The Undeniable Power Of Search Engine Marketing

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Bing Network. All opinions are 100% mine.

If you could choose just ONE form of digital marketing, what would it be?

I get asked this question from big brands all over the world, and my answer is always the same…

Search engine marketing.

It often shocks people, because social media and content have been such a big contributor to my success. But in reality, search engines are where I continue to get the best return on investment.

In fact, 55% of the traffic for this site comes from organic search alone. And for me, more traffic means more earning potential.

Search engines are the lifeblood of digital marketing, not just because they deliver the most sustainable traffic to websites, but also because they are an essential component of our every day life.

Without search engines, life from a digital sense would inevitably stand still, stop functioning and most likely create widespread panic.

We are reliant on our ability to get answers and information at the click of a button, and that's why search engine marketing is such a powerful tool for you as a marketer.

But don't take my word for it, let me show you what I mean…

Powerful search engine marketing stats

There is more to search engine marketing than just website traffic, and to illustrate why you should consider it an integral part of your digital strategy here are some statistics:

• 96% of marketers use search engine marketing to provide content to their prospects


• Organic and paid search engine traffic contribute to more than 60% of total website visitors


• 48% of consumers start mobile research with a search engine


• 18% of local mobile searches lead to a sale within one day


• 81% of B2B purchase cycles start with a web search


• 57% of B2B marketers say SEO has the biggest impact on lead generation


• The highest spenders are most likely to turn to search for purchase information


• Conversion rates are 10 times higher from search than from social media

Of course these are just stats, but they tell a compelling story. Search engine marketing is here to stay, and it's importance will only grow as the global adoption of mobile devices continues to accelerate.

So how can you make the most of it?

A unique opportunity

A few weeks ago I wrote an article that encouraged you to diversify your search engine marketing strategy; in order to stay competitive and create a distinct point of difference for your website.

The most natural place to start if you're looking to diversify your strategy, reduce your overall risk and tap into some unique opportunities, is with the Bing Network.

Bing has come along way in the past decade, and it's much more than just a search box on a webpage. It's now a powerful connector between technology, information, people and knowledge.

Beyond being your typical search engine, Bing powers over 14 billion searches around the world across the Microsoft ecosystem; from Cortana, Xbox, Twitter, Apple and Amazon.

This means as a search engine marketer, Bing offers a unique opportunity to reach MORE people, in MORE ways and on MORE platforms.

Bing helps search engine marketers reach people at times when they are ready and willing to spend money – in their everyday lives. They connect you to prospects where and how they want to be reached.

More than just keywords in a search bar

Search engine marketing isn't just about dropping a few keywords into a search bar anymore…

It's much more than that.

Now search is present in everything we do, from interacting on social networks, to purchasing products, to finding a local restaurant.

As the digital marketing space continues to evolve, so will search, and you need to be prepared to ride that wave and capitalize on opportunities when they surface.

Networks such as Bing help you diversify your search marketing risk and tap into a growing and unique opportunity to reach your ideal customers.

Learn more about Bing Network

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Marketing Influencers: Four Ways to Elevate Your Content Strategy and Amplify Your Outreach

Marketers can learn a lot from established voices who are driving decisions in marketing, and this analysis of 21 influencers' content sharing offers ways you can improve your own content strategy. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Marketing Influencers: Four Ways to Elevate Your Content Strategy and Amplify Your Outreach

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Create an Audience of People Who Spent the Most Time on Your Website

Back in May, Facebook made updates to Website Custom Audiences that gave advertisers more targeting power based on quality of website visit.

That launch allowed advertisers to create audiences based on frequency of actions taken.

In the example above, an audience is being generated of people who have visited JonLoomer.com at least 20 times during the past 30 days. But this update also included the ability to create audiences based on frequency of events occurring, like registrations, purchases and searches.

