Week 13: Mkt 349 - Profitability and Growth

Today I'm going profitability and growth. However, to achieve it is impossible to talk about it without mentioning performance. As your performance on your campaign is growing, you will get profitability, and it will give you support to grow your campaign as well as your business.



As your business is getting more customers with a Ad Words campaign, you can say that you are doing a great job with Google Ad Words. However, you have to make sure that you keep improving it because things can change quickly and maybe in the other week, you do not get the same amount of clicks.

Week 12: Mkt 349 - How to Optimize your performance

Today I'm going to talk about the ways to optimize your performance in a Google Ad Words campaign. There is a couple tools that you can use in order to develop a better campaign. The first in is to check how well your keywords are going, in other words, to see how many clicks or impressions certain keyword is getting along the time.



Another tool is to accept the hints of Google Ad Words, and delete a couple that would not be exactly what you want. So, The most important thing to optimize your performance, is to select the right keywords. Another way, is to check your CTR, check your bid, your budget, location, and have remarkable content always.

Week 13: Mkt 348 - 9 SEO tasks, part 2.

Today I'm going to keep talking about the SEO tasks . Last week I stopped talking about the third one.



Talking about the fourth: Run a crawler about your site. For this task, I would say that this tool would read your site the same mechanical way as google does it.
Fifth one: Pull keyword volume data. that tool will help you to see what keywords related to your business are most searched by users.
Sixth: Optimize the Tittle Tags of Your Site. In simply words, you should try to have a separate page on your site for each major user need you help address.

Week 12: Mkt 348 - SEO Tasks Part 1.

Today I'm going to talk about the first 9 SEO tasks. However, I'm going to focus on a couple by now. Here you can see all the tasks.



The first one, you have to set up Google Analytics, or if you prefer, any other package. However, once you set it up, you have to learn how to manage it better.
The second task is to Setup Google Webmaster Tools, which means that you have to get this because this tool provides a lot of relevant data (backlink data, rankings data. crawl data, and so on)  that you have to keep in mind.
The third one is that you have to follow two basic steps and it will provide you a list of how many pages has in their index for your website.

Week 11: Mkt 348 - Search Engine News

Today I'm going to talk about another material that is related to SEO, which is called Search engine news. This material provides sessions about search engine and would be really helpful to develop the knowledge about this topic.


According to the this material, "Any single aspect of SEO, Social Media, Mobile Search, Local Search or PPC can be confusing enough. Trying to synchronize them all can make heads explode! ...but it doesn't have to be that way."

Week 11: Mkt 349 - Check and understand quality score

Google AdWords has one tool that helps you to see if your campaign is going to be successful: quality score. It depends on how your keyword is effective and how your ads are effective, according to what you are advertising. It means that, if your campaign is good enough to make the right people to visit your website. This video is going to help a lot to understand this.

Week 10: Mkt 349 - Performance monitoring

Today, I'm going to talk about performance monitoring. If you really want to succeed with your campaigns, you have to regularly control your campaign to see how it is going. You need to check features like CTR, CPC, Keywords, Location, etc. this video will help you a lot to understand it better:

Keep in mind that the performance of your ads and keywords can fluctuate. Web traffic varies from day to day, and this normal fluctuation may affect the performance of your campaign. In addition, current events can have the potential to dramatically influence the number of impressions and clicks you receive.

Week 10: Mkt 348 - Advanced SEO techniques

Today, I'm going to talk about on advanced technique of a SEO: the use of HubPages to promote sites. There are many reasons that confirm you the need of having a Hub, and I'm going to summarize it here:

• Improve your search engine rankings
• Get more traffic to another website or blog
• Increase its Page Rank which will make your linked websites rise in rankings as well
• Promote specific affiliate links, if you choose

Week 9: Mkt 349 - Optimizing performance

Today I'm going to talk about how to optimize your performance in Google AdWords, and how to improve your numbers on that tool. In order to achieve your goal, you definitely have to take advantage of the Opportunities Tab. According to the Partners help, "The opportunities tab ;ooks at your account's performance history, your campaign settings, and Google search volume and trends, and automatically generates opportunities that could improve your performance."

The opportunities tab helps you to to:

• See performance estimates based on historical data.
• Make improvements without spending a lot of time.
• Keep your campaigns fresh.

Week 9: Mkt 348 - Local search marketing

For this week, I'm going to talk about marketing strategies, and focus on local search marketing. The use of the search engine to find a local product or service has been increasing a lot during the years. In the keyword research, you have to implies certain kinds of information that qualifiers, such as zip codes, city, county, state, and streets.



