Is Your Digital Marketing Ready For Christmas?

Okay, so I’m usually one of those people who doesn’t think or talk about Christmas until a week before (yes, a scrooge you might say), but it’s hard not to think about it when you work in the marketing industry. It’s so important for businesses to be ready for the biggest spending period of year and with the increase in consumers spending online it’s even more important to be prepared early.

These stats from eConsultancy speak for themselves:

• 80% of UK shoppers have reserved products online for collection in stores (up from 74% in 2011).
• 44% of UK shoppers always research purchases on the internet before buying offline.
• Just 4% never use the internet for product research.

With this in mind, here are a few tips to make sure your Digital Marketing is ready for the madness of Christmas spending and help optimize your campaigns to the max!

Social media

Are you actively pushing your offerings around the Christmas period on all social media channels? If not, why not?! There isn’t a better place to voice your brand and offers. Be that Pinterest, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter or Instagram, if your customers are hanging out there, you should be reaching those people and engaging with them!

PPC

If there was only one month of the year you could make yourself appear on a search engine results page (SERP) then now would be the time. Just having your PPC campaign active isn’t enough though, optimisation is needed so you can make the most of all the searches. These few things are key in increasing your sales:

Search Engine Marketing News This Month

November has been a quieter month for Google with no major algorithm changes (good news for SEO). Here are some of the main search engine marketing news this month:

Google Make Changes to Help Businesses Get Local for the Holiday Season

Google have made a few (small scale) changes to location targeting and location extensions to help small businesses ‘get local’ in time for the holiday season. The latest Google Adwords updates include:

• Airport targeting – A great opportunity to target people who travel
• Location extensions and extensions shown together – up until now you have been unable to have both showing at the same time. A great way to get more visibility and target consumers with relevant links.
• More detailed maps – location extensions on desktop and laptops will now show a bigger, more detailed map.
• Conversion reporting for location extensions
• Geo-targeting and location extensions rolled out to more countries

Bing Publishes Its Webmaster Guidelines

Bing have recently published its first webmaster guidelines. Not surprisingly, there isn’t any groundbreaking guidelines that stray to far from Googles.

The Bing webmaster guidelines can be found here

Let’s Get Searchical Wins A Liebster Blog Award

I have received my first ‘blog award’, just  a month after starting Let’s Get Searchical! Thank you very much to Organised Clutter for the nomination.

The Liebster Blog Award is awarded to bloggers by other bloggers – making it a fun award for us in the blogging community. It recognizes blogs who have a small following, especially those who have less than 200 followers.

Okay, so I know these things are as bad as ‘Like this picture or 100 puppies will die’ on Facebook, but it’s still nice for my blog to be found and ‘nominated’ so I’m going to join in and keep the spam going!

The following are the rules for those who have been nominated:

• Post eleven facts about yourself
• Answer the questions the tagger has set for you and create eleven questions for people you’ve nominated
• Choose eleven people to give this award to (with fewer than 200 followers) and link them in your post
• Go to their page and tell them
• Remember, no tag backs!

So, going by these rules, here are the 11 Facts about me:

1. I graduated in July with a BA Business Management Degree
2. I work for a Digital Marketing Agency as a PPC Account Executive
3. I’m a digital geek. This is my own personal blog that I do for fun!
4. I volunteer in Romania with kids in a poor Roma village, it’s a huge part of my life (The charity is Aid For Romanian Children)
5. I’m a huge football fan and support Bradford city. I played for about 10 years, until about two years ago
6. I live with my fiance and am currently trying to save for our wedding (but we keep spending our savings on holidays!)
7. I’m an adrenaline junkie. Did a sky dive for Romania and am doing a bungee jump soon!
8. I love hats
9. I’m ridiculously unfit for my age and small size
10. I love snow boarding, but am not very good!
11. I’m allergic to wine and vodka (not really, but they don’t agree with me!

The Who, What, When, Where & Why of Paid Search

If you’re setting up a new paid search campaign or even just want to make your existing one work that little bit harder, you can use the old school ‘Who, What, When, Where and Why’ to define your objectives and get you started. Here are just a few questions you should be asking yourself about your paid search campaign.

Who

Who do you want to target? Who you decide to target is predominantly based on the paid search keywords you select. Keyword research using Google’s Keyword Tool is a good place to start.

Who is your target audience? While with PPC it’s difficult to pin point who the typical searcher is, knowing a bit about who is clicking on your ads certainly helps! Okay, so I don’t mean knowing the middle names and shoe sizes of your potential customers, but knowing their buying habits and trends can help you define your strategy. Are these people searching on mobile devices or tablets? If so, make sure you’re showing your ads on mobile and tablets devices! Are they on social websites? This is more difficult to know, however if you know the type of person you are targeting are ‘hanging out’ on social networks then this can be a perfect paid (or non-paid) opportunity.

What

What do you want people to see? Do you want them to see an ad with offers or one highlighting your USP? Your ad copy is the only thing the user sees about your campaign, so your ad copy needs to make people click! It doesn’t matter how well your account is structured and managed if your ad copy isn’t getting clicked on!

What do you want people to do once they’ve seen your ad? Do you want them to buy a product? Make an enquiry? Share content?

The ‘what’ part is really all about strategy, strategy, strategy!

Increasing Your PPC Productivity

With pay-per-click (PPC) it’s easy to spend hours on end optimising your account. There are literally endless amount of things you could do, so how can you increase your PPC productivity? Check out these few tips for starters!

Excel – Don’t underestimate the power of excel. You can use Excel for all types of things -Bid management, keyword ad analysis, adding new keywords and ads etc. This can save you loads of time sifting through data on Adwords and you can upload your changes back to Adwords Editor in minutes!

A Good Old Fashioned To-Do List – Sounds simple, but I’m shocked by how many people dont work from one. With a to-do list you can establish your priorities and the order of your tasks. In PPC it’s sometimes very easy to do the tasks you enjoy first and ignore the more mundane ones so a to do list can help to show your priorities for the day/week/month.

Don’t Waste Time on Things You Can’t or Won’t be Able to Influence – It’s very easy to get caught up in stats, but there are few stats that you can actually act on or simply have the time to be able to analysis fully so use your time analysing wisely!

What a Difference a Bid Change Makes

Changing the bids on keywords can really optimise your PPC account and give you great results. Often in PPC there is a lot of emphasis on ad performance and overal budgets on campaigns, so the bids on individual keywords can sometimes get neglected. Bid management can generate great results and it can be really easy and quick to do.

I’ll admit I’ve never used bid management software before as I am able to do everything I need to on Excel. On a basic level you can quickly adjust your bids on converting or non-converting keywords by a certain percentage on Excel and upload this to Editor quickly and easily. Bid management software can be useful for when you want to delve further into your conversion data and work out ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).

Using Excel for bid management reduces the amount of errors that can happen as you are more in control. Plus, it doesn’t cost you a penny so that’s always a bonus! You can export your keyword data straight from Adwords. Using filters on Adwords can give you the data you need for the bids you want to amend. What I find to be useful is to set up a filter to show all the keywords which have spent xx and not converted or spent xx and have converted. This will save you time as the data is already filtered.

Using the data from Adwords you can see the keywords that are performing and the ones that aren’t. You’ll need to determine what you deem as a performing or non-performing keywords first based on your overall PPC goals, for example – do you need to lower your cost per lead (CPL) or are you targeted on conversions so need to ensure the leads you get are quality? You can then adjust the bids by a certain percentage in Excel using a simple formula (if you want to reduce by 10%, take the CPC and multiple by 0.9)