If you run a digital marketing agency, you may have found yourself looking at your bank account, wondering how it’s possible that you can be busier than you’ve ever been, and still not have much cash to show for it.

It’s something I’ve seen time and time again in my work as an agency profitability consultant and SaaS CEO, focused on helping agencies improve their profitability.

The truth is, just about every agency I’ve worked with has hit that first critical growth ceiling when they’ve figured out how to get clients, but are still struggling with cash flow and profitability.

In this post, I’m going to walk you through the key KPIs I’ve used to not only lead clients to improved profitability, but to also show their progress and hone their strategy along the way. The six metrics I'm going to cover include:

1. Utilization
2. Revenue earning efficiency
3. Gross margin
4. Average billable rate
5. Accuracy of scope
6. Overhead spending

For each metric, I will explain what it is, why it's important, and how to measure it; and then provide benchmarks to help you identify what your agency should aim for.

Profitability metric #1: utilization rate

If you have an internal team that delivers work to clients, utilization rate will be the first and most foundational metric to start paying attention to in terms of profitability.

What is utilization rate?

For employees that interface with clients, their working time can be split into billable vs non-billable hours. Billable hours are those spent on client projects or directly working with their clients, while non-billable hours are those spent not directly on the client, such as with internal projects and meetings. 

Utilization is defined as the percent of your employees' total time that is billable. What this means is, in order to increase your agency's profitability, you need to make sure your team has enough work to do for clients to keep a threshold of billable hours.

Why is utilization rate important?

Understanding your utilization rate helps you avoid situations where you’re paying a salary to the team, but not earning any revenue in return. If the team isn’t busy, there’s not much point in optimizing for profitability, because the increased efficiency can’t be transferred to other revenue-earning opportunities.

If you primarily lean on contractors or outsourced partners to do work for clients, you may not need to worry about utilization as much, since you’re not paying those contractors when the agency isn’t busy. Your contribution/gross margins may be lower, but if you haven’t figured out how to predictably acquire clients yet, keeping your workforce more elastic might be a good idea until you’ve sorted out your funnel and acquisition channels.

How to calculate utilization rate

Utilization can be calculated using the following formula:

Gross Capacity / Billable Hours = Utilization Rate

• Gross capacity is the total number of hours they have available per year (most employees are 40 hours per week for 52 hours per year, or 2080 hours).
• Billable hours is the amount of time they spend doing work for clients (regardless of whether you’re billing hourly or not).

Utilization benchmarks to aim for

On a week-to-week basis, you generally want your “pure” producers (designers, developers, copywriters, etc.) to land somewhere between 75% and 90% utilization.

On an annual basis, you should aim to have your production team hit a utilization rate of between 65% and 80%.

With utilization above 65%, you should be putting yourself in a position to achieve healthy margins as a business, so long as you’re earning your revenue efficiently (more on that next).

Profitability metric #2: revenue earning efficiency

Once you’ve started consistently hitting utilization targets, this is the next highest priority metric to familiarize with in order to build a scalable agency that can cash flow its own growth.

What is revenue earning efficiency?

There’s a trap many of my clients fall into before they call me: the trap of selling work to meet a revenue target, without thinking about the liability that that work creates. This often leads to them working long hours and yet still not having much cash flow to show for it. And this is where revenue earning efficiency comes into play. This metric basically describes how well you use your assets and resources to generate income.

Why is revenue earning efficiency important?

As a service business, your revenue is a liability until it’s earned. Your margin is determined by how much it costs you to earn that revenue, and that cost is often a function of the time it takes to complete the work. That’s why it’s critical to track how efficiently you’re earning your revenue.

How to track your revenue earning efficiency

There are two primary ways for digital marketing agencies to track their earning efficiency: gross margin and average billable rate. These will comprise the next two metrics, where I'll break down the pros and cons to help you determine which metric is best for measuring and improving agency's profitability.

Profitability metric #3: gross margin

As mentioned above, gross margin is one of two metrics you can use to help track your revenue earning efficiency. 

What is gross margin?

Gross margin is a tried and true method to getting a handle on your production profitability. Simply put, it means calculating the profit margin on a per-client or per-project basis by subtracting time & material costs from whatever the client has paid you.

This method is generally more accurate, but can be more expensive and time-consuming to calculate since it usually happens in an accounting tool—and without an aggressive bookkeeping schedule, this may be something you can only ever look at in a retroactive way.

Who should use gross margin?

I generally recommend the gross margin metric to mature agencies (several millions+ in revenue) with a bookkeeper making updates on a biweekly or weekly basis, and/or agencies who work with a lot of contractors.

How to calculate gross margin

Gross margin can be calculated with the following formula:

Adjusted Gross Income - (COGS/Labor Costs) = Gross Margin
Gross Margin / Adjusted Gross Income = Gross Margin %

• Adjusted gross income (AGI) in this formula refers to the amount of revenue left over for the agency to earn after any pass-through expenses are paid (ad spend, print budgets, equipment rentals, etc.).
• COGS/labor costs are the costs associated with the people you’ve brought on to work on this project, be they internal team members or external contractors.

To calculate your employee cost per hour for internal team members, you’ll need to take their salary + benefits and divide it by their gross capacity. For most employees, this comes out to 2080 hours per year (40 hours x 52 weeks).

For a deeper dive into this metric, check out my guide on accurately calculating your billable employee cost per hour.

Why gross margin is important

Being able to consistently hit gross margins in this range means your delivery systems are efficient enough to scale profitably, thereby allowing you to cash-flow your agency's growth.

Gross margin benchmarks to aim for

To run a highly profitable, scalable agency, you’ll want to aim for a gross margin of 50-70% on a per-client or per-project basis.

That should set you up to hit a margin of 40-60% agency-wide at the end of the year, leaving you enough room to carry normal levels of overhead and accommodate for slow times without compromising net profitability.

Profitability metric #4: average billable rate (ABR)

Average billable rate is often a much simpler, more accessible way to get an idea of your revenue-earning efficiency (which is metric #2) and benchmark different clients or projects against each other.

What is ABR?

ABR basically helps us understand the average rate we’re earning per-hour, based on the amount of time it actually takes us to earn our revenue. This method is generally a bit less accurate, but much faster and easier to calculate and doesn’t require a bookkeeper or accountant to figure out.

Who should use average billable rate (ABR)?

I generally recommend using the ABR metric method for smaller agencies who may just be getting started with tracking metrics, and for agencies who tend to work with fewer contractors and keep most of their labor in-house.

How to calculate ABR:

Average billable rate (ABR) can be calculated with the following formula:

Adjusted Gross Income / Hours Worked = ABR

• Adjusted gross income (AGI) is the amount of revenue left over for the agency to earn after any pass-through expenses are paid (ad spend, print budgets, equipment rentals, etc.).
• Hours worked is the total amount of time your team spent to complete the work for your client.

ABR benchmarks to aim for

The target for average billable rate is the same as for gross margin. When we look at our average cost per hour for our production labor, we want to land in the 50-70% margin range.

Usually that means aiming for around 2.5x your average employee cost per hour or whatever contractor rates you’re paying the team.

For example, if our hourly cost per hour is $50 to pay someone to do the work for us, we’d want to target an average billable rate of $125 (which is 2.5 x $50 and equates to a gross margin of 60%).

Profitability metric #5: scoping accuracy

The riskiest part of any service business is the fact that many of its critical functions rely on assumptions that are made every day when scoping work.

What is scoping accuracy?

The information we use to determine how much to charge for work, when to hire or fire employees, how to resource a plan, and how to assign team members, all comes down to what we believe is going to be required to complete the deliverables we’ve promised our clients—aka the scope of the work.

The importance of scoping accuracy

Without feedback about how accurate those assumptions are, it’s very difficult to build out the systems required to scale our agency and our teams’ profitably. That’s why it’s so important to install a feedback loop to help us understand whether the assumptions behind our pricing are accurate or not.

How to calculate scoping accuracy

Scoping accuracy can be easily calculated by the following formula:

Estimated Time & Cost / Actual Time & Cost = Scoping Accuracy (%)

• Estimated time & cost is the amount of time or money we estimated it would take to complete the work.
• Actual time & costis the amount of time or money we actually spent to complete the work.

Usually this will be broken down into “buckets” like design, development, and project management. To learn more and to avoid common agency mistakes in this area, you can check out my guide on choosing the correct structure for your estimates and actuals.

Scoping accuracy benchmarks to aim for

An acceptable margin of error is to consistently keep variance under 20% of the originally anticipated budget, with going over, of course, being more of a concern.

However, at scale, we should be aiming to keep our margin of error under 10% consistently. This should become achievable over time as we collect more data and install more processes to close the gaps between our assumptions and reality—thereby creating our own agency profitability flywheel.

Profitability metric #6: overhead spend

Once you’ve gotten a grip on utilization, earning efficiency, and scoping accuracy, you should already be head and shoulders above the competition. Your agency will feel more stable, you won’t find yourself worried about cash flow, and planning ahead for growth won’t feel so obscure.

The last piece of the puzzle for really dialing in your agency's profitability is paying attention to your overhead spending—making sure it’s balanced relative to your income.

What is overhead spend?

Overhead costs are expenses that support your agency but are not directly tied to the creation of a specific product or service. They are the ongoing and necessary expenses of running your business that do not generate revenue. The three main categories of overhead spending that we’ll talk about in this post are administrative, facilities, and sales & marketing.

How to calculate overhead spend

The percentages of overhead spending for each of the different areas below may shift depending on your accountant’s guidance on where to place expenditures that fall into “grey areas.”

Overhead % can be calculated using the following formula:

Overhead Spending / Adjusted Gross Income = Overhead %

• Overhead spending is any expense related to admin, facilities or sales & marketing (further defined below).
• Adjusted gross income (AGI) is the amount of revenue left over for the agency to earn after any pass-through expenses are paid (ad spend, print budgets, equipment rentals, etc.)

Overhead spend benchmarks to aim for

The general rule of thumb is thattotal overhead spending should be about 20-30% of your adjusted gross income (AGI). Within overhead, there are three primary categories to pay attention to:

1. Administrative expenses (target = 8-12%)
   Administrative expenses include things like accounting, legal fees, receptionist, part or all of the director’s or owner's salary, and more.
2. Facilities expenses (target = 4-6%)
   These include any expenses related to providing the team with a proper working environment such as a building (rent), parking, and utilities.
3. Sales & Marketing (target = 8-14%)
   Sales & marketing includes any expenses related to bringing in new business, including marketing spend, sales softwares, part of the directors or the team’s salary working on sales or internal marketing projects, etc.

Why overhead spend is important

Landing in the acceptable ranges for each of these areas should allow you to meet your agency’s needs relative to its size, while maintaining healthy profit margins.

Keep in mind that through periods of aggressive growth, you may find yourself spending out ahead of scale. For example, you may sign a lease on an office that is much larger than what is necessary for your current team, anticipating having to make a lot of hires in the coming months.

There’s nothing wrong with this, so long as you’re making these investments consciously and with a plan to eventually level your expenses back into a healthy relative range.

Use these metrics to make a big impact on your profitability

If there’s one thing I'd urge you to take away from this post, it’s that it doesn’t take much to start measuring the simple numbers that will make a big impact on your profitability. What I’ve learned from working with hundreds of agencies over the last few years is that most of them don’t do this stuff well (if at all)—so even doing just part of it can help you set your agency apart from your competitors, and position you to outlast or outgrow them in the long term.

The peace of mind that comes with having good cash flow, efficient systems, simple yet clear-cut numbers, and visibility into your progress can make running your agency much easier and more enjoyable for both you and your team.

Who doesn’t want that?

About the author

Marcel Petitpas is the CEO & Co-Founder of Parakeeto; a consultancy turned software company that helps service businesses increase profitability and close more deals.He’s also the fractional COO at Gold Front, an award winning creative agency working with top silicon valley brands like Uber, Slack, Google, Keap, and more. When he’s not helping agencies run more profitably, you’ll find him cycling, renovating his home with his fiancé Cearagh, or watching The Office on an endless loop.

This year has been unlike any other, and this holiday season is sure to follow suit. More consumers are going to need to shop online for holiday gifts, and due to issues with slow mail deliveries, they’re likely going to be doing so for a longer time frame than normal. That said, for the 2020 holidays, your ecommerce campaigns are going to be even more important than they’ve been in years past.

Image source

But even in this unprecedented year, there are some advertising and ecommerce fundamentals you need to make sure you’re covering in order to give your current and potential customers the best holiday shopping experience possible. In this post, I’m going to provide eight tips and best practices to ensure that you:

• Stand out above your competition
• Attract holiday shoppers, and
• Still see the uptick in sales that comes with the holiday season, despite the current economic and marketing landscape.

8 best practices for 2020 holiday advertising success

I’ll admit many of these are pretty basic, but with the increased online activity we're likely to see among consumers, it’s even more important to make sure you’re buttoned up on the basics so your customers can have a good experience with you—which could be enough to win them over since all the rest of the world is a dumpster fire. Let’s hop in.

1. Maintain product feeds

There is nothing more annoying than seeing an ad promoting a product either on social media or Google search, and then getting to the site and seeing that it’s out of stock. From an advertiser's perspective, this is a relatively easy fix if you’re using product feeds or catalogs, and keeping up with your inventory. Facebook, Google, and a host of others have ways for you to make sure you’re only advertising products that are in stock.

On the other side, if you’re using text ad campaigns for search or standard website traffic campaigns on Facebook, this information isn’t dynamically available. It’s up to you to make sure you’re writing ad copy that's accurate and doesn't make promises your business or ecommerce website can’t deliver on.