Here you can see a lot of examples of search engine that focuses on the local search marketing:

• Yelp.com
• Local.com
• Infousa.com
• yellowpages.com
• superpages.com
• citysearch.com

Week 8: Mkt 349 - Growing a profitable campaign

This week I'm going to talk about how to grow a profitable and successful campaign in Google AdWords. There are 3 basic stages in order to achieve this:

• Testing: New campaigns would start from this stage. In this stage, you will try to find what CPC bid, keyword, and ad combinations are better for you. Your main goal is to determine profitability comparing costs to revenues.
• Growth: Your goal now is to reach more customers, and you may be able to do this increasing your campaign budget while leaving every other thing the same.
• Maturity: If your costs don't reach your AdWords daily budget and you're profitable, you have a successful campaign.

Week 8: Mkt 348 (SEO) - Bidding strategies

This week I'm going to talk more about bidding strategies. Bidding is exactly what decides fate of your PPC campaign. SEO certification stated that, "For example, let's suppose you're bidding on the keyword phrase 'search marketing' but do not know your max CPC. One way to estimate a max CPC involves taking the top 5 bids on Yahoo and computing the average. The current bids are: $0.51, $0.50, $0.33, $0.32, $0.31. The average is 39 cents. Use that as your max CPC to begin with." That is just an example of bidding; however, there are several other ways to see that.



On the other hand, you can use reverse calculation in order to see how much you can spend with PPC campaigns. In the reverse calculation, you calculate the profit that you are making with this kind of campaign and set up a budget for that. If you want more profit, invest more; and vice-versa.

Week 8: Mkt 348 (Hubspot) - Taking your sales process inbound

This week I'm going to talk about the importance of transforming the way you sell. Hubspot stated that, "Buyers have so much information available to them that they typically have already made 60% of their purchase decision before even talking to sales rep." It means that you have to focus on your inbound strategy because it is fundamental to attract customers.

However, we need to understand what is inbound sales. You have to deliver to the customer value of the product, giving to them exactly what he or she expected or even more than that. Here is the inbound sales approach:

• Attract visitors to the website with relevant content
• Be an open book and share your content
• Leverage the buyer's content
• Buyer now has all of the power

Moreover, you have to keep in mind that there are 4 transformations: transform the way you target accounts, transform the way you prospect accounts, transform the way you connect with accounts, and transform the way your prospects perceive you as a sales person.

Week 7: Mkt349 - How to edit your daily budget

Today I'm going to talk about another way that Google AdWords offers you to set your preferences. This PPC program provides you the possibility to edit your daily budget. It is really important because it is a way to manage your budget really closely. Here it is the steps:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com

1. Click the Campaigns tab.

1. Click All online campaigns, then click the + Campaign button and choose a campaign type from the drop-down.

1. In the Bid strategy section of your campaign settings, select a strategy. If you choose the "manual" option, enter aDefault bid as well.

1. For Budget, the amount you enter should be the most you're willing to spend on your campaign on average per day over a month. You can also apply a shared budget that you've previously created in the Shared library.

1. Click Save and Continue (on the next settings page, you'll be prompted to create and save your ad group).

1. You may edit your bid strategy and budget again at any time by returning to your campaign's Settings tab.

I hope these information help you.

Week 7: Mkt 348 (SEO) - Major PPC search engines

Today I'm going to keep talking about the way of advertising your company or website that I was talking last week. However, I'm going to focus on the major PPC search engines. The market leaders of this programs are undoubtedly Google and Yahoo. But what is the difference between these two programs? That is what I'm going to explain right now.

• Google

           Google's PPC program is know as "Google AdWords" and is considered the best of this industry. And the competitive advantage of Google is the ad positioning strategy. "AdWord's bid prices and click through costs are not synonymous. That's because your bid could be on a variety of phrases and because their discounting system attempts to keep bid spreads from getting too large. Your specified maximum bid of $3.99 per click may actually result an average of only $2.65 per click instead. Ads can contain 25 characters for the title, 70 characters for the ad text, and 35 characters for a display URI. America Online shows the title and ad text all on one line."    

• Yahoo

            Yahoo's PPC program, on the other hand, is know as "Overture" and was the first Pay Per Click advertising of the world. "In Google AdWords, ads are added automatically whereas in Yahoo human editors review your keywords and your site. You may bid on a search term only if the web site has substantial content that is clearly reflective of the search term. Also Yahoo asks their advertiser to rewrite the ad if they are not receiving proper click through and the landing page for visitors must be according to the query phrase."

