MarketingSherpa Blog

Facebook this week launched a free Guide to Facebook Ads to give advertisers more information on how to build successful campaigns on the social network.

The guide covers the basics, such as the types of ads Facebook offers, as well as detailed information on how to budget campaigns, target an audience and improve performance.

For example, the guide’s “Best Practices” section provides the following tips:

– Choose one goal for your campaign to better focus your efforts and set a budget

– Create ads with captivating titles, relevant images and a strong calls-to-action

– Use demographic and psychographic reports available in the Ads Manager to determine which audiences your ads best resonate with

– Closely relate landing pages to ads

– Test multiple ads to uncover the best approach for your audience

For marketers already advertising in Facebook, the guide is worth going through to round-out your knowledge and to fill in any gaps. For marketers who are just getting started, or who are considering a campaign on the network — it’s a vital resource.

Tracking, integrating marketing channels and smaller budgets are among CMO’s top challenges, according to a recent survey of more than 100 consumer-targeting CMOs. Aprimo and the Argyle Executive Forum conducted the survey on April 29, 2010.

Here are some highlights from the report:

1. More tracking is needed

39% of the CMOs said correlating marketing activities to revenues is the “most broken” area of marketing. 27% reported that the growing requirement for ROI and accountability is driving the most change in their marketing strategies.

Two likely contributors to this situation:
o The recent economy’s pressure on marketers to justify their budgets
o The unprecedented tracking potential offered by digital marketing

2. Multichannel marketing is challenging

Also related to tracking, 37% of the CMOs said their biggest challenge is integrating and tracking multiple channels. 27% said lack of marketing channel integration was the “most broken” area in marketing.

Integrating marketing channels and tracking customer interaction on an individual level can provide tremendous insight — but it’s difficult to achieve. Many marketing systems were not designed to play nicely together.

3. Budget woes continue

28% of the CMOS said “doing more with less” is their biggest challenge today, showing that the rising economy has not yet lifted marketing teams’ budgets and staff numbers to their previous levels.

What do you think of these stats? Are you experiencing something similar? Are you on a totally different page? Let us know…

Anyone familiar with press releases sees it all the time: a bunch of words that don’t say anything. I’ve personally read releases with three or four sentences of real information. The rest was just superlatives and hype.

Marketing strategist David Meerman Scott has targeted this type of writing since at least 2007, starting with his Gobbledygook Manifesto. In 2009, he pooled resources and queried journalists to pull together 325 common phrases. He then worked with Dow Jones to analyze their occurrences in over 700,000 North American press releases sent in 2008.

The top three most-used “gobbledygook” phrases they found:
1. “Innovate” (and all its derivatives)
2. “Pleased to”
3. “Unique”

“You see that stupid word [innovate] everywhere,” Scott says. “Every company is claiming how innovative they are, how innovative their products are…It’s so over used to have literally become meaningless.”

At best, potential customers ignore such words, Scott says, and at worst they’re insulted by them. Furthermore, the words do nothing to differentiate a brand, and they’re unlikely to be used by someone in a search engine. They’re truly empty phrases.

I recently interviewed Scott to ask him how social media can help cure a company’s addiction to these phrases (keep an eye on our Great Minds newsletter for the article). Scott shared a wealth of information — and not all of it made it into the final piece.

Here are some steps he suggests for checking whether your company uses too much “gobbledygook”:

First, check content on your website, press releases and other marketing content. Look for clichés listed here and in the Dow Jones analysis linked above. Examples include:
o “Mission critical”
o “Ground breaking”
o “Market leading”

Also, check if your content describes how your products solve your customers’ problems, and if it’s written in your customers’ language. Too many companies, Scott says, speak in a language that is only understood internally.

“People are dreaming up this language in a vacuum.”

For a good test, Scott suggests taking a block of questionable text, finding all references to your brands and products and replacing them with your competitors’ brands and product names.

“If the language still sounds accurate, then you’re in deep trouble,” he says. You’re not differentiating yourself at all.

When working in social media, many marketers stick to a few areas, such as Facebook, Twitter and blogging. Justin Greis, Owner, Panna Dolce, chose a broader approach.

The Chicago-based French maracron, cookie and brownie bakery relaunched in December 2009 after perfecting their macron recipe for five years. Now, they have a blog and also work in Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, Flickr, YouTube and other networks.

