Month: November 2022

Rigging your marketing budget

Post author By Harsha Vardan Hariprasad
Post date November 1, 2022

While consistent uploads, relevant content, user intent fulfillment are undoubtedly the most crucial aspects of successful marketing, but that alone won’t give you the magical results you’re seeking.

While organic rankings are achieved through best-in-class SEO, there’s much more that goes into bringing your business to the top of the charts if you’re planning to run ads. Budding businesses must use ads strategically to get the best out of their marketing budget.

Search marketing keywords can be expensive with some terms costing hundreds of dollars. Planning and execution of a good marketing strategy are crucial. Here are 6 strategies to get the highest returns from your ad campaigns.

Using keywords smartly
Out-of-the-box search content
Optimize your landing page
Landing page alternative
Search engine alternative
Keep evolving

Using keywords smartly

Short keywords are expensive and broad, they can bring in unwanted visitors and thus more unnecessary clicks to pay for. Long tail keywords are generally way less expensive, also you bring in visitors that are likely searching the same thing and have a much higher conversion probability.

Keep in mind, half of the search queries are 4+ words, and the user you bring in is way more valuable. If you’re a brick-and-mortar store at a particular location, then your search keyword term can end with your location. Having a more specified and common description of your business is the key takeaway here.

Out-of-the-box search content

The present-day user doesn’t remain on the “all” search result channel, the user will find content that’s useful to them on images, news, and video channels of search engine results. Apart from optimizing your search engine ranking on the homepage, focus on optimizing in these channels too.

As we said earlier, tagging your location as a brick-and-mortar store will boost your visits a lot. Studies say more than 72% of people who search for a local store, visit a store within 5 miles of their reach.

Optimize your Landing Page

If you’ve read our article on SEO 101, you might know that the landing page has a world of relevance when it comes to user retention. A site taking more than e seconds will be left by 72% of users. Another study shows that landing pages that are not satisfactory will lose 97% of leads instantly.

Analyze that number and now think of how many wasted clicks were paid for? The landing page should be fast, easy to navigate, and should have satisfactory information or lead to the user. Call-to-action buttons will play a major role in conversion at the end of the landing page.

Landing Page alternative

While it’s important to build a very strong landing page, at times it can simply be replaced by something of value to the user. If you have a blog post or other relevant content that can add value to the user’s intent, then link that instead of your landing page.

Adding a call to action button that earns the loyalty of the user will prove useful in the long run. This user will add to your site visits and indirectly increase your organic ranking. Also, this loyal user has a higher tendency to convert to a lead if they come across your site again.

Search Engine alternative

While the first thing that comes to mind after hearing search engine is Google, though desktop users are well used to search engines like Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo. These search engines with others count for the rest 66% of search engine clicks.

One advantage is the cost of competitive keywords, which is way less on these less competitive search engines. Depending upon the type of product and service your business is offering, you can opt for different search engines for better engagement and higher ROI.

Keep Evolving

With trials and errors will come feedback, you can analyze your own data and pinpoint which actions are yielding leads and which actions are fruitless investments. Reworking your ad campaigns from time to time will lead you to perfection. This will ultimately improve your ROI.

With previous ad campaigns, you’ll also be able to analyze which keyword terms are performing well and should be used more often. These Investments are initially cheap and you can cap them off weekly for data analysis. Once you’re familiar with the results and techniques, you can invest more.

If you have any questions about these techniques, feel free to comment them down below and if you liked this article, consider subscribing to our newsletter for the latest updates. Also, you can catch us on social media.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising SEO

Balancing Your Paid vs Organic Search

Post author By Sushanth Shyamsundar
Post date November 1, 2022

Balancing Your Paid vs Organic Search

Search engine optimization, once an afterthought when compared to other marketing strategies, is now at the forefront of inbound marketing success. There are two ways to land yourself on the front page which often confuses people- paid search and organic search

Paid search results are essentially ads. With these, your placement is usually based on the amount you are willing to bid for the ad’s placement and other factors like the quality and impact of the ad. Paid search results are at the top of the page they will contain a small note saying add. So you can easily identify what is an ad. Even though we don’t sometimes consider digital marketing as advertising, it is an ad. Your paid search results will have little ad icons. There are a lot of similarities between paid search and organic search.