Week 7: Mkt 348 (Hubspot) - The power of Smarketing

Today, I'm going to talk about Smarketing. First of all, let me explain the main goal of a Smarketing: put on the same team two different segments of the company - sales and marketing - and make them focus on revenue. So, the "S" stands for sales department and the other part is presumable. However, Smarketing can be critical because the relationship between these two sectors is often a negative one.



There are five steps to be followed in order to integrate Smarketing to your organization:

• Speak the same language
• Set up closed-loop reporting
• Implement a service level agreement
• Maintain open communication
• Rely on data

Following those five steps, your organization would definitely integrate Smarketing to its culture, and would see the results and benefits of this integration.

Week 6: Mkt 348 (SEO) - Pay per click campaigns

Pay per click (PPC) campaigns are one kind of advertisement in which you set up an account in one search engine and you are going to have one campaign that you just going to pay for each click that visitors eventually do. In another words, you have one advertisement, in Google for example, and you are going to set up a budget that you want for the clicks. So you are just going to pay for each click.

This is a really important tool that all the marketers has to keep in mind because in this way, you are going to restrict your budget in effectively consumers. Therefore, you are going to reach easily your potential buyer personas using this kind of campaign.

There are two major players of this tool: Google, and Yahoo. The first one has one project, which is called AdWords, and the second one has the Overture. These PPC advertising, programs offer the best quality traffic for most website marketing campaigns.

Week 6: Mkt 348 (Hubspot) - Sending the right email to the right person

First of all, we have to keep in mind that email is extremely important nowadays. The return on investment (ROI) is really high: 4300%. Plus, the use of email by marketers is growing annually, and it is an easy way to always keep in touch with your customers (creating trust, engaging them).

The point is: How to send the right email to the right person?

There are four steps: determine who your audience is, segment your contents database, send the right content at the right time (try to reach the buyer's journey), nurture a lead into a customer. However, you have to send an email that is going to add value to your product, that will have an interesting and attractive content. Otherwise you are going to create a kind of antipathy in the consumers.



Here you can see some optimization tactics:

1.       Identify a specific goal

2.       Personalize sender information and email copy

3.       Get to the point

4.       Use actionable language

5.       Focus on benefits

6.       Use multiple CTAs

7.       Encourage sharing

8.       Edit the plain text version

9.       Optimize for mobile

10.       Analyze results

Week 6: Mkt 349 - Choose an ad format

After selecting the language and locations, I want to let you guys know about another tool that Google AdWords offers. Do you know the small the small text ads that appear on the Google search result? Well, that is just one type of format that you can create. There are multiple ways that this tool can offer. Moreover, each ad format has its own benefits, in which you can choose what is going to be the best for your campaign. Here you can see all of the ways that you are able to use: Text, ad extensions, image, WAP mobile, App promotion apps, Video, product listing ads, call-only ads.

Moreover, there is the steps to choose an ad format:

1.       Select the campaign and ad group in which you want to create your new ad.

2.       Click the Ads tab.

3.       Click the + Ad dropdown button.

4.       Choose the format of the ad you'd like to create and complete the instructions specific to that ad format.

5.       Click Save ad.

Week 5 - Mkt 349: Language and Location Targeting

As I said in the other posts, Google AdWords is a really smart tool in which you could focus on many different aspects and target your buyer personas. And today I'm going to talk about how to set up language and location targeting. Firstly I wanna explain the importance of it. For example, I speak Portuguese, English and Spanish, so I could focus my campaign on 3 languages and set it up for multiple locations.

Here it is the steps to set the language:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
2. Click the Campaigns tab.
3. Click the name of the campaign you wish to edit to open your campaign settings.
4. Click the Settings tab.
5. Next to "Languages", click Edit.

6.Select your target language(s). In our example, we've selected only English.

7. Click save

Really easy, right?

I hope it was helpful!

Week 5: Mkt 348 (SEO) - Content optimization

For this week, I will keep talking about optimization; however, instead of talking about on-page optimization - like last week- I am going to cover deeply content optimization.

While there are many characteristics of your content that are in the algorithmic calculations, there are a few that consistently hold relatively high priority. These are:

1. Heading Tags

2. Special Text (bold, colored, etc.)

3. Inline Text Links or Anchor text 

4. Keyword Density

The main important thing on the first one, is to always use those rules: Never use the same tag twice on a single page, try to be concise with your wording, use heading tags only when appropriate, if bold text will do then go that route, don't use CSS to mask heading tags. The second one is any part of your text that you want to pop up from the rest. It is often the most significant part of the content that you really want to stand out from the rest. You can bold it, underline, color it, highlight sizing it and italic. Inline text links are links that you put on your content to create value. In other words, instead of quote part of the link, you can put the link of an article on your text. The last, but not least, keyword density has 3 points that you should consider: algorithm is very complex, so you will never understand everything about it; the optimal keyword density algorithm change regularly; and, the keyword density for one search engine is not the same as it is for another.