“We don’t discriminate,” says Greis. “We found there are different types of people who connect through different types of networks, and the more we’re connected and linked up through a central hub, which ends up being our blog and our ecommerce site, the better.”

Amazingly, Panna Dolce’s three-member team is able to keep content fresh in all these networks while maintaining their business. They do so, in part, by connecting as many accounts as possible, so a blog post becomes a tweet, a video becomes a Facebook update, and so on.

“We haven’t seen a lot of interaction on our blogs. But when you link your blog to Facebook, when you like it to Twitter, when you link it to YouTube and Vimeo, you connect with people the way they want to be connected to — and that is absolutely essential.”

The team also generates content by partnering with and writing about relevant sites, as well as covering their own:
o Charity work
o New flavor launches
o Events attended
o Press mentions

The team’s website, powered by Volusion, enables shoppers to share links to their product pages, further increasing their content on the  networks.

All this work is paying off. The team estimates 35% of ecommerce sales come from referral traffic from social networks. That number jumped to about 50% during Valentine’s Day. Also, the team’s work is earning them valuable business contacts.

“We’ve had several offers from big retail department stores that are tasting our products right now to see if they want to pick them up. We’ve had a lot of interest from bigger boutique grocery stores…All of those contacts were made through [online social networks].”

I spoke with several paid search experts over the last two weeks for an article about timing PPC ads to optimize performance, and an interesting side-topic came up.

Seeing which PPC clicks are helping your bottom line is not always crystal clear. For example, a consumer may click an ad on Saturday and purchase the advertised item on Tuesday. These slow-converting, or latent clicks help drive sales. But by how much?

One way you can help figure this out is by looking to see whether an ad’s search phrase contains branded terms. Branded searches are likely driven by another marketing channel — because the consumer knew your brand name. Conversions on generic, non-branded search terms signal that your PPC ad had a much stronger influence on the sale.

You can track these slow-converting clicks using cookies — but even that can be challenging. Consumers often search the Web at work on one computer, and surf at home on another. Unless you’re able to connect those two machines, you’ll likely be missing some clicks that later become sales.

The lesson here is you should track the behavior of consumers who click your ads as well as you can. Doing so will give you a better idea of which clicks are driving delayed sales, and that information can help you better allocate your spending.

Have you found a good way to uncover slow-converting clicks? Has it helped you much? Let us know in the comments…

Marketers wanting to be heard over the over the rabble in social media may soon have a new tool to capture more attention. On Tuesday, Twitter announced the launch of its first ever advertising program, Promoted Tweets.

The micro-blogging network will show promoted tweets at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages, essentially making the tweets a form of paid search advertising. The tweets look and act as normal tweets, but are clearly labeled as promoted by an advertiser.

This “first phase” of the ad platform is only open to a handful of advertisers, such as Best Buy and Starbucks, and is helping Twitter “get a better understanding of the resonance of Promoted Tweets, user experience and advertiser value,” according to the announcement’s blog post (linked above).

I personally assume a self-service, keyword-targeting ad platform will eventually be offered to a broad range of advertisers–but time will tell. For now, Twitter says they hope to later expand Promoted Tweets beyond their search tool, bring them to other partners’ spaces and into Twitter users’ tweet timelines.

This is yet another case of social media and search engine marketing finding common ground, this time in the area of paid search. Yesterday, we published part one of our two-part social media and SEO special report, which outlined five key trends in social and SEO marketing integration. Stay tuned for part two next week which will feature specific tactics.

Hopefully this announcement will be the first of many which help Twitter grow as a powerful marketing channel. My head is already spinning with different ways sponsored tweets can be tested to increase clickthrough rates and response.

What does this announcement mean to you? What else do you think is on the way?

As a reporter, I will contact a company through any means necessary. I prefer using a phone number or an email address for a specific person — but sometimes I’m stuck filling out a ‘contact us’ form.

I’ve filled out more contact forms than I’d like to admit. I really dislike them. About a quarter of them do not work, and I’m never sure if my messages reach my intended audience: the marketing department.

Some common problems I’ve seen:
o Errors after clicking ‘submit’
o Tiny message length limits (such as 200 characters)
o Bounced emails in response
o Claims of ‘improper formatting’

Even worse is after receiving an error, you can lose your entire message. I learned long ago to write messages in a separate program and to copy-and-paste them into forms, in case I need to resubmit.