Difference between paid search and organic search

Paid search is where advertisers pay to serve for different user searches using keywords, landing pages and ads. It is a faster and more straightforward means to serve clickable links on the SERP. The paid results will be shown at the top or very bottom of the SERP with a small ‘ad’ note in the copy. These searches have shorter and more control over the ad copy. Organic search results are results that come up organically. These results are optimized based on website content, HTML coding and link building. Here, the results take time to serve. Organic results are always shown below paid results. They are dynamically created by the search engine organic algorithm. Unlike paid searches, organic search results will have a longer headline and a longer body copy.

Which is best- Paid search or Organic search?

Instead of asking which one is best, it may be wise to ask which is best for you. Both have unique advantages and disadvantages. So it is a matter of knowing which will work best to get you the most of your marketing benefits.

Pros and cons – Organic Search

Pros

Trust

When you are searching for something on Google, you will certainly select the results at the top. And that’s because that’s the search we have grown to trust. This perception of credibility works well for your company if you are at the top of the results. Because most people are guaranteed to click through to your site.

Long-lasting

As long as your content remains relevant, your page is likely to remain at the top, which simply means more beneficial exposure over a long period. Once you put in the effort and the resources upfront you never have to do it again, but you will reap the benefits long term.

Click-Throughs

If you are comparing the click-through rate of organic versus paid searching, organic make up nearly 68%, especially for buyers who have an interest, but not necessarily an immediate purchase intent.

Compounded Ranking

Each time you go on to the search engine results, you increase your chances of ranking high again. By ranking high, you not only build trust with users, but you also build a good reputation with search engines. The more authority status the engine gives you, the higher your rank over time.

Cons

The initial investment at the heart of great organic search results is great content. It can be anything from articles and white papers to videos and infographics. But the best content utilizes SEO tactics or Search Engine Optimization tactics that can take some time to research and create the content which means inevitably be a lofty investment.

Time

On top of that, ranking for highly competitive keywords can take months or even years. So there is a good chance your marketing team will be out of the wild. If you can stick it out and see your efforts to achieve a high ranking, your return on investment is almost guaranteed.

Paid search – pros and cons

In essence, paid search results are advertising for your company. You associate ads with certain keywords, and when users search for those keywords, your ad displays at the top of the search results, and in the section marked as ads. If your users click on the listing, you pay a small amount which is called PPC or pay-per-click advertising. The placement of your ad compared with your competitor’s ad depends on the amount that each of you bid for a certain keyword as well as a few other certain factors. The pros and cons of PPC advertising have some similarities and some differences from those of organic search.

Pros

Time

Paid such rigging shows the top of the results as soon as you pay for the ad placement. You simply decide the keywords you want to rank for, the message you want your searches to see, and find the budget of the search engine to work with, it is fast and it can be very effective.

Success after click through

Paid search is geared towards more serious and eager buyers. Through it accounts for much less search engine traffic than organic results, the actual revenue amount is quite considerable.

Targeting

Paid search is tailored to reach certain audiences. So if your target is done correctly, you have a high chance of getting your message in front of the people that you want to see it. Not only can you target by keywords, but you can also further filter into segments by location, marital status, education level and much more.

Cons

Cost

In general PPC advertising can be quite costly for a few reasons. The first bid price is based on keywords. So the more competitive the keyword is, the higher price you are going to pay on each click for your display ad. Paid search advertising requires a high level of expertise and understanding to be successful. You either have to have a knowledgeable person on your team or outsource it.

Short-lived

As soon as you stop paying for your PPC ads, they go away. They don’t have a long-term effect that organic searches will over time.

Lack of trust

Drawing on the example of organic search results, users tend to select organic results before they will click on the ads at the top of the page because there isn’t the same level of trust. There may be a certain suspicion over how relevant the information might be.

When it comes to best practices, generally a combination of organic and paid nets the greatest results. Making use of the features of both increases credibility, and also ensures visibility, secures everlasting search results and targets, buyers, at different parts of the buying cycle. Mix and match how you utilize it to search for your marketing strategy. Make sure to track the results. You can prove things as you go and try new tactics if the current ones aren’t working. Search Engine Optimization takes time and effort, regardless of which method you use. But the results are always worth it.

Social Media

Advertising on Instagram: Become a Pro

Post author By venky
Post date November 1, 2022

In 2022, when social media is as diverse as it has ever been, the contender that’s the world’s 4^th most used social media platform is Instagram, with over 1.5 billion daily users and over 2 billion total active users.

It’s no secret that mobile technologies have evolved exponentially over the decade, with over 77% of the world’s population having a phone now. These numbers are never facing down and they indeed prove a point that m-Commerce is becoming a bigger chunk of e-Commerce.