All of this was made available to advertisers creating audiences from the Facebook Ads Manager or Power Editor. There were a few other features made available to the ads API (accessed by third party tools):

• Time spent: How long someone spent performing an action or visiting your website


• Dynamic date: A range of dates when someone was visiting (rather than a duration)


• Aggregate values: Total amount someone has spent

The big news: You no longer need a third party tool to create audiences based on time spent on your website.

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Facebook advertisers can now create audiences of people who spent the most time on their website…
Click To Tweet

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How to Create

To create a Custom Audience based on time spent on your website, start by creating a Custom Audience within Ads Manager the way you normally would.

Select the option for website traffic…

Click the drop-down menu for Website Traffic and select “Based on time spent on your website”…

Now you can create one of these! Facebook defines it as follows:

This allows you to create an audience based on the relative amount of time people spend on your website. We recommend installing a pixel on every page for best results.

You'll recall that when creating an audience based on frequency of website visits or events, you entered the number of times someone visited. Not this time.

As you see below, you can create audiences based on the top 5%, 10% or 25% of active users on your website during the past 1 to 180 days…

A theoretical example:

Your website gets 100,000 visitors during the past 30 days. Those visitors are listed (hypothetically) in order of time spent on your website. So the first person has spent the most time on your website during those 30 days. We'll say they spent 10 hours. The last person spent the least amount of time. We'll say they spent one second.

To create an audience of the top 25% of active users on your website, Facebook takes the top 25,000 in this case.

How to Use Them

When creating these audiences, they will appear on the Audiences page along with other Custom Audiences, Lookalike Audiences and Saved Audiences.

You can then target or exclude this audience when editing the audience while creating an ad set within either the Ad Create Tool or Power Editor.

The Benefits of These Audiences

This option is awesome! Prior to the May announcement, you could create an audience of your website visitors, but it was difficult isolating the best ones. Some people may have visited once for three seconds while some others visited 30 times for 10 hours. They aren't equal!

Then came along the frequency option, and you could focus only on those who visited a minimum number of times. Very helpful.

The ability to isolate time on site takes it a step further. Sure, maybe you visited three times. But were those three quality visits? Would you rather target someone who visited three times for 10 seconds or once for one hour?

This development will allow advertisers to target their most engaged website visitors.

Potential Issues and Considerations

It's still early in this rollout, so I don't expect this feature to be perfect yet. And it's not! Here are a few things to consider…

1. Limit of 20 Audiences

After I created just a few of these, I received the following error message:

I hadn't created 20 audiences for time on my website, but the others I created for frequency of visits contributed to the limit of 20. If you hit that limit, you can always delete the audiences you aren't using.

I fully expect this to be a temporary restriction that Facebook will eventually remove when the rollout is complete and the feature is proven to be stable.

2. No Domain Filter

Go back and look at the screen grabs above of the process to create these audiences. You'll notice that there is no way to filter by URL or domain.

This is something you can do when creating a typical Website Custom Audience…

And it's also available within the frequency of website visits feature released in May (though not available for frequency of Events)…

This is a problem for any advertiser who has their pixel on multiple websites. While I wouldn't advise having one pixel on different websites you don't own (like for clients), I've personally had my pixel on two unrelated websites I do own.

Not having a domain filter would make this feature worthless for me because it would create an audience of the most active visitors from both sites combined.

3. Past Traffic Checkbox

Because of the second issue above, I decided to create a separate ad account for my other website and replace the pixel with one that is unique to that website.

Of course, since I just did that on July 26, I'd want to be sure to uncheck the “Include past traffic” checkbox when creating the audience since I would not want to include the traffic that hit that pixel prior to removing it from my other website.

Upon creating that new audience with past traffic unchecked, however, I quickly realized there was an issue…

As you can see above, the audience that included past traffic for the past 180 days is the same size as the audience that was created on July 26 and wasn't supposed to include past traffic.

I again alerted Facebook of this issue.

