Know Your Audience – Optimizing Your PPC Campaigns

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Who do you want to see your search ads? Sometimes businesses fall into the trap of trying to reach too broad of a target audience. When you do this, you typically end up with a lower CTR and conversion rate, which is not what you want. That’s why your digital marketing program depends on clearly identifying your target audience.

Finding Your Target Audience

What you do want is to reach your target market. But who is your target audience? First, you need to do some research. Collect demographic information, interests, behaviors, and more, to determine who is most likely to convert. Gather as much information as possible and look for common themes and trends in the data. Once you know who your target audience is, it’s time to use that information to optimize your PPC campaigns.

Using Audience Targeting

Audience targeting is becoming just as important as keyword targeting for PPC this year. That’s because, as we demonstrated above, who you reach is critical to your SEM. Although audience targeting isn’t necessarily new, it’s expanding in its use cases. While many people think it is specific to retargeting, display, and social marketing strategies, but now more than ever, it’s a key component of an effective PPC campaign.

There are multiple ways to use audience targeting, and in this post, we’re going to cover four use cases:

  • Using Audience as a Bid Modifier Layer – This encompasses your remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA). Go to the audience targeting tab on Google Ads, add your targeting and then adjust the setting to Observation. This will allow you to add the audience as an additional layer in the targeting rather than making it the sole targeting. Just like you can adjust bids for different geography, you can adjust bids for certain audiences.
  • Segmenting Campaigns – Another way to use your RLSA: If you have a few different target markets that you’re looking to hit, we suggest creating separate campaigns for each target audience. By doing so, you allow yourself to edit the creatives and the copy for the campaign depending on which audience you’re trying to reach. Segmented campaigns are typically much more effective than broad, generalized campaigns. Your target audience will be more likely to engage if the campaign is specifically for them. Make adjustments as needed to ensure that your segmented campaigns really are tailored to the target audience.
  • In-Market Audiences – This is a newer feature that Google rolled out in over the summer of 2018. With in-market audiences, you can target the users who are engaging in online activities that demonstrate they are ready to purchase. For instance, if you are creating a campaign for a new car, in-market audience looks at who is searching online for their past search and browsing history. Unlike using remarketing lists, in-market audiences can introduce your brand to people who may have never even heard of your brand, vastly extending your reach.
  • Audience Exclusions – Sometimes rather than selecting who you want to see your ads, you need to identify who shouldn’t see them. For instance, if you’re running a search campaign with an offer for first-time customers, you’d want to exclude your current customer list because the ad doesn’t apply to them. There’s no reason for your ad to reach your current customers in this case. We recommend creating separate audiences for different conversion actions. That way, you cane exclude users already converting on an action for an ad that is also driving the same action.

Get More Information from Skyrush Marketing

Skyrush Marketing, a full team of creative staff, programmers, marketers, and content develops, works to continuously optimize our clients’ search campaigns. Audience targeting is only one of the many ways to improve the outcomes of your campaigns, but it’s a good place to start. We can handle any project, big or small, and deliver rapid results by customizing your digital marketing strategy.

 

Contact us today for a free consultation.

Influencer Marketing is so NOT Last Year

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Last year was when influencer marketing really took off, but there’s still plenty of room for growth in 2019. While influencer marketing was met with some controversy surrounding privacy, it still promises to be a very cost-effective and time-effective way of reaching new customers.

This year, it’s time to look at how we can better use influencers to spread a brand’s messages. Both famous and not-so-famous internet celebrities can offer your business a way to communicate the message you want to send your customers. It’s worth trying – at Skyrush Marketing we’ve had a lot of success with influencer marketing, and below we outline some of our predictions for successfully implementing influencer marketing in 2019.

This Year’s Influencer Marketing Tips

  • Get Youth on Your Side – As Generation Z ages, younger influencers are on the rise. Find influencers that are around the age of your younger target market. That way, your customers relate to them on a deeper level and look up to them for advice and guidance. You want to find the influencers that appeal best to a specific segment of your target market.
  • Focus on Instagram – According to CreatorIQ, Instagram was a part of 93% of all influencer campaigns in 2018, and that number is sure to rise this year. People are drawn to the short, yet compelling videos featuring some of their favorite digital celebrities. Tied for second in the prevalence of influencer marketing are Facebook and YouTube. For any of these platforms, make sure you’re prepared for your influencer campaign. That means identifying your goals and KPIs. A campaign aimed at brand awareness is going to be very different from one designed to promote a product launch.
  • Find the Right Influencer – As we said when referring to youthful influencers, it’s important that the influencer you choose is a good fit for your target audience and your business goals. Here are a few things to consider when selecting your ideal influencer:
    • Specialty – Look at the topics the influencer usually covers and then make sure that your content is in line with the content they usually produce. Authenticity is important in influencer marketing.
    • Reach – Bigger isn’t always better. If you’re trying to raise brand awareness, then yes, it’s time to look for top-tier influences with the greatest reach. However, it your main goal is to drive engagement, it’s better to target a relevant micro-influencer.
    • Tone – Decide how you want your influencer to present your brand’s message. An influencer can be serious and professional or warm and friendly. The one that’s best for you depends on your target audience.
    • Engagement – No matter who you decide to go with, a major consideration is whether the influencer’s engagement rate lines up with your goals. You need to determine the minimum engagement rate that you need for your campaign and do the research to find out which influencer is the best fit.
  • Build Long-Term Relationships – As we ease our way into the new year, influencers have come to understand their role in the success of many brands. Therefore, it’s important to build a long-term relationship between your brand and your influencer. You want them to understand your message, goals, vision, and more. While these types of deals can make things more complex (i.e. exclusivity terms, compensation models, etc.) it’s worth considering if you want to have the influencer on your side for more than just a one-off promotion.
  • You Need More Than Talent – It’s important to remember that influencers are tools to leverage for marketing purposes and you need to provide them with the right idea and high-quality content for your campaign to be successful. Their talent can only take your brand so far. Start with the idea, the story you want to tell, and run with it. Everything should line up with your brand’s message while still fitting in with the influencer’s typical content.