Week 5 - Mkt 348 (Hubspot) : Creating content with a purpose

After talking social media, in this post I want to talk about the conversion, or how to create content with a purpose. First of all, why inbound marketing can't exist without content? The easy way to see this is to always keep in mind that content is information, as well as that content can influence the sales cycle with content.



Another point is about how to create remarkable content. The most important thing is that content should focus on the solution. And to know the solution you have to know the problem and who you are solving the problem to. Moreover there are two keys to create a remarkable content: you are creating content for buyer personas and the content should be dictated by the buyer's journey.

Week 4 - Mkt 349 - SEO Keywords

Take a look of those words,

"Clothes", "Good clothes", "Big clothes", "Small clothes".

As you guys do usually, whenever we are looking for something (clothes, as the example), we type one, two or three words to find what we want. But we do not find what we want easily with broad terms like in the example. However, if we type more specific words we would get into what we want faster.

So, for the company is exactly the same thing. Whenever you are using Google Ad Words, you have to select specific terms. If you choose the right keywords, we would achieve the right customers, and maybe the buyer personas.

One more thing that is extremely important. In Google Ad Words, you have the option to delete some kind of keywords from the search. For example, if your store sells winter clothes, you can put "summer clothes" as a negative keyword, so your advertisement would not pop up whenever the searcher types it.

This video explains really well how to choose the right keywords:

Video: How to Choose the Right Keywords

Really helpful, right?

Week 4: Mkt 348 - SEO - On-page optimization factors

 On-page factor is the kind of factor that can be changed and modified by a webmaster.Which include:

• Keywords
• HTML tags
• Content
• CSS
• URL rewrites

In this post I am going to explain briefly the three first aspects.

For the first one, I would say that Keyword list is a list of descriptive words that you make for the customer to find the content easily.Moreover, keywords can be considered as "mental images linked to what lies in the heart of your customer". Also, there are many tools to generate keywords, which are called keyword suggestion (helps to choose relevant terms). 

The second one can be resumed as: "When spiders scan a website it actually scans the HTML code of that particular website. There are several HTML tags such as Title tag, Meta tags, Alt tags etc. which should be integrates with the keywords, in terms of greater optimization of the website."

Moreover, a huge and significant part of the HTML is the Meta description tags, which can be summarized as:

• Meta Robots: This tag enjoys full support, but you only need it if you DO NOT want your pages indexed.
• Meta Description: This tag enjoys much support, and it is well worth using.
• Meta Keywords: This tag is only supported by some major crawlers and probably isn't worth the time to implement.
• Meta Everything Else: Any other Meta tag you see is ignored by the major crawlers, though they may be used by specialized search engines.

The third one: Content. That is exactly what makes a good website. It is the best way to keep the customers in your website. However, a simple text is not enough. You need to have interesting materials, good experiences, and things that would keep everyone's attention.

Week 4: Mkt 348 (Inbound Strategy) - Social media

Nowadays, it is extremely important to be aware with all of the new technologies and tools available in the market in order to reach your customer in different ways. Well, in the past 5 to 10 years, social media is getting a significant power in the society. Programs like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. is always in the top most visited websites.



Therefore, why not to use those websites to attract customers? Facebook has different ways to advertise your company, product or service, in which you can easily and with low cost make an advertisement or create a page for your brand.  Moreover, besides attract customers, with the social media you are able to convert, close, and delight them.

Week 3: Mkt 348 - SEO - Search Engines

 

We use search engines, in which we just put keywords and the it will reproduce the most relevant data according to those words. The huge majority can confirm that this is the easiest and fastest way to find something that you want.

Google is the unquestionable leader of the search engines. Its database is incredible and it always shows the most relevant information. Google is followed by Yahoo!, which is considered the second best search engines.

Nowadays, everything is about time. As soon as you complete successfully something you are considered better than the others. However, that is not only true for the inside of the company, but also for the marketing research. Whenever the customer is looking for something, as fast as he find it, he will be more satisfied.

Week 3: Mkt 349 - Organization of the campaign

The most important thing to achieve the goals with your campaign is to keep it well organized. You have to select the most specific keywords that you can in order restrict the customer's research to your campaign. Doing this you will not lose your clicks and will probably attract the right people to your website page.