4. Slow Build Time

If you've created Website Custom Audiences before, you know that the audiences tend to build very quickly - within minutes - assuming you've had the pixel on your website for a while.

Well, that's not the case when creating these audiences. I found it took several hours to build. My assumption is that it's again because this is a new feature. It's likely that instead of running every few seconds, there is currently a process that only runs a few times per day.

I expect this to eventually change and mirror the real-time building of other Website Custom Audiences.

5. May Not Be Fully Rolled Out

I know that the number one comment below will be “I don't have it yet! When will it come to [X Country]?”

I don't know. But like all rollouts, these things tend to take weeks if not months.

Your Turn

What do you think of this update? Do you have it yet? How will you use it?

Let me know in the comments below!

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How to Strike the Right Tone With Live Chat

Over the last decade or so, live chat boxes have slowly become a staple in many websites' landing pages. What some may view as an annoyance can actually keep the customer on your site longer, cut down time on the phone, and lead to more conversions-at least that's what it would seem.

Proponents of Live Chat will boast surveys conducted on the usage and effectiveness of live chat boxes, citing the fact that users generally do respond well to websites that have chat windows. This Forrester survey reports that chat usage rates had risen from 30 percent in 2009 to 43 percent in 2012. It has surely climbed since. The survey further revealed that 44 percent of U.S. online consumers like having a chat invitation appear while they're researching or purchasing a product online.

Further, Boldchat's 2013 Live Chat Effectiveness Research Report showed that 47 percent of respondents who prefer live chat reported that they are more likely to make a purchase when a website provides a live chat option. This means nearly half of all your target customers are either accustomed to or potentially interested in using live chat. (highlight to tweet)

If these surveys show such positive results, then why don't live chat windows always improve conversion rates?

A Live Chat Case Study

In my experience, a well-converting website with a large number of inbound leads can easily get thrown off course by tossing in a live chat box. I run an online insurance agency, and we recently decided it was time to put a chat box on our company site, as well as one of our main publishing partner's sites. Our initial integration was fairly crude-we created a PureChat account, assigned two reps to monitor it, and off we went.

We saw an immediate drop in conversion rates across our pages, to the tune of 30 percent. On Monday, we had 100 inbound leads. On Tuesday, with our chat boxes live, we had 70. Nothing else changed. It's not exactly good for business to lose 30 percent of your lead volume overnight.

Of course, our site visitors did start initiating conversations with our agents via the chat box. We answered basic questions. We missed a few chat requests. After just two days, I read over the chat reports (PureChat has nice reporting features for administrators, including nightly email reports). Unfortunately, I didn't learn much. We had lost 30 percent of our expected leads over two days, and all I saw were basic questions about our products or incomplete conversations where the user seemed to drop off after asking one question.

Why weren't we getting the results demonstrated in the surveys I'd read?

After doing some more research and internal brainstorming, our team decided we needed to revamp our approach in three aspects: the chat box design, the timing of displaying the chat, and how the user interacted with the chat.

First, we tested different chat box colors, styles, and locations. In our initial haste and “throw it up to see what happens” approach, we had inadvertently put our chat box in a location that covered our contact form when the user scrolled beneath the fold of some of our top landing pages.

We also changed the timing of the chat box pop up, delaying it to 45 seconds after landing on our site. Initially, we had it pop up with no delay. It was distracting. On top of that, PureChat offers different animations for the chat box pop, and the one we were using was particularly eye-catching. Combine that distraction with the previous problem of having the chat box cover our form, and it's easy to see why our conversion rates were tanking.

Why 45 seconds? It wasn't an arbitrary decision, although anything may have proven better than 0 seconds. Instead, we looked at the average time on site for our top landing pages and on our site overall. With this in mind, 45 seconds seemed to be the time that would catch the majority of visitors after they had been on the site for a while, but before they had bounced.

Finally, we decided to add some required fields for the user to submit before we started a chat-namely, their name and email address (so we could follow up with them via email if needed).

