Women Click on More Facebook Ads

In Q4 2011, US women on Facebook were 12% more likely than men to click on ads

A blog is one of the best tools for regularly adding relevant, keyword-rich content to your website, helping it rank better for key terms on search engines. So optimizing your blog posts will make your best top of funnel offer easier for your prospects to find.  

Great blog writing is part art, part science… I’m going to deal with the scientific part. The art is up to you! Follow these proven best practices to increase your presence with your best prospects.  

Keywords. Just Do Them.

When I first started blogging, I completely ignored keywords. What a mistake! If you don’t use keyword best practices, guaranteed you’re making your success as a blogger 10x harder than it needs to be. Begin with keyword analysis and buyer persona research using a keyword tool like Hubspot’s or Google’s,  look for keywords that a prospect would use to describe the problem that you solve (refer to your positioning statement!), then focus the keyword by adding additional relevant words in order to get the difficulty score down (ideally below 40 for starters). Here are some keyword metrics you’ll need to keep in mind:

• Search volume: This is how many times that particular keyword phrase is searched on a monthly basis. Search volume is important but choosing keywords simply based on search volume is a bad strategy. Overly broad keywords will be very difficult to rank for and if you do happen to rank, chances are many of the prospects using that keyword aren’t looking for what you specifically offer.  
• Competition/difficulty score: This score indicates how hard it is to rank for that particular keyword based on the number and quality of sites competing for search rankings. In Hubspot, difficulty scores go from 0 – 100 with 100 being the most difficult. In Google, difficulty is measured on a scale from 0-1, with 1 indicating a highly competitive term. 
• Relevancy: Keywords shouldn’t be selected only for search. Think about your audience and how they would likely describe their pain points and potential solutions/products. For example, a government agency may use different terms than a small business owner when seeking similar information. Also, consider how well the keyword will integrate with the theme of your content. Don’t stuff keywords – the practice of over-using keywords to try to improve rank - into a post.

Using these guidelines, identify one-to-two keyword phrases per blog post. Remember that you can often combine multiple keywords into one (key)phrase.

On-Page SEO

Use your keywords in your blog content using a process called on-page optimization.

On-page search engine optimization of your content is just one element of an effective SEO program, which should also include factors such as number and diversity of inbound links, content freshness, external and internal anchor text, social sharing and more. However, many of the important SEO factors are not completely within your control. You can influence, but you can’t force inbound links for example. So let’s look at the one element of your SEO that is completely in your control and how to make it work for your blog.

Placement: For each blog post, the keywords you chose for your blog should be placed in 6 key areas—title tag, page URL, heading, page copy, image alt text and page meta description. The image below demonstrates where these items are located on a sample blog page.

Strategic Keyword Placement in Your Blog

Most content management systems (CMS) like Hubspot and blogging platforms, like Wordpress, have on-page SEO functionality built in so there’s no need to edit your page HTML for your blog in order to achieve good on-page SEO. That said, you still need to actively manage the placement of you on page SEO for maximum effect. Here’s the detail:

Title Tag

This is one of the most important on-page optimization factors, and appears at the top of the browser and as the headline in search results. Best practice is to use your target keyword(s) within the first few words of the title, and limit the length to 70 characters. In the Hubspot blogging tool, this is also your blog subject. All too often, the title is an afterthought. Bad. Not only is your title a cue to human prospects but also to search engines. Take your blog title seriously.

Page URL

This is the page's web address. In the Hubspot blogging tool, the URL is auto-generated by your subject so once again… subject matters! Use the keywords you’ve chosen for your blog in your subject.

Meta Description

The blog meta description is the snippet of text that often appears below your page title and link in search engine results. For those social media users, you can almost think of this as a Tweet about your blog. For best results, include your target keywords, limit copy to 150 characters, and make your description interesting and/or action-oriented to give people a reason to click.

Nutella is employing the decades-old marketing mix model (MMM) - a nuanced sales attribution system for integrated campaigns - to measure the effectiveness of Facebook ads. For instance, the company, which sells chocolate hazelnut spread, combined Facebook ads with TV spots and other paid channels in Germany during December 2011, attributing 15 percent of sales from the yuletide campaign to its Facebook ads. In terms of return on investment, the brand told ClickZ that Facebook ads outperformed the TV spend, according to its MMM data.

Online measurement has long been a hot topic among marketers. Over the years, brands have often determined campaign spend for individual media ingredients (e.g., TV, radio, magazine, coupons, display ads, etc.) by using a marketing mix model system - or a similar sales attribution program referred to by a different name.

Kevin Lee is an executive chairman with marketing services firm Didit and a ClickZ columnist. He said brands that plug Facebook ads into their MMMs show they've started considering the social site to be more of a bonafide channel, rather than experimental.

"Once Facebook ads spend becomes material, it belongs in the [MMM]," Lee said. "If you are only dabbling, it's going to be too difficult to understand the impact of your Facebook advertising."

John Donahue is director of business strategy and consumer engagement at content and technology firm Socialistic. He's also served as an analytics exec for Omnicom Media Group as well as CTO at BuzzLogic (now Twelvefold Media). Donahue said he "applauded" Nutella for incorporating Facebook into the marketing mix model, stating the methodology's results gives brands a sense of ROI.

"At the end of the day, [Facebook is] a predictable audience that you can message and get reliable reach/results," Donahue said.

Campaign Reaches 30 Percent of Online Germans

For the holidays, Ferrero, Nutella's parent company, sought to increase awareness and sales from Dec. 1 through Dec. 24, 2011. Ferrero wouldn't give specifics about the broadcast campaign but says the Facebook ads got the largest return on investment when compared to the other media channels.