Skyrush Leverages Influencers

The tips we mentioned above are just the start of everything you can do with influencer marketing this year. At Skyrush Marketing, we are on top of the latest trends in influencer marketing. When we meet with our clients to discuss their initial plan, we make recommendations about influencer marketing campaigns based on their specific message and goals. We have connections with top-tier influencers as well as micro-influencers that can help your business succeed.

 

Contact us today to learn more about influencer marketing for your brand.

7 Ways AI is Revolutionizing Digital Marketing

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We’ve all been hearing about how artificial intelligence and machine-learning have been rapidly expanding in the past couple of years. AI opens the door to so many options, taking on the cognitive functioning capabilities at the speed and scale that humans can’t achieve on their own. With all the data available to you, it’s important to make use of everything, and you can’t do that without AI. Now more than ever, AI is no longer an optional part of digital marketing – it’s essential. Whether you’re a B2B or a B2C company, here are plenty of ways AI can be used in your digital marketing program.
In this post we’ll cover a few examples of how you can start harnessing the power of AI for your business

AI In Action

Below we’ll covers seven examples of how you can start taking advantage of AI for your business to improve customer engagement and boost sales:

  1. Content Generation and Curation – There are a variety of online tools that use machine-learning to help marketers generate new content based on science and data. For instance, HubSpot’s content strategy tool suggests topic clusters to investigate further so that you know your content is compelling, relevant, and engaging for your customers. You can also perform competitive research that lets you see how certain topics are performing for other brands so you can find your niche.
  2. Email Marketing – Gone are the days of the one-size-fits-all emails to customers. Instead, consumers want their emails to be personalized. They respond better to emails that include their name and content that specifically relates to them. For instance, if someone was looking on your site for a new Ram truck, you’d want to make sure that you’re sending that person information about the models they’re looking at. Offer them incentives to buy, give them more information, show them comparisons to other dealerships, make them want to buy from you. AI gives you the power to personalize messages on a large scale, drastically improving engagement.
  3. Social Media Marketing – A major use of AI in social media marketing is social listening. Rather than simply monitoring the conversations around a topic, social listening involves tracking phrases, words, or brands. Then, this information is used to generate content that appeals to your target market. Another important way AI is changing social media marketing is by using machine learning to optimize your budget. AI lets you know which posts are most engaging and what to boost based on content, timing, competition, and audience and then it can make the appropriate changes to your budgets to maximize performance.
  4. Paid Search AdsGoogle Ads uses AI to inform you of any suggestions for your current campaigns based on all the data available. When you’re creating the targeting options for your search ads, AI allows you to target consumers based on their interests and past behaviors, so you can home in on your target market. In addition, natural language processing helps you better understand your ad performance by analyzing key words and phrases. Of course, AI also saves you time, as you can automate ad headlines and copy to increase efficiency.
  5. Display Ads – Something that makes Skyrush Marketing stand out is our premier partnership with Sizmek, giving us direct access to the most advanced AI digital ad platform. For your display campaign, we can target consumers who are most likely to purchase your target product lines with pinpoint accuracy and follow them across their desktop and mobile devices on tier one websites to reach them at the right time.
  6. Chatbots – Chatbots are rapidly being implemented on websites to enhance the user experience. AI-powered chatbots allow your customers to interact with your brand at any time. They’ll get real-time feedback based on sets of responses you create so that all their questions are answered right when they ask them.
  7. Predictive Analytics – Predictive analytics uses data, statistical algorithms, and AI to predict future outcomes. You can predict customer behavior based on their data from past customer journeys so you know when they will decide to make a purchase. This allows you to always be on top of the latest trends and optimize your marketing program by cutting waste and increasing efficiency.
    Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive list of all the ways AI can be used to improve your marketing program, but it’s a good start if you are starting out and trying to stay on top of the latest trends.

Skyrush Marketing Harnesses the Power of AI

At Skryrush Marketing, we’re always up-to-date on the latest uses for AI in marketing. While we provided this list as a starting point, it’s important to know that if you really want to make a big impact, you need to dive deeper into each of the items on this list (and more). We developed proven techniques for implementing AI for our clients to drive sales and we stand by our results. All of our plans are customized to ensure that you reach your target customer through search engines, creative advertisements, social media, mobile apps, blog content, video content and more.

Contact us today to set up a free marketing analysis