2. Use automation to promote holiday sales

Similar to finding a product out of stock, it’s just as frustrating when an ad teases a sale but then is nowhere to be found on the website. But never fear, ad scheduling is here. There are several platforms that allow for some form of ad scheduling, to ensure your ads with sale messages are live and paused when they need to be. They include;

• Google Ads (ad scheduling setup help here).
• Microsoft Ads (ad scheduling setup here).
• Facebook/Instagram (ad scheduling setup here).
• Snapchat (ad scheduling setup here)
• Twitter (ad scheduling setup here)

Depending on the platform(s) you’re using, be sure to check out their ad scheduling capabilities and adjust accordingly. Maybe you can only run promotions as whole-day events or maybe you can have them set down to 15 minute increments. Either way, know your options and make sure your customers are seeing an accurate message, no matter the time.

3. Be realistic with shipping expectations

As consumers, we’re generally very trusting of a website that tells us we’ll have our products by a certain date. Years of using Amazon Prime for two-day, one-day, or same-day delivery with a fairly high success rate have conditioned us this way. The bar has been set very high.

Your website needs to give a realistic expectation as to when something will be delivered. Even if something is technically called two-day shipping and that’s what your customer is paying for—if you know your are running behind schedule, you need to tell your them that.

Someone could have a perfect experience on your site, but if shipping is delayed and they didn’t realize that was a potential outcome, you'd better believe it’s going to reflect poorly on your brand just as much as, if not more than, the shipping company itself.

The bottom line: Set proper expectations, especially the closer you get to the holidays, and warn people if you don’t believe that item will be there on time. You might lose a sale in the moment, but it’s better than fighting off bad reviews after the fact.

4. Improve your site speed

With an increase in online shopping this 2020 holiday season, there is bound to be a drain on network bandwidth. Some users will have their normally-fast internet slowed by more users being on the network, while others with already-slow internet will get hit even harder. Either way, this holiday season (well, ideally beforehand) is the prime time to remove site speed hindrances from your online store and speed things up for your customers.

The best tool I’ve found for this is the Google Developer PageSpeed Insights tool.

An example of a PageSpeed Insights report using none other than Google.com.

Simply add your URL to the tool, and it’ll scan your pages on both desktop and mobile devices and return a report with highly detailed suggestions on what you can do to speed your page up. Pass these findings either to your internal team, your freelance developer, or dive into them yourself and speed things up. With one caveat: DO NOT REMOVE YOUR AD PIXELS.

DO NOT REMOVE YOUR AD PIXELS.

I can’t tell you how many times developer teams tell me that ad platform pixels are slowing down the website. Most of the time, the pixels are not the problem and there are bigger fish to fry. And during the holiday marketing season especially, you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot if you remove them. You’ll have no insights into performance and no way to optimize your campaigns. So even if the ad pixels are the only things slowing your site down, do not remove them (unless they’re redundant or not being used).

5. Make your site mobile-friendly

You might be surprised by how many folks conduct their holiday shopping online while at work. Sometimes, it’s the only way they can do it without people around so as not to spoil the surprise. For others, it’s because they don’t have a computer at home large enough to really shop on.  And with many people still in the work-from-home phase, we’ll likely see an even higher percentage of users coming from mobile devices in 2020. So although it’s been “the year of mobile” for more than a decade now, it’s really important to make sure your site is mobile friendly this holiday season.

Dick's Sporting Goods' mobile speed score could definitely use some improvement before the 2020 holidays hit.

6. Give users a few ways to pay

The last thing any consumer wants to do is enter our credit card information over and over again for each online purchase. Maybe it’s the tedious nature of it or maybe it’s a privacy concern. Either way, let 2020 be the year you let users pay with PayPal, Apple Pay, or some other platform rather than needing to use a credit card at your store.

There are seriously tons of different payment options out there.

Most platforms easily allow these solutions to be added to your online or eccomerce site, and from a user perspective, it’s so much easier for me to click the PayPal logo, log in, and already have my payment and shipping information available instead of typing it in over and over again.

7. Share customer reviews

Despite what you see on Twitter or the news, when it comes to online shopping, people actually do care about what others think—especially what they think about your products, so play to your strengths here and make it a priority to showcase your online reviews—before and during this holiday season. Of course, you'll need to have a steady stream of them in the first place, but there are plenty of easy and organic ways to collect and ask for reviews.

Many sites have built-in review capabilities, like Dicks’ Sporting Goods above.

If you don’t have this feature or plugin for your website, there are solutions out there to make it possible. Companies like Trustpilot or others have lots of preset tools that allow you to easily integrate reviews into your website. This social proof can go a long way when users are trying to decide between two different products or solutions.

Note: For local businesses in particular, getting Google reviews will be crucial for your holiday marketing success. The quantity and quality of reviews on your Google Business Profile directly impacts your ranking in local results, so if you want to show up first on Maps and/or Search for the holiday shopper Googling stores near them, get your Google review game in gear.

8. Use real-life photos

Similar to customer reviews, I believe seeing products in action will be a big selling point online for the holidays this year. Typically, customers would go to retail stores in droves and buy up holiday gifts. But with many consumers still being cautious due to the ongoing pandemic, normally-high in-store holiday sales are likely going to be lower than ever.

But what is the real difference between buying something online and buying it in the store? There are two:

1. You get to take it home with you. To this point, we’ve already discussed real expectations for shipping, so let’s assume you’ve taken care of that.
2. They get to hold it.You can touch it, see how much it weights, flip it upside down, compare it to the next model, show it to someone else, and more.

The biggest impact on someone buying something in-store vs online? They get to hold it.

The tactile experience of being in the store is something we simply can’t overcome as online retailers. So what’s the next best thing?

Show them.

Give your customers all the real-world pictures they could want of a product.

The two images above are for the same thermos, but you get different information from each photo. The first is useful for seeing what the thermos looks like, but the second helps give you a reference point for its size and shows what it looks like in natural lighting. I think we all know the feeling of seeing something online, then being disappointed that it appears different when we get it in person. The bottom line is, good-quality, real-life photos can help you overcome that difference so your customers aren’t disappointed. For tips on producing high-quality product photos, check out this post.

Brumate takes this strategy even further by using a grid of Instagram user photos to showcase their products.

These images don’t have to be the only ones you use. The images with a white background certainly have their place, but in the year where we’re not as able to go hold things in a store, use your photos as a proxy for your customers and show them your products in the wild.

Focus on the online holiday shopping experience in 2020

If there has ever been a year to pay attention to your online shopping experience, this is the one. Don’t just think about things from your vantage point; think about the user experience and how you can make things simple, easy, comfortable, and pain-free for your customers and help them decide you’re the right vendor to work with this year. To wrap up, here is a full list the strategies I've covered in this 2020 holiday advertising guide:

1. Maintain product feeds
2. Use automation to promote sales
3. Be realistic with shipping expectations
4. Improve your site speed
5. Make your site mobile-friendly
6. Give customers a few ways to pay
7. Share customer reviews
8. Use real-life photos

And for more holiday marketing and advertising help, check out these posts:

• 6 Tips to Supercharge Your Holiday Marketing Campaigns
• 7 Ways to Boost Your Instagram Sales This Holiday Season
• 13 Ecommerce Holiday Marketing Tips to Implement Now!
• Our Top 10 Best Holiday Marketing Strategies EVER!

Successful companies know that sales promotions are among the most effective methods of increasing sales, boosting customer satisfaction, and heightening brand awareness. Sales promotions have been used for decades with great success and, no matter your industry or the size of your business, there are sales promotion techniques that can work for you too.

With so many ways to promote your business with or without money, there is no need to suffer from sluggish revenue. And I've written this guide to help you with exactly that. We're going to cover:

• The basics of sales promotions, deals, and offers.
• How your business (and customers) benefit from sales promotions.
• 15 different sales promotion ideas with real examples for each,

From classic percent-off discounts, to teacher-only specials, to joint promotions with complementary businesses, there's something in here for everyone. So read on if you're ready to learn how to attract and retain more customers to your small business through creative and attractive promotions.

What is a sales promotion?

A sales promotion is any undertaking by an organization designed to increase sales or encourage the use or trial of a product or service. Sales promotions take many different forms, but they all focus on persuading a target audience to become customers of a business.

Sales promotions can be announced over free channels like social media, email, or your website; or they can be the focal point of your paid advertising campaigns such as with LinkedIn ads or Google Ads. An effective sales promotion uses imagery, effective copy, and logic to appeal to the needs, values, and emotions of your target audience, and invites them to purchase your products or services with an incentivizing offer.

Why leverage deals and offers for your business?

At first, it might seem that offering promos and deals is a self-destructive behavior that shortchanges your business. That would be terrible…if it were true. In reality, though, your business benefits from sales promotions just as much as your customers:

• Minimize risk: A balanced approach to promotions minimizes risk to your company. In other words, so long as you’re not offering endless, outrageous deals that wouldn’t be sustainable for your business, your promos are likely to create win-win situations.
• Make a profit: The sense of urgency and desire created by short-term offers means that your sales can increase significantly. In fact, you could end up making more profit than you would if you were doing business as usual.
• Retain customers: You could think of sales promos as a long-term customer relations strategy.

Sales promotion ideas and examples to increase sales

To get you started with this worthwhile strategy, here are 15 sales promotion ideas, accompanied by real examples, and categorized by the business goals they can help you achieve. We'll cover promotions to increase sales, to encourage repeat business, and to boost brand awareness.

1. Google My Business offer posts

Did you know that you can run promotions on your Google business listing? Your Google My Business account dashboard allows you to create four different types of social posts: Offers, Updates, Events, and Products.

Using the "Add Offer" post type allows you to announce a deal or offering right on your Business Profile. This allows your promotion to reach customers who find your business on Google Maps and Search—which is often when they have the highest intent. In addition to boosting your conversions, a Google My Business promotion can also drive more traffic to your website.

For even more ways to use your verified Google Business Profile to promote your business, check out these 13 essential Google My Business optimizations.

Google My Business promotions allow you to reach customers who find your business on Google Maps and Search—which is often when they have the highest intent.

2. Free samples

Although many businesses temporarily suspended this promotion strategy for customers during COVID-19, it can still be referenced as one of the best sales promotion examples out there. By offering free samples to all in the store regardless of whether they purchase something, this strategy (employed by businesses like Costco and Whole Foods) introduces consumers to products they may not have considered before, and oftentimes cordially encourages them to buy.

Do you have a product that you’re trying to sell? Give out samples! While this works best with food (both in-store and at farmer's markets), it can also be used by spas and salons—with tester lotions, perfumes, or aromatherapy products. The bottom line is that people like things they can try before buying.

3. Buy one, get one free promotions

Buy one, get one free deals (aka BOGO) are among the most popular types of sales promotions. Offering two of an in-demand product at a reduced price and for a short time creates a sense of urgency that can boost sales. It can also clear stock, which is why, within business circles, BOGO promos are often referred to as “self-liquidating”.

The great thing is that these promotions rarely cost anything. In fact, they’re designed to increase revenue.

For example, let’s say you pay $3 for a product that you sell for $10. If you offer a 50% discount, you’d be making $2 from selling just one at the discounted price. However, running a BOGO discount means you can sell one item at full price minus your cost for two items so, in the end, you’d be earning $4. With more people buying that product as a result of your promo, your profits would soar.

The great thing is that these promotions rarely cost anything. In fact, they’re designed to increase revenue.

BOGO deals work with more than just product-based businesses; they also work for service-based businesses. Fitness studios, spas, salons, consultants, and trainers can offer BOGO deals on their classes or trainings to fill their schedules or get new clients during a slow season. Since service-based businesses are more time- than product value-related, the only cost is time. So especially if you have time to spare, this is a perfect promotion to try.

4. Cashback promotions

Many consumers would agree that it doesn’t feel as bad to spend money when you get some in return. It’s almost like paying less from the start and then having extra money to get other desirable products.

Plus, giving back to customers in this way usually results in more loyalty and business from them. This kind of offer is a win-win for both you and your customers.

5. Lifestyle discounts

Lifestyle discounts are those that apply to a particular profession, age group, or demographic.—usually one associated with an ID. They commonly available for:

• Teachers
• Students
• Veterans
• Seniors

While you can offer these promotions year-round, there are also months and days of the year dedicated to specific groups of people, so be sure to take advantage of that. For example, back to school discounts are great September promotions, while August is home to National Senior Citizen's Day. Keep an eye on your calendar for these monthly marketing themes so that you can plan your promos well in advance and maximize their results!

6. Flash sales and discounts

A flash sale creates a sense of urgency among your customer base to buy now. So especially if you have a business that does a lot of online sales, flash sales may be one of the more effective sales promotion strategies for you.

There are at least two ways to go about this type of sales promotion. One, you could do a flash sale once or twice a year. Or, two, you could do one on a set schedule each month so that people are anticipating the event and prepared to make purchases on short notice.

In either case, be sure to utilize social media and email marketing campaigns to announce when the sale will be happening. You can even create a fun branded hashtag to get your audience hyped to buy!

Sales promotions that encourage repeat business

Repeat business is often the best business. Your loyal customers are often the ones to spend the most on your offerings and will gladly spread the word about your products and services. 

7. Vouchers and coupons

You can offer vouchers and coupons via email, your website, or print materials such as product packaging, catalogs, and so on. They are a great way to thank your current customers and to encourage them to continue doing business with you.

One way to really get people excited about their next purchase with you is to offer a mystery coupon. Not only is it interactive, but it also makes customers feel as if they’re playing a game and getting more than just a run-of-the-mill discount.

If you do give this a try, be sure to capitalize on every opportunity with a multi-pronged campaign and strategically-crafted landing page. Even after they’ve clicked through to find out their discount, continue to advertise sale items or your most popular merchandise to further entice them to cash in on their coupon.

Too, you can make use of coupons to recover potential customers who’ve abandoned their carts. As of 2020, around 88% of online carts are abandoned. However, offering discounts to customers who may previously have only been window shopping may be the nudge they need to complete a purchase.

88% of online carts are abandoned, but offering promotions to your window shoppers just may be the nudge they need to complete a purchase.

8. Fairtrade, made in the USA, and cause-related promotions

Fair-trade and made in the USA promotions are sometimes more subtle but no less effective, and can help humanize your brand at the same time. The same goes for those that are linked to charitable causes. These aren’t often seen as promos. However, they are technically types of sales promotions and they can benefit the businesses selling them, charities, and those who participate.