Furthermore, we can see that Ad Words is organized into three layers: account, campaigns, and ad groups.

1. Your account is associated with a unique email address, password, and billing information.
2. Your ad campaign has its own budget and settings that determine where your ads appear.
3. Your ad group contains a set of similar ads and the words and phrases, known as keywords, that you want to trigger your ads to show.

When I was living in Brazil, for instance, I used to work for a small company, in which one of my tasks was to manage Google Ad Words for them. Back in those days, I could not realize how important this tool could be for a company. However, this experience taught me, at least, how to manage the basic parts of Google Ad words and how important is to organize the campaign according to the keywords. They did not have a significant database, in which I could see exactly the impact of my work. However, the increase on the demand was so dramatic that all of the credits were given to my job.

Week 3: Mkt 348 - Inbound Strategy - Successful case of Inbound Strategy

A successful case of Inbound Strategy is the company P & G, in which they developed a huge marketing strategy based on that new kind of strategy. All of their websites are focused on the methodologies and practices of the Inbound. This company is achieving significant results on this because they are attracting, converting, closing and delighting their customers. This case serves as an inspiration for any other company.






As you can see in the image, their website is pretty clear and just with necessary information to make the customer stay in the page.

Week 2: Mkt 348 - Website Optimization

Nowadays, the key for success is to focus on your optimization, which means that you are always trying to make yourself close to the perfection; and that is kind of the job of a SEO. He is hired to make a website optimization constantly. However, a website optimization has different techniques, in which all of them are directed to find searchers.

One really important part of the optimization is to make the idea of the website clear when any person is looking for something online. One good way to make it clear is the META description ( the small letters under the website that pops up on Google research). This has a strong impact because is the first thing that the person would look, and to take the decision to click or not.

Week 2: Mkt 349 - How to manage a Google AdWords with your preferences

Google AdWords is a tool that is significantly helpful for many reasons. One of them is that you can manage your account and put your preferences on it. It means that you can select your target, your currency, your time zone, the budget that you are trying to spend with it, and the moment of the day that you want your advertisement to go up.

In this video, you can see how easy is to manage your account.

Therefore, with your preferences selected you can target more your company on the way that you think is better. It would facilitate you to find your buyer personas.

Week 1: Mkt 349 - Google AdWords

Google AdWords is a really important tool that many small and big companies are trying to explore a lot. With this tool you can make a clean and small advertisement, and the good thing is that you only have to pay if the customer click in your link and actually get in your website. In another words, you have your advertisement on the top of the page and you just pay when you get a potential customer.



Besides being an easy tool to manage, Google AdWords is providing relevant profits to companies. This is happening because of the low cost of each click and the high percentage of potential customers that it is bringing. Moreover, you can emphasize your company exactly the way want. You can choose key words for the research, as well as the period of the day that you want your advertisement to be on top, and the most significant thing is what I mentioned before: you attract the right people and you can find easily the buyer personas.

Week 1: Mkt 348 - Essentials of an Effective Inbound Strategy

Watching the video about the Inbound Strategy I could learn about a couple marketing strategies that successful companies are trying to do nowadays in order to attract the customers as well as find out what kind of customers they have to focus on. Firstly, we have to discuss a little bit about the difference between the traditional way and the new way to spread the product.

On one hand, Traditional Marketing is the type of strategy which the company puts advertisements everywhere in order to spread the brand or the product. Furthermore, they actually put the advertisement in moments that you are not looking for that. For instance, when you are trying to see a video on YouTube, it is very often pop up an ad about some brand. That is extremely dangerous for the company because the customer would not see and, moreover, would get a kind of a repugnance to this product.

On the other hand, the Inbound Strategy would focus much more on clean articles where you can see instantly what you want. In this strategy, you would attract the right people to your product. That is exactly to put the right people, in the right place, with no obstacles to make him or her give up on your product or service. Another way to see it is to think that if you are looking for something and you find a clean article about it, the effect on your mind would be a thousand times more significant than if you see an advertisement of something that you are not looking for. Nowadays, the buyers have all the powers, so as a marketing man you need to focus on them firstly, and then let them focus on you.

Talking about the inbound methodology, a successful marketing man has to focus on four steps in order to achieve the company goals: Attract, convert, close, delight. The first step is to make a portion of the 3 billion people, which have access to the internet, look at your page. So you have to attract strangers to be visitors. After this, you have to convert the visitors into leads, and then you have to make the leads turn into potential customers of your product. In the end, the most significant step is to make the customers a promoter – it means that they are more than happy buyers; they are people that are going to spread and indicate the company to their friends.