Happy Tuesday!
This week we are back again with more internet marketing news; we’ll be covering last-minute holiday marketing tips, Facebook’s new ‘quality comment’ feedback option, and how artificial intelligence (AI) can help your content marketing strategy. Lastly, we will cover the essentials on how to use social media icons for your blogs, and why Google’s ‘exact match’ keeps getting less exact. Let's dive in!
6 Last-Minute Holiday Marketing Tips to Do Now
The holiday season is also known as the shopping season. According to a recent Gallup report, the average American will spend approximately $885 on holiday gifts in 2018, and 33 percent of Americans plan to spend at least $1,000 this holiday season. Customers are ready to spend their money, but are businesses ready to with their marketing campaign that focuses on holiday season? In this article, Sergey Grybniak gives holiday season marketing tips that any business can adapt.
Your website gives the first impression of your business to your customers so it essential to 'Holidize' your site. Keep in mind your site should have more than just ads; give some emotional context to website elements like footers, headers, and CTAs. Customers receive a barrage of holiday-sale emails throughout the season, so you need to make sure that yours pops; make your email colourful with beautiful designs and pictures, and keep your text small and straightforward because no one likes to read lengthy messages. Holding a contest during this season is a great idea — because who doesn’t love free stuff? Festive contests bring more traffic, drive more engagement, and attract new subscribers.
A pay-per-click (PPC) campaign during the holiday season is one of the most recommended strategies of all time. One tip for a PPC campaign during the holidays would be to target more audiences so that other people can discover your business and buy from you.
One thing to keep in mind is that you’re not the only one who is giving the customers special offers this holiday season; there are many companies out there who are also offering something similar. So, one way to get a leg up on the competition is to create more engaging content and make your strategy better than your competitors.
Facebook Tests New 'Comment Quality' Feedback Option as it Looks to Boost Engagement
Facebook is a social platform that gives the highest regard to social engagement. In every post on Facebook, the most interesting comments show up on the top of the comment list even if the comment is offensive or 'low quality.' Criticism is something everyone aims to avoid and is the main reason why people refrain from commenting on some post in fear of being criticized.
Facebook recently decided to take some action on this issue, as this lowers the engagements all posts on the platform.
As of last year, Facebook started testing a new up and downvote option for comments, which gives users a way to provide immediate, natural feedback on comment quality — the aim is to keep on-platform conversations more civil and inviting. But soon after making its debut, this update disappeared.
This week, Facebook announced a new update. In this latest update, there's a quick 'Facebook survey' option on comment quality, which helps provide the platform with more feedback into what users like and don't like within discussion threads.
Earlier in 2018, Facebook rolled out a News Feed update to put more emphasis on content from friends, and less on Pages. Facebook has also been pushing Groups, where an increasing amount of user interactions are now taking place. Looking at all the recent updates, it is quite evident that the platform's more recent moves suggest that there are concerns about losing touch, but only time will tell if these concerns and updates are taking this platform in a different direction.
How AI Can Help Content Marketing Drive Business
Artificial Intelligence (AI) was considered a dream technology a few years ago, but with the advances in machine learning, it has become more prevalent and powerful in recent years. Here’s how AI can help take your content marketing strategy to the next level:
Atomization is a technique where you breakdown longer content into shorter versions to keep things fresh and exciting. This technique also allows content marketers to save money — and with more dollars being invested in producing content, saving becomes vital.
Let's not forget about the errors that can be rectified without wasting time and effort when you use AI. In principle, AI will learn what you like and get better at delivering it much faster than a human writer can. AI can rewrite content in different ways without looking similar; of course, humans can do the same, but that might take a long time and team of writers. AI keeps track of every word it has written and produced a variety of content with minimal resources. Content marketing strategies come in all shapes and sizes, but AI is set to transform them all shortly.
Final words, the future of AI looks bright as it reduces human errors, and helps deliver content in shorter time frames.
The Essential Guide to Using Social Media Icons for Your Blog
Social media is a network of information where things get continuously shared on different platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Bloggers integrate social media sharing buttons on their blog posts that allow readers to share the blog on different social media platforms. There are a few techniques that can be used to optimize and use these sharing buttons in the most effective way.
Placing these social media buttons on the top of the page is usually a good practice, since sometimes the reader may want to share the blog just by looking at the catchy title before they actually read the post. It is not recommended to put these icons near the navigation pane and in between paragraphs since it can affect the reader's experience. To catch the attention of the reader, larger sized icons are always a good choice; you can either go for the classic design or a custom one, depending on your audience. This technique can sometimes be a sword; if your content is already getting a lot of shares, then it can often impress the reader and convince to them share more. However, if the share count is lower, it can often be disadvantageous as it can push readers away.
The last step is the essential part; marketers need to analyze the performance of these buttons depending on the engagement. After knowing the results, you can pick the best option available for you.
Google Ads: ‘Exact Match’ Keeps Getting Less Exact
In September 2018, Google announced another update for Google Ads. This new update has introduced to three different concepts:
Implied words, paraphrasing and same intent.
In this article, Robert Brady discusses how why Google should stop the new update as 'exact match.'
According to Brad Geddes, these new changes seem to show bias. For example in the Ad copy itself, if you are looking for the best time to go for the campaign. With this new update comes a number of changes. For example, if your ad copy focuses on just one season instead of all seasons, you’ll run the risk of missing out on click.
Another change is with negative keywords. You can now add up to10,000 negative keywords per campaign when using Google Ads. Using campaign-level negative keyword lists can help reduce the number of unqualified leads you get, but may require reorganizing the account to utilize them.
Click here to learn more about this update.