This type of promotion works for businesses of any size. On the larger scale, for example, Apple and other major brands have gotten enthusiastic responses to their (RED)-branded products, which support HIV/AIDS programs in Africa.

Your business can make use of such identifiers and sales promotion strategies as well. After all, people seek out and loyally support businesses whose values align with their own. If something is important to you, it may very well be important to your customers too so use it! 

9. Free shipping and returns

In addition to coupons, which we discussed earlier, what’s another cure for a ton of abandoned shopping carts? Four words: Free shipping. Free returns. Free shipping eliminates one of the last obstacles that could prevent people from completing their orders. This is key because hesitation can be present even when a customer has done business with you before and likes what you offer.

On the other hand, free shipping eliminates the anticipation of the hassle that is paying for return shipping. By getting rid of both forms of friction, you can encourage more repeat purchases from your product-based business.

The best cure for a ton of abandoned shopping carts? Four words: Free shipping. Free returns.

10. Loyalty program promotions

Rewards and loyalty programs—even those that don’t necessarily pay off immediately—can be a powerful motivator for customers. Here are a few approaches you might consider.

You could double or triple loyalty points for a limited time, which can be a great incentive to buy. You might even offer a “lump sum” of points for signing up for your loyalty program, which could move customers to buy more than they would have initially.

Punch cards are also a well-known option, which makes customers eligible for a special offer after a certain number of purchases. Some businesses even offer a small discount every time customers use their cards.

This tactic, of course, keeps customers coming back for the rewards, but also ensures you’ll make enough cash to keep you in the green after providing discounts.

Sales promotion examples for boosting brand awareness

The more familiar your audience becomes with your brand, the more they will trust and look forward to your business's announcements and content. Let's take a look at some sales promotion ideas to build and strengthen your brand story.

11. Joint promotions

Whether your company owns several brands or you partner with companies in similar or related industries, you can make use of joint sales promotions. All you have to do is bundle products or services from each brand into a package and promote it via the other brand(s). Your partners can do the same for you, which means free promotion for both of you.

This type of arrangement can extend the reach of your brand. It familiarizes new potential customers with what you offer and increases the likelihood that they’ll convert in the future. The partnership between Red Robin and the X-Men Wolverine franchise is a fine example of a joint promotion.

Red Robin offered discounts to patrons who showed up for a burger with their Wolverine ticket stub in hand. While they may not have received a discount for the actual movie, the film benefitted from attracting people who were more excited about the burger at the end of the tunnel than the movie itself.

12. Social media contests and giveaways

A contest or giveaway on Facebook, Instagram, or your target audience’s social platform of choice is a great way to get new customers interested in your business and gain more quality followers.

For example, one common method is to require followers to tag a certain number of people in the comments, or post to their stories, to be entered to win.

If you can get your existing audience excited enough about your contest or giveaway, this is basically guaranteed exposure. And not only does it increase your business’s reach on social media, but it specifically increases awareness of your brand among your ideal customer base! This boosts the probability of meaningful engagement and sales in the future.

13. Shopping sprees

One of the most exciting in-store sales promotions you can do is an “enter to win” contest that gives the winner a shopping spree in your store.

Of course, you have to be careful not to leave too much merchandise up for grabs because that could end up costing you dearly. However, allowing for a generous shopping spree can prompt powerful word-of-mouth marketing.

No doubt, the winner will be excited to share their good news and, after the spree is finished, to show off their goods. This user-generated content can put your business on the radar of potential customers and encourage them to check out what you offer.

14. Give branded gifts or bundles

Additional value for less can be very enticing, so you may bundle together your most popular or closely-related services for a reduced price. This is an excellent way to get people talking about your business.

Alternatively, you can offer branded gifts to existing customers and others. The more loyal a supporter of your brand, the more often they’ll use your branded gifts. Who knows how many people will find out about, be reminded of, and check out your brand as a result?

Both bundles and branded gifts can spark a good deal of new interest in your business.

15. Referral discounts

Bringing new customers into the fold should always be on your radar. One way to keep the new customers rolling in is to offer discounts when current customers refer a friend or promote you on social media.

Alternatively, you could give money that can be put toward a customer’s next purchase. In either case, you’ll need to decide if the referral alone is enough or if the discount is only applied after the new customer makes a purchase. If you choose to offer a discount regardless of whether or not anything is purchased, try to place a threshold on the number of referrals required before the discount takes effect. For example, get 25% off your next visit if you make three referrals.

Which sales promotion ideas will you try?

Out of these 15 time-tested sales promotion examples and ideas we covered, which ones stood out to you? Can't remember all of them? Here's the full list:

1. Google My Business offer posts
2. Free samples
3. Buy one, get one free deals
4. Cashback promotions
5. Lifestyle discounts
6. Flash sales and discounts
7. Vouchers and coupons
8. Fairtrade, made in the USA, and cause-related promotions
9. Free shipping and returns
10. Loyalty program promotions
11. Joint promotions
12. Social media contests or giveaways
13. Shopping sprees
14. Branded gifts or bundles
15. Referral discounts

No doubt, there are at least a few you could implement and test at little to no cost to you. And the benefits of leveraging sales promotions can be well worth the effort, as we’ve discussed. So what's your goal? Increase your sales? Get more repeat business? Boost awareness of your brand? All of the above? Then it’s time to pick a sales promo idea and run with it!

With 2020 bringing us into uncharted territory as far as the economy goes, consumer behaviors and their buying habits have significantly shifted since the emergence of COVID-19. In August, eMarketer reported that they expect total retail sales to decilne by about 11% this year in the United States due to social distancing measures being in place, but that ecommerce will likely grow by as much as 18% by the end of the year.

With these predicted outcomes and with what we are already seeing in many of our own ecommerce social media advertising accounts, it's clear that it will be crucial for brands to leverage social media this holiday shopping season.

Image via Facebook

In this post, I'm going to cover eight tips, best practices, and strategies to help you maximize your holiday ecommerce advertising success this year—with a particular focus on two awesome social media advertising tools for ecommerce: Facebook Shops and Instagram Checkout.

The data behind social media and ecommerce holiday advertising success

It's not just paid social professionals who are claiming that social media will be the most important means of connecting with customers this 2020 holiday season. A combination of ecommerce predictions and conclusions from recent studies are backing this claim.

Forecasted social media buying behavior

A recent post by Salesforce on holiday 2020 predictions stated that "Social media will be the most important emerging platform for engaging with consumers." The following are some of their data-based predictions:

• Up to 30% of global retail sales will be made through digital channels this holiday season.
• 10% of mobile orders will take place on social media channels.
• As much as 15% of mobile orders will take place during peak shopping days, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Current social media buying behavior

Also, the current behavior of consumers helps make the case for ecommerce advertising on social media this holiday season. According to Salesforce's Snapshot Research Series data, 73% of Gen Z consumers have purchased on social media during the pandemic.

Image source

Radial, an omnichannel commerce technology platform, underscored Salesforce's predictions in a study conducted earlier this summer. Among 1,000 consumers surveyed in the United States about their 2020 holiday shopping plans, 66% reported that they will increase their online purchases this year, and 60% claimed that they plan to shop less in retail stores during the holiday season. In addition, the majority of these consumers said they planned to spend the same amount of money on gifts this year as they did last year.

66% of consumers have reported that they will increase their online purchases this year, and 60% claimed that they plan to shop less in retail stores during the holiday season.

It is with this data that we can feel pretty confident in investing our ecommerce advertising dollars into social media. As Salesforce puts it, "brands must break down the historical friction between inspiration and purchase.”

How to use paid social for ecommerce advertising success this holiday season

While these findings can be helpful as we strategize and launch our holiday shopping campaigns, we can't know for certain how or how much consumers will spend their money this season until after the fact. What we can do for certain is get prepared, be in stock, develop a holistic seasonal strategy, make sure our websites and apps work properly, and use social to amplify our reach, purchase volume, and revenue.

So how do you use paid social to enhance your holiday advertising success? If you work in ecommerce, you’re in luck because both Facebook and Instagram have launched new features this year to help advertisers better utilize their respective ecommerce capabilities. For Facebook, it's Shops and for Instagram it's Checkout; and with these exciting new tools, small businesses and big brands alike can create seamless online buying experiences using Facebook and Instagram audiences. In this section, I'll go over best practices, tips, and these new tools to help you drive more online sales this holiday season.

1. Prioritize mobile strategies 

According to Facebook’s Holiday Package report, since the beginning of the pandemic, an average of 72% of Gen Xers and 50% of Baby Boomers are spending more time on mobile as quarantines, shelter-in-place, and social distancing measures were enforced. These facts, paired with Salesforce’s forecast above that as much as 15% of mobile orders will be placed through social media channels this holiday season, translates to an increasing reliance on mobile-first ecommerce for consumers across varying demographics.

2. Optimize the user experience to prevent losing frustrated mobile shoppers

According to the Facebook Holiday Insights Report on last year's holiday trends, 82% of global shoppers reported user experience issues when shopping online during the holidays. In addition, 32% of Baby Boomers reported that font sizes were too small on their mobile devices; 25% of Millennials claimed that content did not fit on the screen; and over 25% of all consumers reported that images were not clear. As advertisers, we need to optimize our Facebook and Instagram campaigns accordingly by creating mobile experiences that align with the way users view our branded content.

3. Perform extra quality assurance checks to ensure engagement

These are easily avoidable issues. Detect and resolve them now and plan ahead this season, especially before we get to peak shopping days. When launching new Facebook and Instagram campaigns, take the time with your teams or your clients to perform quality checks on ad creatives and your landing pages—especially on mobile. The devil is in the details when it comes to creating effective, engaging social media ads. Focus on producing an optimal mobile experience so that you don’t leave money on the table that your competitors will surely grab.

As advertisers, we need to optimize our Facebook and Instagram campaigns accordingly by creating mobile experiences that align with the way users view our branded content.

4. Expand your ecommerce capabilities with Facebook Shops

Earlier this year in May, Facebook launched Facebook Shops, an ecommerce storefront, in an effort to help small businesses expand their ecommerce efforts. This was a very timely launch given the economic impact of COVID-19 on small businesses. With Shops, it is now easier for small businesses to adapt to selling more online and for their target audiences to discover and shop for the products they offer.

Image via Facebook

Facebook Shops gives brands the ability to create a mobile-first online store that resides on their Facebook Business Page and Instagram Profile, and is accessible to users across both platforms. Businesses can use it to upload their product catalogs that Facebook and Instagram users can easily browse to save or order products directly in the app.

5. Try Facebook Shops' design layouts

Then in July, Facebook added new design layouts for Facebook Shops so that brands could feature single products or groups of products. The latest update also includes new insights via Facebook’s Commerce Manager, allowing brands to measure the performance of their Facebook Shops.

Image via Facebook

6. Test out your Facebook Shop now, before the holidays hit

As we quickly approach the holiday season, brands should test out Facebook Shops beforehand to get a better understanding of how it works. They can then later use it to feature popular products that people may want to purchase for holiday gifts. This will help give your products more exposure across Facebook and Instagram and create more accessible online shopping opportunities for audiences.

7. Utilize Instagram Checkout to drive conversions

Instagram Checkout was launched over a year ago to a limited number of brand accounts. Since then, it has been slowly rolling out to others and has become one of the best strategies for ecommerce advertisers. Checkout makes it possible for users to purchase the brand’s products directly within the Instagram app, thus, creating a seamless and secure payment in-app option. With the heavy impact on businesses this year due to the pandemic, it was with great timing that Facebook announced in August that it was rolling out Instagram Checkout to all eligible United States-based business and creator accounts with a Shops integration – tying together the Shops experience with Checkout’s in-app purchasing capabilities.

Image via Instagram

If you have not yet done so, check out Instagram Checkout to drive more Instagram sales this holiday season. You can either open up a Shop with Checkout on Instagram by using their Commerce Manager, or, if you are already using a third-party platform like Shopify, you can easily integrate it with your account.

According to their own blog post on Checkout, enabling Checkout enables you to:

• Reduce friction in the path to purchase
• Tag your products in other creators' posts
• Gain access to additional ad products and signals
• Create product launch announcements
• Enable live shopping for your customers

8. Leverage Instagram waived selling fees 

In addition to opening up Checkout access to more brands in recent months, Instagram is also waiving its selling fees through the end of 2020 so that more brands, especially small businesses, can take advantage of the in-app purchasing feature. Regardless of your brand, if you are in the DTC space, the waived fee is also a major benefit and is worthwhile to leverage this holiday season as it can offer you the opportunity to create a seamless customer journey from product discovery to purchase with little implementation cost.

If you’re looking for some inspiration for your Checkout efforts or to see some examples in the wild, head over to your Instagram app and click the Discover tab and then click the Shop link.

With the surge of online sales that are to come this holiday season, come out ahead by optimizing your ads to create a seamless buying experience for your shoppers and shorten the gap between browsing and buying your products online— and Facebook and Instagram have the features to enable you to do just that.

I don’t know about you, but I am exhausted. Between juggling all of my personal and professional responsibilities while also trying to stay safe and healthy during a pandemic, every day feels like running a marathon. Have I run out of gel energy packs? Yep. Are my calves cramping up at mile 22? You betcha. Am I looking for anything and everything that could help me make it successfully to the finish line? Without a doubt.

We are all running our own daily marathons right now and we each have ways of coping with the constant barrage of obstacles and challenges along the way. Many of these coping strategies involve technology, and the same goes for marketing and advertising. In this post, I’m going to talk about one particular technology that can be, well, the energy gel packs your business needs to more effectively compete in the Google advertising race: automated bidding. You will learn:

• What automated bidding is, how it functions, and when it is best to use it.
• The key benefits of Google’s automated and Smart Bidding features.
• How WordStream Advisor’s new “Optimize Bids” alert can help you apply these strategies in a meaningful way.