Things improved. Our new strategy has helped get us closer to a happy marriage between having a chat box that helps our users get quick answers and our ingrained expectations for the conversion rates of our pages. Converting site visitors into leads is still the priority, but the chat box is starting to show the benefits that all the surveys proclaim.

We learned this lesson: In most cases, it's not the idea of the chat box that's driving people away from your website or lowering conversion rates, but something about the chat box that's turning people off. Let your chat window complement your customer's experience on your website, not interrupt it.

The Right Timing Is Everything

Customers might be put off by a chat window that instantly appears on the landing page, causing them to bounce right away. Consider having the window appear after the user has spent some time on the page or site. On the other hand, don't wait too long to display your chat. The last thing you want is a potential lead wondering how to get in touch.

A Good Design Does Wonders

Effective chat windows don't disrupt your customer's site experience. This means your chat window should have a look and feel similar to that of the rest of your website. Incorporating the right color scheme, your company's logo, and a size and shape that fits your site sparks trust in customers, making them more likely to chat and make a purchase. Make sure your chat box is not covering up your contact forms.

Robotic Greetings Are Not Effective

Users won't bother asking questions via chat box if they're not convinced a real, live human being is on the other side. Make sure your greetings are personalized and the answers your customer service reps provide don't sound too robotic. The idea is to give users a live chat experience equal to one they would receive by phone.

Chat Boxes Should Meet Expectations

Customers using your live chat feature are expecting to have their questions answered and issues resolved quickly. Make sure you have the right reps behind the chat window that know your product or service well. If they can't deliver answers quickly, users won't wait. This has been easy for us with PureChat, which sets up desktop and mobile notifications for our reps that can run in the background while they do their usual workflow.

In the end, certain customers will always prefer to discuss their issues over the phone instead of using a live chat window. Placing a chat box on your site won't eradicate the need for phone representatives. However, it will give your users more options, and if they choose that option and have a great experience with it, you can expect higher customer satisfaction and better conversion rates. I like the feel of credibility it adds to our business, and after a few hiccups, we're happy to have it integrated into our business today.

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How to Strike the Right Tone With Live Chat

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3 Advanced Influencer Marketing Strategies for Noisy Markets

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Some people hate the term “influencer marketing.” Dress it however you like, but building relationships with world-class bloggers, organizational leaders, and public figures works. It allows you to capture a wider audience and build new business opportunities. According to AdWeek, 92 percent of consumers trust recommendations from their friends and family over branded advertising or content.

The problem is, so many people are shouting for the attention of established influencers, it's hard to cut through the noise. Everyone wants their attention. How do you engage with influential thought and organizational leaders in noisy markets? Here are three advanced techniques that will increase the performance of your influencer marketing efforts. It's a slow game, but going the extra mile demonstrates your desire to add value.

1. Sophisticated Targeting for Higher Conversions

Laying the groundwork before executing on tactics is the most important first step to influencer marketing. It's also the step that many marketers skip. The outreach may engage them, but the results are often disappointing. This is because proper research was ignored, and the wrong influencers were targeted in the first place.

So how do you find the right influencers to target? Start by focusing on the audience you want to target, rather than the influencers themselves. (highlight to tweet) Your goal might be content distribution or business development efforts. It doesn't matter as long as your goals align with the needs of the influencer audience.

To get this right, it's important to adopt a data-driven approach. There are a couple of tools we can use for this. First, there's Woopra, a customer intelligence platform. Woopra takes customer and visitor data from your website and gives you granular information on them.

Using this data, you can build a profile of the customers, users, and visitors from your website who are most engaged to find more of them. Use this to map out your target influencer audiences. This makes it easier to find influencers who have access to this audience.

Remember that an approach like this requires a manual effort as well as automated tools. Use Twitter hashtags to find those who contribute to conversations around relevant topics. Google Alerts and Mention are also useful when monitoring social media and online communities.