I’m just a reporter trying to get a marketer on the phone — can you imagine if I was a dissatisfied customer? My frustration level would skyrocket. If I was a potential business lead, I’d likely leave and never return.

‘Contact us’ forms are similar to social media in that they provide a way to receive customer feedback — which is very valuable. Broken ‘contact us’ forms send a clear message: “we don’t care about your feedback. Don’t contact us.”

But I’m sure that’s not true. You must care about your customers’ feedback. Their satisfaction keeps you in business.

So if you have a minute, check your website’s contact forms. Make sure they’re flexible, easy to use, and most importantly, that they work. A small effort can go a long way in preventing customers from walking away for good.

Not every marketer’s audience is waiting on Facebook or Twitter, especially marketers in B2B manufacturing. Tim Madel, Manger, Global Ebusiness, Kennametal, is one of these marketers, and his team experiments with social channels anyway.

“We know our current customers might not be using Twitter and Facebook, but we know that the next generation is, and we want to be there and ready for it,” he says.

One way Madel’s team is preparing for a new generation of metal workers is by using Lyris to add buttons to Kennametal’s emails to share content on social bookmarking sites and networks. Although the quick, low-cost tactic does not drive much traffic to Kennametal’s site (referrals from social networks are below 1%), the team hopes the buttons:

– Bring content to correct customers

Many of the team’s email subscribers are purchasing officers, who’re not their target audience. The team adds the buttons so emails can more easily reach people who use Kennametal’s tools.

– Help current and future customers

Customers who prefer to bookmark using Delicious or iGoogle have the option. And if more customers start moving to Twitter, the team will be comfortable sharing its content on the network having experimented. Other buttons the team includes are for:
o Digg
o Reddit
o Newsvine
o LinkedIn
o StumbleUpon

In a sample of two emails, the buttons captured between 40 and 50 clicks each in each email. This is a very low percentage of all emails sent, but the team is undaunted.

“You’re not looking at high percentages, but in our world, that’s a great number to start with,” says Jennifer Altimore, Site Content Manager, Global E-Customer, Kennametal.

Personal travel arrangements often require coordination with other parties, whether it’s your spouse, friends or other family members. That’s why travel activity retailer Viator’s sharable wish lists are such a great idea.

Many ecommerce sites offer wish lists to visitors. They’re especially useful during the holiday season when families are figuring out what to buy one another. The impression I’ve gleaned from marketers is wish lists are useful, but they’re not a strong ongoing performance driver.

Online travel, on the other hand, has a more practical application for wishing. Friends and family members going on trips often coordinate what to do and send each other ideas. Viator’s wish lists make it easy for travelers to share ideas, and the team places “Add to my wish list” links prominently on their product pages.

I noticed these lists during a conversation with Kelly Gillease, Marketing Director, Viator. Visitors can view items on their wish lists directly on the homepage. From the homepage, with one click, they can view a form to send the list to up to three people with a personalized message.

“We do get a fair number of people creating wish lists, emailing them and sharing them,” Gillease says. “We’ve found it really does help boost our conversion rates.”

Gillease’s team plans to build on this success by creating account pages where site visitors can view all their lists, among other features.

Are there other effective applications for wish lists that you’re seeing? Are they helping lift your conversion rates? Let us know in the comments, and thank you.

Going through my mail a few days ago, I came across a letter from the U.S. Census Bureau. I read it and was baffled to find it alerting me to the census forms’ arrival next week.

“What a stupid letter,” I thought. “I’ll see the forms when they come.”

However, an editorial in my local paper the next day made me think twice.

In “Surprisingly Sensible,” the Spartanburg Herald-News’ editors report that while this letter cost about $50 million to send, it’s part of an alert and follow-up strategy. For the 2000 census, the strategy lifted the number of returned census forms 6 percentage points to 67%. How’s that for a response rate?

The letters arrived one week before the census forms. Ten days after the forms, a post card was sent reminding recipients to fill out the forms and return them, according the editorial.

The 6% lift reduced the number of houses the census workers had to visit, which translated into huge cost savings. So the $50 million may prove to be a sound investment.

The editorial goes into further detail on how much money the strategy could save. The important point for marketers is that even when a strategy does not make sense on its face — it still might lift performance.