What is automated bidding?

Google’s automated bidding strategies will not only do the heavy lifting of bid management for you but it will also help push those monthly, quarterly, or yearly KPIs across the finish line. Before sprinting towards how Google’s automated bidding strategies are going to help you smash your business’s “race,” however, let’s warm up and stretch with the basics.

Google Ads defines automated bidding as “a bid strategy that automatically sets bids for your ads based on that ad’s likelihood to result in a click or conversion. Each type of automated bid strategy is designed to help you achieve a specific goal for your business”.

Adapted from Google’s more comprehensive automated bidding breakdown.

Note: Enhanced CPC is not included in the above visual because it is not a fully automated bidding strategy.

Common uncertainties surrounding automated bidding

Google’s definition above sounds great, doesn’t it? Yet, some advertisers are wary to relinquish control of their bids to Google Ads. This is just one of many hesitations businesses have with using Google automated bidding. In the second part of our pre-race warm-up, we’re going to tackle other common uncertainties and questions.

1. Can a computer really handle my bidding?

The manual management of keyword bids is a tedious process. Constantly assessing the performance of your ads and keywords, deciding where adjustments need to be made, and then implementing those strategies is a full-time job in itself. As a task that is complicated for an individual to complete, it’s understandable that there would be hesitation in assuming a computer could do it—much less do it well. But as you’ll learn next and throughout this post, a computer can, in fact, identify and implement bid adjustments as effectively as a human can—in much less time.

2. Isn’t automated bidding new?

There is a common misconception that automated bidding is new to the world of online advertising—it’s not! Automated bidding can be traced back as far as 2010. For over ten years, Google, backed by all the immense resources it has at its disposal, has spent time assessing and perfecting the algorithms behind automated bidding. So it’s safe to say these algorithms are smart enough to pinpoint where bid adjustments should be made, execute optimizations, and deliver results—in a fraction of the time it would take you or me to do so.

3. Can automated bidding really increase my conversions?

The short answer: yes. Some of Google’s automated bidding strategies—such as Maximize Clicks to increase website visits, or Target Impression Share to improve visibility—are not  conversion-based. But Google’s Smart Bidding feature is. Released in 2016, Smart Bidding is Google’s approach to conversion-based bidding. Google’s Smart Bidding strategies are:

• Enhanced Cost Per Click
• Maximize Conversions
• Maximize Conversion Value
• Target CPA
• Target ROAS

Since their inception, these Smart Bidding strategies have undergone many iterations, making the machine learning that powers them as smart and impactful as ever.

4. What makes Smart Bidding so smart?

By understanding the primary factors or indicators that these algorithms take into consideration, we can gain a sense of just how smart this form of Google automated bidding is.

According to Google Ads, smart bidding optimizes for conversions or conversion values in every single auction—a process referred to as “auction-time bidding.”

Auction-time bidding

The machine learning behind these algorithms is computing data at an immense scale and lightning-fast speeds, all while factoring in a wide array of parameters. Google Ads refers to these parameters as “signals,” which are identifiable attributes about a person or their context at the time of any given auction. Some examples include:

• Device
• Physical Location & Location Intent
• Weekend & Time of Day
• Interface Language
• Browser
• Operating System
• Demographics (for display only)
• Product Attributes (for shopping only

And it doesn’t stop there! Smart Bidding can also optimize search bids based on the attribution model you have applied to your campaign(s).

To try and determine the precise algorithm that’s behind automated and Smart Bidding strategies is nearly impossible and something I’m going to leave up to the Googlers. But you get the idea—these algorithms reallyknow what they’re doing.

Is Google Ads automated bidding right for your business?

So we’ve tackled some of the uncertainties of running your race with auto-bid sneakers on, but you still might not be sure if it’s the winning strategy for your business.

As with any pre-race or warmup tactics, some are going to set you up for success while others may actually make the run more difficult. For example, actively stretching, shaking out your muscles, and making sure you’re hydrated are all good things to do before the beginning of a race. Eating a full English breakfast, staying up late, and wearing jeans on race day are, well, not good things to do.

Just like in racing, there are dos and don’ts to consider before applying automated bidding strategies to your Google Ads campaigns.

Automated bidding strategies may be right for your business if:

• You have conversion tracking in place.
• Your campaigns aren’t limited by budget.
• Your targeting isn’t too narrow.
• Your target performance metrics aren’t too aggressive.
• You have good campaign structure with coherent and relevant ad groups (which includes keywords and ads).

Automated bidding strategies may not work for you if:

• You aren’t tracking conversions.
• You have a limited budget to work with.
• You are targeting very narrow demographics, locations, etc.
• You are expecting results tomorrow (performance analysis for Smart Bidding strategies takes time).

Maximize Conversions is just one of the many automated bidding strategies in Google Ads.

If you set yourself up for success from the beginning, then you can start seeing meaningful results in a more timely manner. Work more efficiently while driving profitability; hit those PR’s*...I mean KPI’s you’ve been striving towards!

*Clearly getting carried away with the running metaphor...

The benefits of automated & Smart Bidding

Okay, so where are we now? Your morning alarm clock has gone off, you’re dressed, you’ve had coffee, and you settle into your first couple of tasks for the workday. Essentially, the start horn has gone off and you’re a few miles into your race. You’re up to speed on the dos and don’ts, you’re warmed up, and you’re eager to apply all your pre-race preparations—the preparations that are going to help combat fatigue and help you perform better during the miles ahead.

We’ve prepared by learning about Google’s automated and Smart Bidding strategies: what they are, how they function, and when best to use them. Now, how are they going to benefit you?

1. Unlock growth & reach your goals

At its most basic functionality, automated and Smart Bidding is designed to get more of the best prospects to your landing pages. Some of these bidding strategies will supply more traffic to your landing pages, while others may increase the quality of that traffic. Either result can be beneficial but at the end of the day, it’s dependent on your business’s goals. Implementing these bidding strategies will help you identify AND capitalize on new opportunities, all while your campaigns yield a greater ROI (return on investment).   

2. Improve your Google Ads Optimization Score

Your Optimization Score is an approximation (expressed as a percentage) of how well your Google Ads account is set up to function or perform. If your optimization score is 100% it means that your account is firing on all cylinders, so it’s an important metric to review!

Google Ads will provide recommendations for your account and campaigns which, when implemented, can boost your Optimization Score. Because automated and Smart Bidding strategies will improve the performance of your Google Ads campaigns, applying these strategies will positively contribute to your Optimization Score and drive more efficient account functionality. The proof is in the pudding—WordStream Advertisers with an Optimization Score greater than 75% on average see 3x better conversion rates!

3. Save time and energy

Giving up manual keyword bid management means that you are going to get time back in your day to allocate towards all the other tasks and responsibilities that may have been piling up (i.e. search query monitoring, ad copy improvements, landing page testing, and more).  Why slog through endless amounts of metrics and data, just to hopefully (fingers crossed) come up with the right decision for bid optimization, when automated and smart bidding strategies know what the right decision is in an instant? Let Google do what it does best, so you can get back to what YOU do best!

Smart(er) Bidding with WordStream

We’re nearing the end of the race—you can feel the excitement of the finish line ahead! It’s within reach! WordStream Advisor will carry you those final miles, towards the successful adoption of automated bidding strategies.

Through our Optimize Bids alert in the 20 Minute Work Week, WordStream Advisor can help you apply Smart Bidding strategies to the campaigns that will truly benefit from them.

How does the Optimize Bids alert work?

The Optimize Bids alert will analyze your Search campaigns, look for low performance, and provide a recommendation to apply the Maximize Conversion bidding strategy (if and only if it is warranted). A Search campaign is eligible for this recommendation if it is:

• Enabled (and not expired)
• On manual bidding (manual CPC or eCPC)
• Not using a portfolio or shared bidding strategy
• At least three months old
• Has conversion tracking in place (with conversions in the last 90 days). 

If you choose to apply the recommendation, the Alert Insights Monitor within the 20-Minute Work Week will track the performance of the new bidding strategy on the selected campaign. The Alert Insights Monitor will highlight campaign performance during two tracking periods:

1. The Learning Period*: a 15-day window during which Google will learn from the campaign/accounts historical performance and chart an optimal plan forward
2. The Optimization Period: a 30-day period after the Learning Period during which Google can apply the best strategies for the selected campaign

*Please note: The Learning Period is a crucial time during which Google’s algorithm is gathering data to understand the best ways to optimize the campaign’s bids to your conversion goal. Major changes made to a campaign while it’s in a learning period can cause the learning period to restart, further pushing out the time you start seeing true improvements! To help you avoid this, you’ll see a caution label on your campaign in the Manage section so you remember to leave it be.

Using the Optimize Bids alert to increase conversions

WordStream’s analytical team analyzed 204 campaigns [that applied the Maximize Conversions bidding strategy from the Optimize Bids alert] that had completed the Learning and Optimization Periods. Of those 204 campaigns:

• 70% of them saw an increase in conversions in the 30-day optimization period vs the 30 days before switching to Maximize Conversions.
• 80% of them saw a decrease in CPA after switching to the Maximize Conversions bidding strategy.
• The median percent change in conversions was 83%!

The data speaks for itself.

Let automated bidding be a contributor to your advertising success

My hope in taking you through this heavily metaphoric blog post was to highlight how the combined technology of Google Ads’ automated and Smart Bidding strategies with WordStream Advisor can aid you in the daily management of your paid ad accounts. Bit by bit, mile by mile, I think we’ve accomplished that together.

Technology is a partner chosen—both consciously and unconsciously—as a tool to help make our lives/jobs/tasks easier and to help improve our output or performance. As digital marketers, we know that technology, and the effective use of it, helps businesses grow. Leveraging the technology available in online advertising is going to help you manage your accounts more effectively, improve campaign performance, and optimize the KPIs that matter to your business.

We’re all tired—every day we finish one race just to wake up and run another. But if we bring strategies to the start line that will make us more efficient along the way...we can keep running, we can keep moving forward, and we can keep accomplishing our goals. I’ll see ya at the finish!

Ah, November. Summer is long gone, it feels like fall has only just begun, and yet winter vibes are is starting to trickle in—sort of like guests that arrive before your party starts and you're kind of annoyed because you're not quite ready. But I like the definition below:

So, in the name of new adventures and exciting risks, let's talk about some unique and simple ways to generate interest, build brand awareness, and attract more customers to your business this November. In this post, I'm going to provide you with 

• November themes and awareness causes you can use as appealing focal points of your marketing promotions.
• Promotion, blog content, and social media ideas to celebrate the major November holidays.
• Simple and meaningful ways to connect with your audience through the lesser-known observances in November.

Coming up with marketing ideas can be a challenge, especially as you're running the day-to-day of your business (and preparing for the holiday mayhem). But this post will give you the inspiration and creative spark you need to find easy ways to connet with more customers this November.

Meaningful marketing ideas based on November themes and causes

Thanksgiving and gratitude (and perhaps Black Friday greed) are not the only themes of November. This crisp and cool month is home to a number of awareness causes:

We won't cover every single one in this post, but that doesn't mean you can't use them as a launchpad for your creative marketing efforts. Here are some awareness-based marketing ideas for your small business this November.

1. Raise lung cancer awareness

These ideas can also apply to peacreatic cancer, epilepsy, diabetes, and any other health conditions recognized in November. One of the best ways to show your support is to sign your team up for a fundraising activity—a walk, a farmer's market, a virtual race, etc. This gets you out in your local community which strengthens the roots of your business.

There are also ways to show support depending on your vertical. For example, caterers can show photos from fundraiser events:

Health-related businesses can share news articles, educational posts, or survivor stories:

Artists can showcase awareness-inspired work to show their support:

2. Honor military families

For Military Family Month, give a shoutout on social media to your employees and their families who were or are currently active in the military. You could also offer sales promotions and discounts off of products, services, and packages for military families, as shown with this ski lodge example below:

3. Celebrate entrepreneurship

For those in the business services vertical, run an educational series in honor of National Entrepreneurship Month— with webinars, online guides, or live Q&A sessions on Instagram or Facebook for those looking to start or grow their business.

If you are an entrepreneur yourself, share the story of how you came to be—including the hardships you faced and how you got through them. If it's compelling enough, pitch the story to your local newspaper as a way to get some PR while also inspiring your local community. 

Even if your audience does not include entrepreneurs, you can still create content around entrepreneurial themes such as goal setting, persisting through challenges, leadership, being unafraid to fail, and the list goes on.

You could even interview an entrepreneur in your field or a related one. Many of the lessons in entrepreneurship can be applied to life in general, so your audience will come away with plenty of wisdom and inspiration. Exhibit A:

Source

4. Support Movember

While June is men's health awareness month, Movember, or No-Shave November, is a movement where men grow out their mustache until the end of the month to raise awareness and donations for men’s health issues. Participants can sign up here. Some businesses run Movember competitions between employees or among customers. Movember is a fun way to host contests or, if you're into it, showcase your facial hair, for men’s health on social media. Get involved in the chatter on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Here are some ways to incorporate Movember into your social media content:

• Post a picture of your team members (or yourself!) sporting a Movember mustache.
• Participate in a Movember charity event and share photos to your account.
• Get a little contest going, or even an official giveaway.
• Donate a portion of your proceeds to the Movember Foundation
• Of course, don't forget to use the #movember hashtag

5. Update your Google Business Profile for November

This is important for any month of the year, but especially in November because of Small Business Saturday (which we'll get to later in this post).

Thanks to Google My Business, consumers can get the information they need to engage with your business directly on the SERP without even having to visit your website. This is why it’s crucial to have a complete and verified Google business listing.

By communicating your products, services, hours, and location to Google, Google can then know which searches to rank you for; and by keeping your profile and active (such as by updating it, collecting reviews, and answering FAQs), Google can feel more confident in ranking you higher and for more searches. Here are some things you can do to optimize your Google Business Profile for Small Business Saturday and November in general:

• Provide your Thanksgiving Hours.
• Upload pictures of any November- or Thankgiving-themed products or services.
• Create Google posts about Thanksgiving, Black Friday, or Small Business Saturday promotions,
• Ask and answer questions related to visiting your store, especially if you expect more traffic on Small Business Saturday.