BuzzSumo and EpicBeat can be used to search for the most popular content around a keyword to discover top sharers. Use the Influencers feature in BuzzSumo to reveal potential targets based on a certain keyword.

Finding the right audiences is a key first step to influencer marketing. Reverse engineering the audience before identifying influencers is the best way to approach this challenge.

Now that you understand who you're targeting, it's time to reach out to them and get on their radar.

2. An Agendaless, Multi-Channel Approach

When top marketers report their findings on certain approaches, they're adopted by many marketers at once. As a result, these structured and systematic approaches quickly become saturated. This is exactly what has happened with influencer marketing over the last 18 months. Marketers have been applying similar approaches to a formula, all while forgetting one of the most important elements of marketing: empathy.

Templates are doled out quickly become less effective, causing misguided marketers to come across as misleading and dishonest.

The message is simple: If you use the same approach as everyone else, you're going to get ignored. Forget about the one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, focus on the influencers you're aiming to connect with on an individual level.

For example, one influencer may be a blogger, and another may engage in various communities. Is it smart to engage with them both on Twitter in the same manner? Instead, try sharing and commenting on their content and engage with the conversations the contribute to.

It really comes down to two elements: channel and context. Start by finding out where their attention is, then use those platforms in the context those influencers use them in. Do this in a way that adds value.

This context will also inform the forms of content you should use to engage them with. Analyze the content they are sharing with their audience and provide them with more of that.

Keep an eye out for any conferences of events that your target influencers are heading to. This approach goes beyond just digital channels. When doing this, engage before the event via email or social. Offering someone a coffee while they're in the same place is a hard offer to refuse.

The final ingredient here is authenticity. Don't try to be authentic. Join a conversation only if it makes sense to do so. If you have nothing to contribute, then don't do it. Stick to what you know, and don't chime in when you lack knowledge expertise in a particular topic. It's not worth being called out on!

3. Surprise and Delight, The Ultimate Attention Grabber

We talk a lot about “adding value,” but the term is becoming more and more nebulous, often limited to comments, tweets, and shares. These have their place, but we can do better. In order to truly delight with your influencer marketing activity, you must think outside of the box.

These methods are why I tell other marketers to focus on a small cohort of influencers at a time. It requires manual effort and a sharp attention to detail. These are the techniques that will really help you really stand out from the crowd. They go beyond mere shares, comments, and tweets. They boil down to two things: personal desires and professional goals.

By now you should be monitoring your target influencers closely. You've discovered a lot about them, from what they love in life to the activities they're executing in business. This knowledge gives you the power to surprise and delight them in a way that demonstrates authenticity.

Let's start with guest blogging. Influencers are usually either promoting their products and services or pushing out their own content-they may even be executing on a product launch. Whatever they're doing, a mention on a reputable publication or blog will be appreciated. They're already busy enough with their work.

Mentioning them in content that helps them get their message to a wider audience will serve them and speed up the engagement process.

You can also suggest connections with people in your network. If a mutually beneficial opportunity exists, reach out to both the influencer and your own connection, gaining permission to make an introduction. Explain why you think it would be worthwhile before you make the formal introduction

Relationships are built one-to-one. Getting to the “intimacy” stage of relationship building requires going deeper.

While it's great to pay attention to your target influencers' business goals, they're also passionate about other things in their personal lives, too. Let's say Gary Vaynerchuk is on your list of target influencers. If you really pay attention to what he's doing, you'll notice he's a Nike fanatic. There are endless ways you can use this knowledge to get his attention. A coupon code for an online footwear store so he can get a new pair when the need arises is one easy approach. Or, you could find out his shoe size and send a limited edition pair of Nike trainers straight to his office.

These are two extremes. Selecting an approach that goes the extra mile, such as the latter example, will cut through the noise. This is something used often by B2C marketers, but not often done in the B2B world. There's a lot of opportunity in this approach when dealing with executives.