Nutella bought Facebook's Reach Block ads, which are designed to create a predetermined number of impressions within a demographic, and Premium Ads in the effort. Five different versions of the Facebook ads were used. The creative encouraged people to become fans/likes of the Nutella Deutschland page and to try out its "Advent Calendar" app, where they could open calendar doors in the German Christmas tradition. The social promos reached 30 percent of the online population in the country, equaling 3.8 million unique impressions, according to Gfk Group, a Germany-based online consumer panel provider.

Angela Kim, a new media manager for the Italy-based Ferrero, said in a statement, "As well as proven incremental reach and a positive cross-media effect between TV and Facebook, we demonstrated that Facebook lifts sales for [CPG brands] in bricks and mortar stores."

How Are Marketers Using Social Media In 2012? [INFOGRAPHIC]

Are you using social media to promote your business in 2012?

You’re not alone. More than eight out of ten marketers are now using channels such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to raise brand awareness, build communities and drive sales, and a full one third of these professionals invest 11 or more hours each and every week into their social marketing efforts.

All of which raises a couple of important questions: where are they targeting these resources, and what are the benefits?

Using data taken from Social Media Examiner’s latest Social Media Marketing Industry Report, which surveyed over 3,800 marketers on how they’re using social media in 2012, World View Editing have produced this infographic, which includes the following key takeways:

• 83 percent of marketers say that social media is important for their business
• 40 percent of marketers want to know how to measure social media ROI
• 30 percent of businesses are outsourcing some portion of their social media marketing (up from 28 percent in 2011)
• More than half of all marketers spend 6 hours or more each week using social media, while a third invest 11 or more hours
• While 70 percent of marketers are looking to learn more about Google+, the top three social networks at the moment are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, in that order

Stop the presses: online ad spending to exceed print this year 
By Jeff Herschler
 
"U.S online advertising spending, which grew 23% to $32.03 billion in 2011, is expected to grow an additional 23.3% to $39.50 billion this year, pushing it ahead of total spending on print newspapers and magazines," according to the forecast by eMarketer. Tara Pihn, healthcare pundit and futurist says bluntly "Print is dead.  The tablet is the game changer."  eMarketer reported in December that US adults now spend more time on mobile devices each day than they do with print media.  Rolando Valdes, a healthcare marketing professional, working in Dade and South Broward concurs, stating "I go into ten or twelve doctor's offices a day.  The patients aren't reading the magazines, they are playing with their smart phones. Pretty soon they all will have tablets."  Ms. Pihn sees the trend accelerating, "As tablets proliferate (see Gartner: Tablet Sales to Double This Year) and Wi-Fi becomes ubiquitous, the massive shift in the way we read, which began over a decade ago, will be consummated. This will happen much faster than most people think."  See pie chart below which illustrates the transformation:
 
Average Time per Day Spent with Media by US Adults Dec 2011 (minutes)                                Source: eMarketer via FHIpics
 
TV & Video                                                 274
Total Digital (Internet + Mobil)                232
Radio                                                             94
Total Print (Newspapers + Magazines)  44

Total Digital (Internet + Mobile) dwarfs Total Print (Newspapers and Magazines). The typical American is spending over five times more time digesting digital content versus traditional print content (232 minutes per day vs. 44 minutes per day).  Advertisers will continue to follow the audience.  By 2016 eMarketer is predicting an online ad spend of almost double that of print ($62b vs. $32.3b).
        And educated professionals such as doctors and healthcare executives have been early adopters in the digital revolution.  Remember it was the doctors who gobbled up the first smart phone (the Palm Pilot) back in the '90's. According to Health Practice Media, Physicians and Hospitals are Rapidly Moving to Digital Media.  For example, in a recent SpinaBifidaInfo.com study 75% of physicians polled in have purchased an Apple device such as an iPhone, iPad or iPod. Meanwhile that same study found 38% of physicians intend to buy an iPad this year.

I had a chance to catch up with several leaders in Florida's healthcare community recently and asked them about their advertising budget allocations. According to Diane High, Director, Corporate Marketing and Broward Health Line, Broward Health, "We still allocate a big part of our budget to print and outdoor. That said, digital is our fastest growing category. It was close to zero just a few years ago and now is a significant part of our media mix." Steve Whalen, Marketing Director at Danna-Gracey, a decade old medical malpractice insurance agency in Delray Beach, had this to say "We are in a digital age, and this is only the beginning.  We have traded in a walk down the driveway to get the newspaper for smart phones and tablets for on-the-spot information. If you want to be seen, you can't afford to be yesterday's news."  Meanwhile according to Michael Salzhauer, a Plastic Surgeon in Bay Harbor Islands, "I think pure print advertising is going the way of the dodo bird. I spend 95% of my marketing dollars on digital media. The only print I do is charity/non-profit related or else very specific community/demographic targeting via local newsletters and the like. You get a lot more bang for your buck online." Not surprisingly, IOS Health Solutions, a five year old firm providing web-based practice management and EHR solutions, has embraced digital media from the beginning. "Print is definitely not our priority today. Digital media is the most effective way to reach the masses and maintain the message current in a rapidly changing landscape.  It allows you to track and measure results quicker and adjust fire if needed.  Our client's have also embraced the digital world benefiting from the numerous efficiencies and cost savings our software provides their practices when transitioning to a paperless environment." stated Anthony Lopez, Marketing Director.