6. Say farewell to daylight saving time (#fallback)

Daylight saving time ends in November. This means you get an extra hour of sleep one night (cool), more sunlight in the morning (nice), but also that dark and cold afternoons are ahead (womp). That said, acknowledge this the end of daylight saving time with a positive outlook—highlight the fall foliage in your social media posts; showcase bright, fall-colored products on your homepage; or aim for the warm and cozy vibes like this buiness below:

As many consumers are heading into cool weather and more time at home, promote products or services that will make their indoor experience meaningful.

On the other hand, perhaps you and your audience prefer to stay in denial and hang on to summer for as long as you possibly can. Is it too late for summer clearance sales? Yes—don't do that. But could you pull off an an outdoor product clearance sale? Surely.

Encourage your summer-loving customers to get something for next year—something to look forward to and carry them through the winter like Allmodern does below:

Of course, you can always do a simple #fallback post on social media, reminding your followers to turn the clocks back.

Alright, we've covered a handful of marketing ideas for month-long themes in November; now let's take a look at the major November holidays.

Effective and creative November holiday-based marketing ideas

The many observance days in November, but here are the main holidays:

• Veterans Day
• Thanksgiving
• Black Friday
• Small Business Saturday
• Cyber Monday

Shall we run through some easy marketing ideas you can try out in the midst of running your business?

7. Give thanks (duh)

Thanksgiving is a time to appreciate your family, friends, and of course, your customers. Take the time to express your appreciation and gratitude, and be specific! Let others know exactly what you are grateful for about them to show that they matter as individuals. This will also give your social media posts a truly genuine and heart-felt feel.

8. Give back to the community

As you give back to the community in any Thanksgiving charity runs, food drives, or fundraising events, encourage your customers, local audience, and social media followers to do the same.

9. Offer Thanksgiving specials and advice

Promote products and services at your business particularly useful for Thanksgiving, such as cooking classes for great Thanksgiving side dishes or an after-Thanksgiving bootcamp class. Your pet grooming or boarding business can write a blog post on Thanksgiving foods that can be toxic to pets. The opportunities here are endless, just be sure that your content is high-quality and preferrably, SEO-friendly.

10. Demonstrate respect on Veterans Day

Vereran’s Day occurs every November 11th, and on this day, schools may have off and many workplaces are closed. While this is often a time used for sales and promos, your priority should be that of thanking veterans for their hard work and sacrifice for our country. If you have a veteran who works for you or who lives in your community, showcase them on your blog or website. A simple “thank you” goes a long way and let’s customers know that you care about people, not just sales.

This doesn't mean you should abandon sales altogether. There are still great ways to promote your business in a way that supports US veterans. You could offer a discount to those who have served, donate a proceed of your November profits to veteran organizations, or even run a giveaway.

The company below hosted a free pop-up concert with a trio of vintage-inspired female singers in honor of Veterans Day. In addition to celebrating veterans, this event also supports National Aviation Month at the same (crushed it).

If your business is owned by a veteran, you can also add a badge to your Google Business Profile to let others know. 

11. Run promotions on Black Friday

If you’re not running a promotion on Black Friday, you need to! People wait year-round for the incredible deals that await them the day after Thanksgiving, and this is a great opportunity to get your business on the map. Start promoting of your Black Friday deals at the beginning of the month so customers will be ready when the day arrives.

You could even create a Facebook event for your Black Friday specials, where you can post updates and reminders and where followers can invite their friends and add it to their calendars.

12. Promote your (and other) businesses on Small Business Saturday

What November marketing ideas post would be complete without a #SBS section? This is perhaps the best time of year to get your small business noticed, bring back dormant customers, and attract new ones.

Here's what you can do for SBS:

• Register your business register your business through the official American Express site 
• Highlight your best products and most attractive sales promotions over email, social media, your website, and in-store signage. 
• Check out these Small Business Saturday Promotion Ideas
• You may also want to do a partnership with another local business, create and share a gift guide, or host a sidewalk sale. Remember to thank your customers for their support, and remind them of the importance of shopping small!

At some point, however, take a break from self-promotion and lift up other small business owners who have given it their all to make their company a success and a staple in their community.

13. Take part in Cyber Monday

And the sales never end! Prep for Cyber Monday and choose a few promotions to run on this day. If you don’t have a website (something we should talk about, ehemm), you can still run a Cyber Monday promo using your social media accounts or even paid social strategies.

One idea is to run a raffle or offer a special deal to the first ten customers who directly message you on Facebook. Or, take another break from all the sales mayhem and post a video of what it’s like to be an Amazon employee on Cyber Monday…yikes.

Unique and relevant November observance day marketing strategies

Aside from the main holidays in November, there are tons of awesome observance days that make for great local marketing opportunities. Let's take a look.

14. Celebrate Women’s Entrepreneurship Day

Women’s Entrepreneurship Day occurs every November 19. On this day, post some compelling stats about female entrepreneurs or women in business to your Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn pages. If you are a female entrepreneur yourself, share some tips and tricks of your trade as with this awesome post below:

If you attend a female entrepreneurship event, post photos on LinkedIn and elsewhere, and even post reflections and insights throughout the day. 

If you are not a female entrepreneur, you can certainly highlight one in your community or network. If you don't know one, find one! 

15. Participate in World Kindness Day

As Mark Twain said, "Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see." Kindness is a universal language indeed. Participate by doing an act of kindness and encouraging your followers to the same. Your act of kindness could be in the real world such as by helping out a stranger in need or volunteering locally; or online via an Instagram giveaway or a posiitve quote from a famous philanthropist. World Kindness Day is celebrated each year on November 13th.

The company below chose to participate by beig kind to the earth:

Sherwin-Williams engaged their audience by asking which acts of kindness have impacted their careers and creating a video of the feedback:

16. Go the extra mile on Extra Mile Day

This observance day is perfect for small businesses which, unlike big businesses, can truly cater to individual customers.  is all about taking that additional step to help others with something or even to accomplish one's own goals. 

Challenge your Instagram followers to help their neighbor in need, to finish that book they’ve been reading, or even just to wake up one hour earlier. Going the extra mile is something we can all fit into our daily routine and is a great November holiday for connecting with your audience. Extra Mile Day is recognized annually on November 1st.

You also don't have to only go the extra mile for people; the environment will take some special treatment too!

17. Share your support for America Recycles Day 

America Recycles Day is a great day for showing that your small business cares about the environment. Include some facts on your social media, share what steps your business is taking to improve the environment, or provide suggestions on your blog on how to recycle.

Other ideas for this important day include offering a discount on bulk-size items, promoting your sustainable products, raising awareness on social media about the importance of recycling, or participating in or even host a recycling drive.

You could also make a video instructing your followers how to recycle your products or items in general, like Coca Cola did in the example below:

Keep in mind also that a business conscious of the planet is likely to be conscious of its customers. 

18. Embrace the outdoors with Take a Hike Day

This is a perfect day for feel-good quotes and to encourage people to get outside for a stroll in the great outdoors. Ask followers to share their nature photos and favorite spots to take a hike.

There are tons of ideas and examples in this post, but the best part is that it's just a tip of the iceberg in terms of  November marketing strategies. Model off of the ones in this post or use them as a launchpad for your own spinoff ideas. The key is to stay true to your brand voice—that's what your customers want!

For other monthly themed marketing ideas, check out:

• 17 Free and Creatve September Marketing Strategies
• 21 Free and Effective Ways to Market Your Business in October

It’s no secret: content has long reigned king on the frontier of search engine optimization. To get organic traffic, you need web pages. Those pages need to rank for a diverse set of voluminous keywords. If you can solicit (or naturally earn) authoritative inbound links to those pages, all the better. You’re well on your way to setting your site up for organic success.

But what about the technical side of SEO? 

Performance (site speed), 404s, orphan pages, mobile UX, HTTPS, link structure—just how big a role do these elements play in getting on page one of the search results?

They've always played a role, but that role is expected to get much bigger when Google’s new page experience update fully roles out in 2021. This update integrates a new set of metrics known as Core Web Vitals into what Google has traditionally referred to as “page experience.”

So what does this all mean and how will it affect you? Read on, because this post will:

• Explain and define each of the three Core Web Vitals.
• Clarify exactly what the page experience update is and when it will happen.
• Cover its foreseeable implications and tell you how you can prepare.

This algorithm update is sure to have a significant impact on search results, so it's important to equip yourself with the knowledge and tools to maintain strong SEO for your business.

What exactly are Core Web Vitals?

In order to understand Google’s latest algorithm update, it’s important to first understand Core Web Vitals. You can think of Core Web Vitals, which Google introduced back in May 2020, as the baseline requirements for a site’s technical health. Google defines Core Web Vitals as follows:

"A set of real-world, user-centered metrics that quantify key aspects of the user experience. [Core Web Vitals] measure dimensions of web usability such as load time, interactivity, and the stability of content as it loads (so you don’t accidentally tap that button when it shifts under your finger—how annoying!)."

To the layperson, you can think of Core Web Vitals as indicators Google uses to evaluate the UX (user experience) of a page. Each Core Web Vital has a technical name, but in the diagram below, you can see that they represent the page's loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability:

This particular page experience update represents an important shift in SEO. Google has traditionally been tight-lipped about algorithm updates and exactly how they impact search results; but here—in what is surely an effort to increase transparency (important in today’s climate, and something Google has harped on improving for some time now)—they are giving us an exact roadmap to follow to optimize for a coming algorithm update.

Google’s Core Web Vitals are as follows:

• Largest Contentful Paint (loading): measures perceived load speed and marks the point in the page load timeline when the page's main content has likely loaded.
• First Input Delay (interactivity): measures responsiveness and quantifies the experience users feel when trying to first interact with the page.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (stability): measures visual stability and quantifies the amount of unexpected layout shift of visible page content.

In a nutshell, these three metrics measure how long it takes a user to get to your page, how easy/difficult it is for the user to initially interact with your page, and how easy/difficult it is for the user to become disoriented due to inconsistencies/shifts in your page design.

In a nutshell, Core Web Vitals measure how long it takes a user to get to your page, how easy it is for them to interact with it, and how easy it is to become disoriented due to inconsistencies in its design.

Google has also, importantly, added a Core Web Vitals report in Search Console. Head to this tab in Search Console, and you can get a bird's eye view of just how many pages on your site are “good,” how many are “poor,” and how many “need improvement.”

Click into the “poor” or “need improvement” segments, and Google will tell you exactly what’s wrong with your page: be it an LCP, FID, or CLS-specific issue:

From there, just as you can validate crawl fixes, server error fixes, and 404 fixes via the Coverage report, you can now validate fixes to your Core Web Vitals on a page-by-page or bulk basis:

Google has included the same roadmap within all PageSpeed Insights reports. Enter your page URL, and Google will tell you whether or not that specific page meets the requirements for healthy Core Web Vitals:

This is a fairly landmark shift in the way Google diagnoses and reports on page experience. It’s also a landmark shift in the ability of business owners to remedy the technical shortcomings on their site that impact UX.

Incorporating technical performance into its search algorithm is nothing new for Google—we’ve seen it in the past with Mobilegeddon (when mobile-friendliness became a ranking factor) and the Speed Update (when mobile speed became a ranking factor). But the page experience update, which Google announced in May, seems like another animal altogether.

This is a not only a landmark shift in page experience, but also in the ability of business owners to remedy the technical shortcomings on their site that impact user experience.

Note: for more help with technical SEO, head to our post on how to do a technical SEO audit.

What is the Google page experience update?

The page experience update, per Google, is “a new signal that combines Core Web Vitals with our existing signals for page experience to provide a holistic picture of the quality of a user’s experience on a web page.”

We’ve gone over Core Web Vitals. The “existing signals for page experience” Google’s talking about here are the following: mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines.

Combined, that gives us seven search signals that, together, make up Google’s new understanding of Page Experience.

When will the page experience update happen?

Here’s what Google has to say about the Page Experience rollout:

“We recognize many site owners are rightfully placing their focus on responding to the effects of COVID-19. The ranking changes described in this post will not happen before next year, and we will provide at least six months notice before they’re rolled out. We're providing the tools now to get you started (and because site owners have consistently requested to know about ranking changes as early as possible), but there is no immediate need to take action.”

As of this writing (October 2020), Google still has not yet given that 6-month notice. So that “no immediate need to take action” clause still stands. Barring something unforeseen, we are looking at Spring 2021 as the earliest date this update could be rolled out to the general public.

Barring something unforeseen, we are looking at Spring 2021 as the earliest date this update could be rolled out to the general public.

That said: if you’re looking in your Core Web Vitals report right now and seeing more than a few “bad” or “needs improvement” URLs, you have some work to do. Optimizing page experience while retaining content value is not always easy. Because while rich content and useful content aren’t exactly synonymous, you have a better chance of engaging a user if your content is immersive and contextually deep. And site speed be damned, pages with 1KB cat gifs are always more engaging than those without.

Implications: how do I prepare my site for the page experience update?

One implication of the page experience update that, if you’re a business owner, probably will not affect you, is the impact to Top Stories. Publishers covet Top Stories. They are the featured snippet of the news world.

So if you are the Boston Globe or the WSJ or even just a local news outlet, you should get cranking on that Core Web Vitals report ASAP. Google has called out Top Stories specifically as a feature that will be impacted by the page experience update.

For local service businesses, online retailers, SaaS companies, and the rest, my recommendation is to take this update seriously. That said, the top three ways, bar none, to reap the splendors of search engine optimization have not changed. They are:

1. Make good content.
2. Make content that is good.
3. Content. Make it. Make it good.

Take it from Google:

“While all of the components of page experience are important, we will prioritize pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are subpar. A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content.”