If you're looking for influencer marketing shortcuts, no amount of techniques or tactics are going to help you. True relationships are built by showing you care. Instead, make sure you're building mutually beneficial relationships with the right people. When you're confident with this piece of the puzzle, be super personalized online and in real life. Contribute to their career goals and personal desires.

What does your influencer marketing strategy look like? Is there anything I've missed? Share your experiences below.

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3 Advanced Influencer Marketing Strategies for Noisy Markets

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3 Augmented Reality Trends Marketers Should Watch

While the all the recent hype about Pokémon Go has drawn attention to the world of augmented reality, the truth is that we've been trending in the direction of screen-enhanced information for years now. (highlight to tweet) With smartphones in the hands of 72 percent of U.S. adults, according to Pew Research, there are more opportunities than ever to present information to users in ways that keep them interacting with the real world.

What is augmented reality, exactly? Augmented reality is the overlay information onto the real world, allowing users to see virtual items or information while looking at real things. If you've played with Snapchat's lenses to take a selfie or seen a sci-fi movie in which a soldier can see information on the inside of her visor, you get the general idea.

The Yelp Monocle, introduced in 2009, was a novel (albeit slightly limited) example of the possibilities of AR. The world shown through users' cameras was given an overlay with location listings in the general directions of where they are in relation to the user. And while not exactly AR, I would argue that Facebook's Place Tips occupy a similar space for users, providing information based on their interactions with the physical world around them.

AR's prevalence in our lives is only going to increase from here. For smart marketers, there are already opportunities. Here are three trends you should know about.

Turning Fun and Games into Paying Customers

While we can't write an article about augmented reality and not talk about Pokémon Go, the truth is that Niantic (spun out of Google) has been perfecting AR gaming since the 2012 release of Ingress, a game in which players walk or drive around the real world looking for “portals” to hack and link, in order to capture territory for their “faction” or team. Think “capture the flag” with a serious upgrade.

For marketers, the evolution of Ingress shows us the blueprint for Pokémon Go. Ingress's world eventually included sponsored portals, such as Jamba Juice and Zipcar locations, where players could use special passcodes to collect special items in the game. These sponsorships increased foot traffic to the businesses and gave gamers a reason to become paying customers, and it already looks like Niantic will monetize Pokémon Go in similar fashion.

In the meantime, a recent blog post by Vincenzo Landino on this blog has some great suggestions for ways that businesses can lure Pokémon trainers to their locations.

Try It All With AR-Enhanced Sampling

For clothing, accessory, and makeup companies, AR presents a new way to show customers what it will be like to use or wear their products.

Companies like Modiface, whose AR mirrors can be seen in Sephora, let users virtually try on eyeshadows and other products without having to apply them-useful if you already have makeup on! For customers, it makes it easy to see what a product will look like without all the hassle of wiping your face off and applying new products multiple times.

Here's another scenario for gentlemen who hate trying on clothes: Imagine standing at home in front of your webcam and being able to try on multiple pairs of pants and shirts without having to actually disrobe. Sounds pretty good, right? It might even make that website your go-to shop.

We're almost there. This type of virtual sampling combines personalization with convenience, making it a win for consumers and businesses alike.

The Right Information at the Right Time and Place

Google Glass may not be ready for primetime, but soon, we'll have enhanced windshields, windows, and eyeglasses. Companies including Jaguar and BMW are experimenting with “smart windshields” that help eliminate blind spots and display information we might miss with our puny, human eyes.

More companies are embracing the ability to present information based on GPS data. Facebook's Place Tips is one early example, but we're also seeing companies like Yext serve up location-based ads in all manner of apps, allowing shoppers to get information on deals and offers only when they're in-store. It's not quite as elegant as an in-eyeglass display, but it's definitely a step towards the future of science fiction.

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3 Augmented Reality Trends Marketers Should Watch

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