Now that you know the number of people roaming the social world of Instagram and taking a huge part in the business world, let’s explore the opportunities that will help you’re your business break its personal records!

Who’s the target audience?

Before knowing how to get started, let’s first introduce you to the audience that you’re expecting to reach. Over 60% of users on Instagram are from the age group 18–34, while you might question the significance of that, this is the same age group that accounts for over 60% of total online shoppers.

While that raises a lot of eyebrows, another fact that might astonish you is that India accounts for the highest number of users on the platform. And if that isn’t enough to flabbergast you then the fact that the number of Indian users is increasing by 64% annually might as well do the job.

Apart from the incredible base of potential customers, Instagram is already on its way to becoming an indirect e-Commerce platform soon. Moving forward, let’s see how you can start with your own ad campaigns on Instagram and start to redirect the traffic to your online store.

How do Instagram ads work?

Instagram is primarily a platform to connect users to their friends, family, and influencers, but it also serves as a platform for creative artists and businesses. It uses the post and stories format, these posts are visible to people who follow you and to others as per your privacy settings.

If you’re a creator on Instagram, your content is more visible & discoverable to people who follow your niche. To advertise your post means to push your post into the more popular section and give it more reach. When you advertise or ‘promote’ as they call it, your post has higher visibility in the explore section of users.

Studies show that posts on Instagram have over 23% more engagement than on Facebook. Brands reportedly have over 4% of their followers engaging with their content, while these numbers are flat at zero on Facebook.

Moreover, you can link your page or catalog to your sponsored post for instant traffic or even conversion. You can also select what age group of audience located in what region views your posts more, giving you more control over your reach.

How to get started?

Now that you have a strong base of understanding of how ads work, let’s see how to get started with your own ads on Instagram. The platform is based on images and videos and almost all the content on the app is just another format of these two things. Talking about formats let’s take a look at them:

Photos: Photographs conveying an expression, emotion, message, art, or information are the things that would trend here. Be your photos complex or simplistic, there’s a set audience for everything.

Videos: Videos can be shared as posts, stories, or reels on Instagram and have a huge potential to reach users as video is the most popular form of content in the present generation. With the arrival of October 2021, Instagram ditched its original long video format app, IGTV, and merged it into Instagram videos. A while later, Instagram launched Reels in the late July of 2022, entailing the era of short video content which seems to be the most popular form of content right now.

Carrousel: This is the format where you can chain multiple photographs, videos, or even links to your own website or catalog. More CTA (Call To Action) buttons or comments can be added as per your choice.

Stories: Stories are one way of sneakily advertising your brand easier on Instagram. These are images or videos that have a short lifespan of 24 hours, after which they disappear. Instagram provided marketers with the option to place direct ads on stories, again having the liberty to insert a CTA button.

What’s trending?

Instagram has a lot of examples of advertisers using ads in genius ways to make them trend. Take, for example, the footwear-focused brand Nike, knowing that their primary audience is sport-loving, their posts are mostly of players caught in the moment, wearing their products, obviously.

Reels became the new trend as soon as it was launched. Carrying forward the lineage of short video apps like TikTok, reels featured short and long videos, which quickly took over the predecessor.

Using visual information at its best is the key to success on Instagram. Optimization of posts to integrate your products, catalogs and website is the first step toward driving traffic to your page.

With new features rolling out every few months, stay updated with the new ways to connect with your target audience. Let’s now see the budget you’ll need to start advertising on Instagram.

What’s the cost of advertising?

Costing on Instagram isn’t fixed for a particular deal, you can carefully tweak your reach and call to action by the user and pay for the same. Simply put, it’s similar to pay per click, you pay for the type of response you demand from the user.

Taking an average from the year 2021, Instagram’s cost per click clocks up to about $0.40 – $0.70 which includes every type of click, be it a like, comment, or share. Posts with URLs have a CPC of about $0.50 – $0.95 as of 2021.

Any tips?

While social media translates to Influencers these days, it’s not limited to that. If you know that your target audience is the young or adult age group, then Instagram is a world of possibilities for you.

You are the one who started your business and so if there’s anyone who knows your business the best, then it’s you. Take decisions on your own but seek advice from the experts or elites in the niche.

With that, we wrap up this short informative blog, subscribe to our newsletter to never miss premium content like this, and hush! You can find us on Instagram too 😉

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