“A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content.” -Google

Technical considerations have always played a role in determining search rank; and in that regard, the page experience update is not unique. It’s why industry stalwarts like Glenn Gabe are rightfully asking whether or not this update will “have teeth.” There’s no way of knowing just how great the impact will be; and if you’re a site with poor-to-middling mobile UX and/or site speed that is still consistently ranking on page one of the search results, it’s easy to think that you can get away with poor Web Vitals if you continue to churn out really good content.

But ask yourself: is it worth taking that chance? Could there be anything worse than waking up on a beautiful spring morning and seeing that your website traffic fell off a cliff overnight?

Good SEO is—as local legend and noted SEO aficionado Tom Brady preaches in his method—preventative, not reactive.

Take the time to dive into the Core Web Vitals report today. Open up PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and the like, and dive into the elements that are impacting on-page UX and performance.

All things considered...how much “teeth” will the page experience update really have?

To me, there are two things about this update that make it clear it will have a more profound impact on the SERP than any of the prior technically-geared algorithm updates:

1. By the time Google officially rolls out the page experience update, it will have been close to a year (maybe longer!) since they announced it.
2. Google has deliberately created a set of metrics and reports to give SEOs, webmasters, and business owners alike the tangible actions needed to restore their Core Web Vitals and maintain their SEO value.

The skeptic might say Google is cleverly hedging against blowback in the name of transparency. But really—who can say this is not transparent? SEOs: when this one finally drops, if your traffic takes a hit, don’t take to the forums and article comment sections to voice your displeasure. It’s October of 2020 and Google is making good on their promise of transparency. That’s something we should all capitalize on.

With it being more than halfway through October, ideally, you're already well into planning your 2020 holiday advertising strategy—but don't worry if you're not. Delays happen, pandemics hit, and there are always last-minute pushes needed to ensure success. What you should worry about is whether YouTube is part of your 2020 holiday paid media mix.

Given the explosive growth of YouTube watch time due to the coronavirus lifestyle changes, you can feel pretty confident that video ads will help you drive more purchases this holiday season. Even better, I'm going to share with you four strategies I have used in the past to make my spend towards holiday YouTube video ad campaigns worth it. They include:

1. Shopping campaigns
2. Sitelink extensions
3. Call-to-action extensions
4. Lead form ads (yes, lead form ads).

For each strategy, I'll cover how and when to use it, as well as any potential disadvantages to consider. So let's jump right in so you can get to work with testing and optimizing.

4 YouTube video ad strategies to drive more sales during the holidays

I have preached so many times how YouTube is great for building brand awareness. While I am not backing away from that statement in any way, awareness is probably not your main goal around Black Friday or Cyber Monday. When it comes to holiday advertising, you want people to buy. Whether you are an ecommerce business, a brick-and-mortar shop, or a combination of both, here are the best ways you can encourage users to purchase your products with your YouTube video ads this holiday season.

1. YouTube shopping campaigns 

In YouTube advertising, there is a campaign subtype called “YouTube shopping campaigns.” If you are running a TrueView in-stream campaign with a campaign goal of Product and Brand Awareness, you can show up to six additional products next to your YouTube video ad while it is playing. Even if the viewer decides to skip the video ad, your products will still be visible in case the user wants to learn more about each product.

Even if a viewer skips your YouTube shopping ad, your products will still be visible to the right in case they decide to learn more.

The products are available because this campaign type requires you to link one of your product feeds from Google Merchant Center.

How to select products for YouTube Shopping campaigns

There are three ways to select products for the YouTube Shopping campaign subtype.

Option one

The first option is to use “All products.” This option might be for you if you have a smaller total SKU count, or if your video creative is generic and doesn't really call out any products (very common for so many holiday feel-good ads).

Option two

If you want something more specific, the second way you can select products is to manually choose which ones you want to show up.

While only six products can show up alongside the video ad, advertisers can still select up to ten products. If you do select more than six products, you do not have the ability to choose which ones will show up, but the reason for selecting ten is to cover you in case any of your products go out of stock. Out of stock products will not show up in the ads, but will reappear once your product feed is updated with new inventory. This product selection option makes the most sense if your video product calls out any specific SKUs. If people like what they see in the video, give them an option to go to the product's page and buy it!

While YouTube shopping campaign ads only show six products at a time, you can select up to ten products to cover you in case any products go out of stock.

Option three

The third product selection option you can use is with custom labels. These are the same custom labels you can create in your product feeds. If you have “Black Friday” or “Cyber Monday” labels for select products, you can make sure only those products show up. This works incredibly well if you have special holiday deals creative to help push the products you have chosen to be part of the sale.

What you should know about YouTube shopping campaigns

If you are crunched for time, TrueView for Shopping may provide some roadblocks. Products are chosen at the campaign level. That means you will have to create several different campaigns if you want to do any extensive product testing with your video campaigns. Another disadvantage is that this subtype is still not available in Google Ads Editor. I do not want to deter anyone from trying this campaign out because I have seen great results from this ad format, but it sometimes can be a little time-consuming to set up a robust TrueView for Shopping strategy.

Google Shopping campaigns are not available in the Google Ads Editor, so this campaign subtype is often more time-consuming.

2. YouTube sitelink extensions

If, for whatever reason, you are not able to set up a TrueView for Shopping campaign, you can still drive traffic to sale or product pages with sitelink extensions. Yes, sitelink extensions in Google Ads are also available for video campaigns.

To use sitelinks with your TrueView in-stream ads, you need to be running a TrueView for Action campaign. This just means making sure you select one of the following campaign goals: Sales, Leads, or Website Traffic.You will need to have at least two sitelinks added to the campaign to have them show up with the video ad, but you can add up to four sitelinks total. Here's Google's mockup of a YouTube video ad using sitelink extensions:

Sitelink extension mockup source: Google

What you should know about sitelink extensions

There are few things to know about sitelink extensions in video ads. Sitelink extensions are only available at the campaign level, for video campaigns using Google video partners, and also for mobile devices only.

Also, you can choose sitelinks that are already set up in your account, but make sure the sitelinks you choose for your video campaigns do not get cut off. Depending on what you are promoting, also make sure your messaging and the landing page you are sending users to are optimized for the mobile experience.

Sitelink extensions for video ads are available for mobile ads only, so make sure your sitelinks do not get cut off and that the messaging and landing page are both optimized for mobile devices.

3. YouTube call-to-action extensions

A call-to-action extension is the easiest, most common action-focused feature you can add to your YouTube ads (which is also why I recommended it in my YouTube advertising during COVID-19 tips). These are available for almost every campaign type using TrueView in-stream ads.

A call-to-action extension will temporarily appear on the video while the ad is being played. Whether the viewer skips the video or watches the entire thing, a second call-to-action extension will always stay in the upper, righthand corner of the page until the viewer watches another video or goes to a different page.

What makes call-to-action extensions the easiest way to drive more traffic to your website is that they are accessible during the ad creation process. This makes testing out a variety of call-to-action extensions pretty easy, even if you have minimal ad creative for the holidays.

Call-to-action extensions are available for almost every campaign type using TrueView in-stream ads, and the CTA is easily testable.

Here is just one example of what I mean:

Besides testing out the video in your ads, you can also try and see which messaging in your extensions will help drive higher click-through-rates from your ads. In the example above (these are fake ads. I have never worked with Blizzard Entertainment), we could test two different headlines and call-to-action messages while the creative stays the same. Will a “Shop Now” button encourage buyers to click, or will "Ends Soon" make a bigger impact? You won’t know until you test it out.

What you should know about call-to-action extensions

A possible setback you may run into is the character length for both the headline and the call to action. For the headline, we only get ten characters for the call-to-action text and only fifteen characters for the extension’s headline. Sometimes you need to get clever, but in my opinion, sometimes just getting to the point is the best way.

There are character limits for both the headline and CTA for call-to-action extensions, so you may need to get clever.

4. YouTube lead form ads

You’re probably thinking, “Lead gen forms? For the holidays?! I do not want leads. I want sales!”

I completely understand, but I have used YouTube lead gen forms for ecommerce accounts on a few occasions. I will admit this is more of a top-of-funnel approach but stick with me. You might want to use this option in your holiday 2020 advertising.

With this feature, you can collect your video ad viewers’ information directly from the ad itself.

And while the image above shows many of the form field options you can select for your form, I have used just name and email fields for a few of my ecommerce clients. The goal with this strategy is to help build your email database. I recommend that you present this form with an enticing message, such as:

“Want all the best deals for this holiday season? Newsletter subscribers get notified first.”

Then, ask for the bare minimum in your form to make it as easy for the user as possible (because consumers go to YouTube to watch videos, not fill out forms).

YouTube lead form ads allow you to collect your viewers' information (and therefore build your email list) directly from the ad.

After a viewer signs up, you can then encourage them to go to your website or a specific landing page. This can help drive even more traffic after you get their information. You can then rely on your stellar email nurture strategy to get the user to come back later on. Two strategies working together in the spirit of the holidays. Awwwwww.

What you should know about YouTube lead form ads

As with the first two holiday video ad strategies (shopping campaigns and sitelink extensions), lead form ads are also only available for advertisers running TrueView campaigns—TrueView for Action campaigns, specifically.

Also, YouTube lead form ads are still in beta in many accounts. You may have to reach out to your Google reps to gain access.

As YouTube lead form ads are still in beta in many accounts, you may have to reach out to your Google rep to gain access.

Test and combine these video ad strategies to hit your holiday targets

Not all of your sitelink extensions may show up depending on how many you have selected, and some will only be available on mobile devices. Lead gen forms will not show up every time to a user. TrueView for Shopping does not allow sitelink extensions or lead gen forms. The point is, you cannot leverage all of the powerful features talked about in this post in one campaign. You will have to test out a few different campaign types and subtypes to cover everything we went over and identify the best strategies for your holiday sales goals.

You cannot leverage all of these YouTube ad features in one campaign. You will have to test them out with a few different campaign types and subtypes to identify what's best for your holiday sales goals.

Even if only one or two features in this post are applicable to your business, be sure to keep testing in mind. I understand the holidays might mean limited campaign runs. But with the reach of YouTube, you usually can get insights pretty quick on which pieces of your ads are working and which ones are not. Now that you are equipped with the tools for more profitable YouTube advertising this holiday season, it's time to get to work with testing and optimizing. Good luck and enjoy the season.

If someone asked you what your business does, would you be able to describe it accurately in a concise, compelling manner?

Better yet: would your description inspire a potential customer to want to learn more about what you have to offer?

Even further, suppose multiple people wanted that description in writing—sales team members, potential customers, existing customers who want to refer you?

That scenario is a problem for lots of organizations. Who you are, what you provide, why you're so awesome—it's all immediately and perfefctly clear in your head, but how do you create that snapshot in someone else's head? Fortunately, there is a solution. I’m talking about the trusty marketing one-pager (aka a one-sheet or sell sheet). In this post, I'm going to cover

• What a one-pager is (and what it is not), and why it is essential for marketing.
• The core elements you need when writing a one-sheet (with copy suggestions).
• Real examples of marketing one-pagers to help you visualize and gain some inspiration.

I'll also provide some tools and resources that can help you bring a great one-pager to life for your business. So let's get started.

What is a marketing one-pager?

As you may have deduced, it’s a single page that distills down what your company does and for whom. (It can also be a single page about what a product or service does for specific target markets.)

Think of the one-sheet as what’s commonly called an elevator speech or pitch. The name suggests that your marketing message should be delivered in the time span of an elevator ride. Its general purpose is to intrigue the listener enough to want to hear the entire value proposition in the near future.

Its general purpose is to intrigue the listener enough to want to hear the entire proposition in the near future.

The noticeable difference with a marketing one-sheet is that it's in written format and is portable: it can be emailed, shared on social media, downloaded, printed out and mailed, and so forth.

One-pager example source

So while your homepage might have a lot of the core information about your business, it's designed to send visitors out to its other pages, where they can get a holistic view of your business. With a one-pager, you present a full snapshot of your business in, well, one page.

An effective marketing one-pager quickly orients the reader to the value of your business, whether the reader is a customer, investor, potential partner, etc. Its overarching benefit is that it provides the clear, concise, benefits-driven communication that people desire when learning about a business.

The overarching benefit of a one-sheeter: It forces clear, concise, benefits-driven communication.

Do I need a marketing one pager?

Aside from the scenario above, the one-pager is becoming a necessity in companies’ and individuals’ marketing toolkits. In fact, concise content is #4 in Marketing Insider Group's list of 12 content marketing trends now and for the foreseeable future  

So, the one-sheet, once the thing companies stacked on waiting room tables and the go-to “leave behind” of sales reps on face-to-face visits, is coming back into vogue. And it’s doing so precisely because of its brevity. Moreover, it has tangible marketing value: It narrows your prospect’s focus (amid all the distractions of today), which bolsters your engagement chances.

So the answer to the above question? Yes, you need a marketing one-pager, to:

• Provide a clear snapshot of your business in a noisy and content-saturated world.
• Align with current consumer behaviors and attention spans.
• Inrease the chances of further engagement by prospects.
• Convey your compay's value.

How to build your marketing one-pager

When assembling your one-sheet, be selective about what you include. The layout and design are paramount. The one-sheeter must be visually appealing and inviting to read—without making it look like a lot of work to get through. Ultimately, your reader must comprehend it quickly and absorb the material in a useful way. The key here, and as is the case with any copywriting, you want the reader to take action.

Below I will provide the essential elements your one-pager should have (note: several real-world examples follow below). The pieces follow the typical top, middle, and bottom flow for written material. (For more copywriting help, these formulas might be of interest to you).

Are there exceptions to the layout and elements? Of course! This is marketing, and grey areas abound. But these elements should typically outweigh any creative, outside-the-lines thinking.

Elements to have at the top of your one-pager

Here are the elements you'll want at the top of your one-sheet.

Company name and logo: Kind of a no-brainer here, right? You want to let the reader know who the content is from. Be mindful of the fact you have limited space—it is one sheet after all.

Pain points: Call out what your target audience suffers from or needs help with. Be as specific as possible. Remember: you can't be everything to everybody. Test this element of the one-sheeter repeatedly until you find the best performer. In essence, your pain point is your headline for your one-sheeter. So it has to grab attention.

For example, instead of saying something like “The Bay Area’s Number One HVAC Company” – bland, boring – it could be “Had Enough of Your Outdated Furnace Giving You the Cold Shoulder at Night?”

The bottom line is, you’re hoping the reader is nodding her head “yes” when reading the pain point(s) of your one-sheet.

Solution: This is the pivotal point of the one-sheeter. It's where you give your reader what they want more than anything, and that's HOPE—hope that you can solve their problems. So if you’re our HVAC friend, then lay it out for the reader.

For example:

“We’ve helped Bay Area folks stay cozy at night since 1948. They love our Five-Star Service and Better Business Bureau A+ rating. Our secret is staying technologically advanced while still servicing every make and model ever made. Seriously!”

See the below mockup of a one-sheet. Your headline should be something a bit more compelling, but this will help you to visualize the information you're trying to convey.

One pager example adapted from Extensio

Elements to include in the middle of your one-pager

The middle of the one-sheet is where you can get into the specifics: the why and how of your business.

Features: List out a handful of your personal, company’s, or product/service’s features. These are the bells and whistles that you bring to the table:

• 24/7 service
• Advanced training and techniques
• Free estimates
• The new-and-improved version
• Free consultation
• Licensed in XYZ skill
• Downloadable on all devices

Benefits: Answer the question "So what?" about your features. Insert "What this means to you is (answer)" after every feature you list.

Insert a "what this means to you" benefit after every feature you list in your one-sheet.

For example, for “licensed in XYZ skill,” the benefit may be “What this means to you is you’ll rest easy knowing our team has full training and hands-on experience with your equipment. We know we’ll fix it and make it good as new.”

Other benefits include:

• Save time
• Save money
• Produces the best results available, such as “increase leads by 10x.”

The bottom line with benefits: How specifically will the features make the prospect’s life better? When producing any marketing content, you should always put yourself in your readers' shoes and read it with their  "what's in it for me" mindset.

The bottom line with benefits: How specifically will the features make the prospect’s life better?

For this section of your company one-sheet, these finer points of features and  benefits will give you a better feel for what they are and how to use them.

Elements for the bottom of your one-pager

This is where you inspire and equip your reader to take action.

Call to Action (CTA): What should the reader, after having been fully convinced YOU are the answer to their prayers, do next?

• “Start saving today!”
• “Contact me for a free consultation”
• “Learn more about XYX widget here”

There are multiple ways to incorporate CTAs into your one-sheeter. This element, too, can and should be tested frequently. The CTA is probably the most overlooked element—but talk about an important one! We offer an in-depth look at CTAs to bolster your one-sheeter’s performance.

Contact information: Include everything about you or your company to make it easy for people to find you. Include your physical address (if applicable), social channels, email address, phone numbers—everything you feel comfortable sharing.

*Optional add-on for the one-sheeter: Include a brief testimonial or customer review. If space is at a real premium, only include a sentence or two of that stellar testimonial you’ve got lying around.

The takeaway here is that your company one-sheet is about the customer. You have so much to offer and want to tell it all, but when it comes to your one-sheet, resiste the urge to make it all about your company. Make it about how your company knows and is the solution to your customer's problems.

The one-sheeter is about the customer. Resist the urge to make it all about you or your company. Instead, make it about how you are the solution they need.

Examples of great one-sheeters

Let’s look at some specific examples of company one-sheets for context and inspiration. You'll note there is no particular formula or layout. And yes, some are more than one page. Some essential elements are occasionally omitted, depending on the brand. Of course, big brands can get away with missing details because they're well-known entities.

1. HVAC one-sheeter

This one is actually two pages online. Burleson Plumbing & Heating does a great job of focusing on a specific offering with this one-sheeter. It’s all about their maintenance program and why it’s a good idea.

Social media consultant & speaker one-sheeter

This one is also two pages online. Jasmine Sandler has a lot to offer. She clearly outlines what she does and who she does it for, along with providing multiple contact points. Last, she builds her credibility with previous press and speaker appearances listed.

Image source

Startup incubator one-sheeter

A great example of a tight one-sheeter that covers every essential element and uses the space and graphics perfectly:

Mercedes-Benz one-sheeter

A well-known brand that uses emotions and visualization. It’s all benefits, nothing about features or pain points. But hey, it’s Mercedes-Benz. They don’t have to do much selling.

Tech Agency one-sheeter

Fantastic one-sheeter that utilizes space and graphics to capture everything they do in a single sheet. The headline is intriguing and grabs your attention.

Image source

What a one-sheeter is NOT (usually)

• It’s not a spec sheet. Those are separate documents to be used further down the funnel to support the decision-making process. However, a spec sheet or data sheet may be what your industry refers to it as. For example, in software, a prospect might request a data sheet that includes the standard things a marketing one-sheeter would.
• It’s not a company history, about us, or personal bio page. That information goes on a separate web page. However, you absolutely want a brief snippet about who you are as a company or individual.
• It's not a total data dump. You don't want to overload the reader with extraneous information because TMI will cause "reader overwhelm." Stay brief and to the point. You want the reader to have enough information to take the next step, i.e., click the CTA button.
• It's not a case study. That's a separate, longer piece of content. The one-sheeter can mention a crucial point or testimonial of a case study and even offer a link to the case study.

Tools to create your company's one-sheeter

Once you have the template nailed for your one-sheeter, you’re ready to go. In fact, why not create multiple one-sheeters for multiple audiences? Swap out the information to make them for all of your products and services. You could even apply the same format for your company one-pager to your product, service, or program one-pagers.

Here are a few helpful resources to kick-start your one-sheet library:

• Jennifer Beever, a Certified Marketing Consultant, offers some excellent “Do’s and Don’ts” of marketing one-sheets here.
• Visme has multiple types of templates, including a product sell sheet.
• Xtensio bills itself as “the easiest way for teams to create, manage and share beautiful living documents,” including one-pagers.

Get started on your company one-pager(s) now

A compact yet informative page (or two) that distills your business down into its core value—what it provides, why it provides it, and how it benefits or solves pain points—is a powerful piece of content that you can use time and time again. Get started on your company one-sheet today and you'll be surprised at how many times it comes in handy—and how many times it can be repurposed, too.

Conversion tracking could not be a bigger deal when it comes to seeing success with PPC campaigns. If you’re not tracking your conversions, how in the world are you going to know what’s working, or what’s not working, or where to put your budget? It’s mind-boggling to me that some folks aren’t using it.

That said, I also sympathize with marketers that have to set up conversion tracking on a site where URL rules aren’t an option. With these kinds of sites, it takes a bit more work to set up tracking, and it can be a bit confusing.

If you’re running ads in Microsoft (hint: if you’re running them in Google, you should at least take a look at Microsoft) and you have one of those frustrating sites, then this post is for you. Here’s how to set up Event Tracking in Microsoft Ads.

Why event tracking?

You know the importance of conversion tracking in PPC. But why event tracking? In case you need a little more explanation on why to use event tracking, or you’re rude and totally skipped the intro, I'm going to answer this question by extrapolating on the traditional conversion tracking option in Microsoft Ads. 

When you create a Microsoft Ads account, you are given a UET tag to apply to all pages of your website. This pixel tracks all users who go to your site and can also track conversions. So, the simplest way to track conversions is to set up URL rule goals, as with the screenshot below:

For this option, you set up a URL rule that will fire when someone hits your thank you page. Whenever someone visits that page after clicking on one of your ads, you’ll see conversion performance attributed to that campaign.

But if you don’t have dedicated thank you pages—because you have an iframe or you send users offsite, for example—you won’t be able to use this option to track your Microsoft Ads conversions. This is when event tracking comes into play. We've covered event tracking in Google Ads, but now it's time to talk Microsoft.

How to set up Microsoft Ads event tracking with Google Tag Manager

We’re going to be jumping back and forth between the Microsoft Ads and Google Tag Manager interfaces quite a bit for this tutorial, but I’ll do my best to call out where we are to make it easy to follow.

1. Create a new conversion in Microsoft Ads

The first step is to start creating your conversion goal in Microsoft Ads. In the new interface, you can head up to the "Tools" section, then choose "Conversion goals" under the "Conversion tracking" column.

Then choose "Create New Conversion Goal" toward the bottom/middle of the screen.

Give your new goal a name and then choose "Event" as the Goal Type.

You’ll notice there is an alert that pops up that says you’ll need to customize your UET tag to utilize event tracking. Don’t worry, we’ll get to that in a little bit.

You’ll then be taken to a screen that looks quite a bit different than the URL rule example we have above.

Here you’re given multiple fields to add values to, including:

• Category
• Action
• Label
• Value

Each of these can be set to different matching parameters that will determine how your goal is tracked. Depending on how you plan to set up goals, you can set these to Equals to, Contains, Begins with, or Regular Expression.

Before we set these parameters, let’s hop into Google Tag Manager and get some specific triggers set up.

2. Create your custom tags in Google Tag Manager

In Google Tag Manager, we’re going to need to create a new tag and trigger for this custom event goal.

With the original UET tag that you added to all pages of your site, you’re able to track the URL goals like we discussed above. But like the warning said, if we want to track custom events that aren’t trackable through URL rules, we’re going to have to customize our UET tag. That means creating a second UET tag to add to the site.

Start by creating a new tag in Google Tag Manager, then selecting "Bing Ads" from the integrations list.

You’ll then need to grab your Bing Ads UET Tag ID from the Microsoft Ads interface and add it to the open field. You can find this in the UET Tag section of the conversion tracking navigation.

Lastly, change the Event Type from "Page Load" to "Custom." This opens up the fields so we can add the Event Category, Action, and Labels we saw in Microsoft Ads. We’ll fill these out in just a minute, but first we need to create the trigger for the custom event action we want to track.

3. Create your custom triggers in Google Tag Manager

Below the tag setup, you’ll see "Triggering." If you click that section, you’ll be prompted to choose what type of trigger you want to set up in Tag Manager.

There are loads of different kinds of triggers you can use through Google Tag Manager, so take a look through them all and see what you’re needing to track.

For the sake of this post, I’m going to track on-site video views, but you can choose whichever trigger makes sense for you.

In the image above, I chose YouTube Video as my trigger, and I set up my parameters as needed.

4. Add event parameters to your GTM trigger

Now that we have our trigger in place, we need to finally set the event parameters for our tag.

I’ve added the Category of Video View, Action of Watch, and Label I set as YouTube Embeds.

Now we can hit save on our Tag and Trigger in GTM, but it might make sense for you to write down what your parameters were because we’ll need them for the next step in Microsoft Ads.

5. Add your event parameters to your Microsoft Ads custom event goal

Here’s how the same values look for the event parameters in Microsoft:

You’ll see that they’re exactly the same as we have in Google Tag Manager.

One thing to note here, each value you add to the parameters narrows the goal that you’re trying to track.

For example, if you had multiple triggers in Google Tag Manager that fired for Video View Event Category, but only a few that had the same Action and Label, you could set up a goal that looks like this.

Here, we’re tracking all events that have Video View as the Event Category, regardless of what they have as the Action or Label.

Depending on how you set up your on-site triggers and how specific you want your goal to be, only add the values for each parameter that you want to track.

Once you’re finished, you can choose your Goal Category, Revenue Value, Count, and Conversion Window.

Then save your goal and you’re all set!

Optimize your Microsoft Ads campaigns with event tracking

There are times where simple URL rules aren’t enough to track the actions we want to see on our website. But with a little patience and help from Google Tag Manager, we can track nearly any action someone can take on our site and optimize for it in Microsoft Ads Campaigns.

Any aspiring professional or business owner knows the importance of networking, and while there’s no shortage of networking events and opportunities, whether virtual or in-person, the part where most individuals tend to fall short is the follow-up, which is almost entirely dependent on email (aside from LinkedIn).

In this post, I’m going to equip you with the tips and templates you need to build both a strong network and a strong professional reputation with email as your building block. Here's what I'll cover:

• Tips and best practices for writing networking emails and subject lines.
• Nine networking email templates you can use for various scenarios.
• Additional networking email subject lines for each scenario.

Whether you’re networking for your small business, your career growth, or on the hunt for a new job, nailing down these basics will ensure you make the most of both your time and others'.

Want to just get right to the subject lines and templates?

Follow-up networking emails:

• Follow-up email to establish connection
• Follow-up email to continue the conversation
• Follow-up email after no response
• Additional follow-up networking email subject lines

Reconnection networking emails:

• Reconnection email to maintain relationship
• Reconnection email with request
• Additional reconnection networking email subject lines

"Cold" outreach/introductory networking emails:

• Informational interview email (career growth)
• Informational interview email (business owner)
• Connecting two people in your network
• Reaching out to someone you were referred to
• Additional outreach/introductory networking email subject lines

How to write networking emails

Networking is a bit of an art. Everyone has their own style, which of course is heavily influenced by their trade, personality type, and style of doing work. Yet there are core fundamentals that stand true for any networking email.

Add value

Always come to the table with a dish. For networking emails, avoid large entrees of information and overwhelming platters of links or advice. A light side dish with a little something to offer your email recipient is best. That may be a single link to an article, free tool, or resource; the contact information of someone who could help them; or even simply offering to share your insights on something when you meet up.

Be brief

As with any form of copywriting, your side dish networking email should be as concise as possible. Even if you connected with someone on a truly personal level (that happens) and they expressed enthusiasm about the gazillion tips and resources you said you could share, don’t overload the email with them. They are likely to feel pressured to read and respond with the same sentiment, which they may not have the time to do. So keep it brief no matter what, just so you can establish the connection. You can share those resources later or when you meet up.

Be specific and personal

There are a few different ways to be specific in your networking emails.

• First, be sure to mention the specific event during which you met them.
• Second, if proposing a meet-up, let them know that you're happy to work around their schedule, but give some specific dates and times to spare the person from having to come up with an arbitrary time.
• Third, and most important, mention something highly specific in your email that the person said or demonstrated during your conversation with them. This shows the person that you were truly listening, and it will set your networking email apart from the rest.

Be prompt

Reaching out promptly to new contacts from networking events is essential. Within hours of the event is not necessary—maybe even a bit aggressive. But you should contact them within a day while you are still fresh in their memory. Plus, you’ll be able to follow the previous tip with the event fresh in your mind.

Be yourself

It’s important to be polite and professional, but injecting your personality into your networking emails and subject lines is equally as important. Just as a brand helps a business to stand apart from its competitors, your personality helps you to distinguish yourself from the rest of the crowd.

Keep the long term in mind

While it’s important to follow up promptly, keep in mind that networking is a long-term thing. Ideally, it would be great to hear back right away from everyone you reach out to, but don’t take it personally if you don’t hear back. Life happens. People get swamped.

Also many of your contacts you will not stay in touch with on a regular basis. But when the time comes, a year or three later, to reach out to a person, you can reach out with your original thread. And since your email was so thoughtful and specific, they should easily be able to jog their memory and remember you.

How to write strong networking email subject lines

The rules of thumb for networking email subject lines are generally the same as those for general email subject lines. The good news is, they tend to be a bit easier to come up with. Here are the core guidelines for networking email subject lines:

Keep it short: Regardless of what type of email you’re sending, brevity is key (50 characters or fewer). Readers should not have to spend more than one or two seconds identifying what the email is about.

Customize it: Even if you’re sending similar emails to other people you met at a networking event, make sure each subject line is tailored in some way—such as by including their name or something specific you talked about.

Make it clear: Make it crystal clear to your recipient what the purpose of your networking email is, especially if there is an ask in the email. There is no need to beat around the bush. Is it to request a coffee chat? Say so. Is it to connect two people? Spell it out.

Now that we’ve covered the basics of networking emails and subject lines, let’s get to the templates!

Follow-up networking emails and subject lines

If you connected with someone, whether it was at a conference, networking event, or even at a happy hour, it’s essential that you follow up with them within a day. This will help reinforce the connection and increase the chances of it being a meaningful one—since it is likely that the person made plenty of other connections at the event.

Example #1: Follow-up email to establish connection 

Template

Subject line: Nice meeting you, [name]!

Hi [name],

It was great to meet you last night at the [event name]. I enjoyed our conversation afterward—particularly, [something specific they talked about that stuck out to you, that you admired, or that inspired you].

Here is [something you mentioned in the conversation] OR When thinking back on our conversation, this [tool/article/resource] came to mind that you might find interesting:

[link to the tool/resource]

Stay in touch,

[Your first name]

[Your full name]
[Your company if applicable]
[Your phone number]
[Your website if applicable]
[LinkedIn profile link]

Example #2: Follow-up email to continue the conversation

Template

Subject line: Hello from [your name] (event name)

Hi [name],

It was a pleasure talking with you last night at [event name]. It was so interesting to learn [something you learned about that person or their business that stuck out to you]. As for grabbing a coffee some time, I’d love to take you up on that!

Do you have any availability this or next week? Good times for me are [let the good times roll here], but I will be glad to work around your schedule. Let me know if there are any days or times that work for you.

Best,

[Your first name]

[Your full name]
[Your company if applicable]
[Your phone number]
[Your website if applicable]
[LinkedIn profile link]

Example #3: Follow-up email after no response

Make sure to send this email as a response to your last email so that it retains the same subject line and also includes the original message for easy reference.

Template

Subject: Re: [original email subject line]

Hey [name],

I’m just checking in to see if you had a chance to read my last email.

If you're open for a phone/video call on [day proposed], let me know!

Best,

[Your name]

Additional subject lines for networking follow-up emails

There are plenty of other ways to send a networking follow-up email, so here are some more subject lines that may be applicable:

• Met you at [event name]
• This is [name] from [place/event]
• Following-up on our chat at [plae/event]
• Nice to meet you last night!
• Continuing our conversation [from event name]/[about topic]
• [Something specific you said you’d share] and other things

Reconnection networking emails and subject lines

As I’ve already mentioned, networking is an ongoing thing. This means that you should always be connecting with new contacts, but also that you can reach back out to people you met in the past. And this is why proper networking communication is so important. You never know what may change, who you may meet, or what you might need in the future.

Example #4: Reconnection email to maintain the relationship

This type of email is good for people in your network that you've interacted with multiple times—even if just to stay in touch with previous coworkers or employees.

Template

Subject line: A quick hello (and congrats on the [achievement]!

Hi [name],

I hope this email finds you well. I was [whatever action you were doing that brought them to mind] this week and you came to mind. Just thought I’d check in and see how things are going. I see that [check up on their site to see what's new and mention it]. Looks like you’re [action implied by your observation]—very exciting!

Hope all is well,

[Your first name]

[Your full name]
[Your company if applicable]
[Your phone number]
[Your website if applicable]
[LinkedIn profile link]

Example #5: Reconnection email with request

Template

Subject line: Let's catch up!

Hi [name],

How are you? I can’t believe it’s been [time frame]! I just took a look at [their site, recent work, blog, social media feed] and [brief but specific compliment].

I am reaching out to see if you’d be interested in meeting up for another [idea exchange/coffee chat/whatever term makes sense here].I also would love to [find something you can show them that may be of use to them] that you might find useful as well—and of course use it as an excuse to catch up!

Hope all is well,

[Your first name]

[Your full name]
[Your company if applicable]
[Your phone number]
[Your website if applicable]
[LinkedIn profile link]

Additional subject lines for reconnection networking emails

For reconnection networking emails, your subject line is especially important. Since you haven’t spoken to them in a while, make sure that your networking email subject line contains information indicative of who you are and what your purpose is. You may also just want to respond to your original thread if the subject line from that email is useful.

Other subject lines to use when reconnecting with individuals in your network:

• Checking in since we last spoke
• [Your name] from [your company], seeking meeting
• Let's catch up!
• Can I buy you a coffee?
• Hello again!
• Happy [season]!

"Cold" outreach/introductory networking emails and subject lines

The first impression counts! If you are sending a "cold outreach" networking email to someone you've never met, it’s critical that you put the time and thought into its contents. Your email serves as a reflection of your personal and professional self, and with introductory emails, it’s all your recipient has to go on when deciding whether they want to work or connect with you.

One thing to note here: While networking emails should be short, your cold outreach introduction emails can be a little longer. Similar to when you're reaching out to influencers, you want to demonstrate that you’ve done your homework and will be worth their time.

Example #6: Informational interview request for career growth

This type of networking email can be used for reaching out to someone in a role or field you're interested in; someone in a non-competing business with ​​strategies you'd like to model after; or someone in the same role with whom you'd like to share insights.

Since you don't know this person, you probably won't be able to offer them anything specific in exchange (yet), but you can still make a general gesture. Also, be specific about the skills, work, or strategies you admire and are seeking to learn about.

You'll notice I used a very direct subject line because something like '"Time to chat about your content marketing strategy?" or "Your work at [company name]" could easily be mistaken for a sales or recruitment email.

Template

Subject line: Request to chat about [what you want to chat about]

Hi [name],

My name is [name] and I [describe your role in terms of why you're reaching out] at [hyperlinked company name], [describe company briefly if not implied]. I’ve been doing some research in this and related fields, and really admire [something specific about the person or their work].

Would you have any time in the near future to chat (over the phone or in-person) about the awesome work you’re doing at [person's company]? I’d love to [describe what you're looking to accomplish with the chat], and would also be glad to share with you some tools and resources I use that you might also find useful.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

[Your first name]

[Your full name]
[Your company if applicable]
[Your phone number]
[Your website if applicable]
[LinkedIn profile link]

Example #7: Informational interview request for business growth

Template

Subject line: Looking to exchange ideas with a fellow small business owner

Hello [name],

I hope this email finds you well. My name is [your name] and I am in the early stages of my own [business type] business. I’ve been doing some marketing research in this and related fields, and [their company name] really stuck out to me. I admire [what you admire after giving the site a thorough browse]

Would you have any time in the near future to meet or chat on the phone? I’d love to learn about some of tools you use—and I’d of course be glad to offer any tips or tools from the [your forte] side of things. My schedule is very flexible, so I can absolutely work around yours, but here are some days/times that work for me in case it helps you: 

-[day/time] -[day/time]

Looking forward to hearing from you!

[Your first name]

[Your full name]
[Your company if applicable]
[Your phone number]
[Your website if applicable]
[LinkedIn profile link]

Example #8: Connecting two people in your network

Template

Subject line: Introducing [name]

Hi [name],

How are things going at [their company name]? I’d like to introduce you to [person, linked to their LinkedIn profile]. [Describe the person briefly as it relates to why you are introducing him, with something unique/praise-worthy about them if possible].

[Name], meet [name]. [Briefly describe how you met]. [Mention this person's strengths and abilities in the topic of focus and their willingness to chat (provided it is true).

I’ll leave it to you two to find a time to connect!

Best,

[Your name]
[Your number] 
[Your LinkedIn profile link]

Example #9: Reaching out to someone you've been referred to—example

Template

Subject line: Reaching out to you via [name]

Hi [name],

My name is [name], I was given your name by [name]. I run a [industry] business and it sounds like we could benefit from knowing one another! I browsed through your site—love [something about their site, products, services, etc.]

If you ever want to meet up for coffee or have a phone/video chat to exchange ideas, let me know! You can also call or text me at [number].

Have a great rest of your week,

[Your first name]

[Your full name]
[Your company if applicable]
[Your phone number]
[Your website if applicable]
[LinkedIn profile link]

Additional subject lines for outreach/introductory networking emails

Here are some other subject lines you can use when reaching out to someone new or connecting two people together:

• A note from a [insert your job title]
• A quick note from an aspiring [job role]
• Introduction from [insert name or company here]
• Love what [business name] is doing—any time to chat?
• Hi [name], have you met [name]?
• Introducing [name]

Get started with your best networking emails yet

While they are generally short, networking emails can be a challenge to write. You only have so much space to make the right impression. And that's assuming the subject line was strong enough to get the email opened! Use these tips and templates to write networking emails and subject lines that will get you connecting, communicating, and building your career for weeks and years to come.

Growing a business is hard. Whether you’re a small business owner, a marketing team member, or an agency, riding that rollercoaster of highs and lows is no small challenge. What’s even harder is setting ambitious yet realistic expectations of what is achievable.

This is why a growth strategy (like the one above) is one of the utmost importance to businesses. In this guide, I’m going to cover what a growth strategy is, how it differs from a marketing strategy, and why it works—with plenty of examples. I’ll also walk you through the five-step process for creating a growth strategy for your own business. The five steps are:

1. Set your high-level goals
2. Identify your inputs and outputs
3. Run growth experiments
4. Validate your growth experiments
5. Foster extreme accountability

By the end of this guide, you’ll be able to identify what goals to set and what’s needed from your team to hit those goals. Ready to drive consistent, predictable, maybe even explosive growth for your business? Read on.

What exactly is a growth strategy?

There's a lot of confusion in the marketing world about what a growth strategy and how it's different from a marketing strategy.

First things first, a growth strategy is not a marketing plan. Nor does it mean buying PPC ads, driving traffic via SEO, or running CRO tests on your website. These are marketing tactics that fall under your marketing plan.

Your growth strategy is the big-picture roadmap you’ve created to get your business from where it is now to where it wants to be in the future. This means that it:

• Involves all departments of the company (versus marketing only).
• Is aimed at growing the company from many angles (revenue, employees, etc).
• Encompasses your marketing strategy (and not the other way around).

In sum, a growth strategy is a high-level strategy that outlines everything a business needs to do to grow. It’s a holistic and scientific approach to driving growth.

A growth strategy is not a marketing plan. It's a high-level strategy that outlines everything a business needs to do to grow through a holistic and scientific approach.

Here’s an example of a growth strategy for a hypothetical company “Startup Masters," which we'll be using for our example throughout the five-step process:

Do growth strategies work?

It can be hard to grasp the concept of creating an actual, actionable plan for something as broad as “growth” and then seeing tangible results—but it’s not only possible; it works! Growth strategies are the secret sauce behind the consistent growth of some of the world’s biggest companies like DropBox, Dollar Shave Club, WhatsApp, and more. 

Growth strategies are the secret sauce behind the consistent growth of some of the world’s biggest companies like DropBox, Dollar Shave Club, WhatsApp, and more. 

In fact, a well-defined growth strategy for my own company, Venngage, has lead to:

• 3-fold increase in blog traffic in under a year. 
• 40,000+ registers per week (vs 400 back in 2016).
• 150% YoY growth over the last 5 years.

Now that you know what a growth strategy is (and isn’t) and have seen tangible evidence in its ability to drive business growth—it’s time for the fun part: creating your own growth strategy.

The 5-step process to creating your own growth strategy

The process of coming up with a growth strategy for your entire business can feel overwhelming. There is so much that goes into a business and defines its success, where do you even start? Worry not. I’ve broken your growth strategy creation process into five clear-cut steps.

Step #1: Set your high-level goals

Business growth is akin to planning a trip. It’s much easier when you know the final destination.

If you could predict how much revenue your new business would make in the long term before you even got started, wouldn’t that help you figure out the best growth strategy to get there?

The bottom line is, it’s more helpful to start at the end and then work backwards (versus the opposite).

It’s more helpful to start at the end and then work backwards.

So let’s head on over to the end of your growth strategy.This is where you set high-level ambitious yet realistic goals (it’s a delicate balance). Business guru Jim Collins calls them BHAGs, or “big, hairy, audacious goals.”

Ex-Hubspot VP of Growth, Brian Balfour, refers to it as the Top-Down Approach:

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At Venngage, we call them “high-level” or “long-term goals”. So for step one, start mapping out a long-term goal such as your 10-year goal. To do this, ask yourself the following questions:

• Where do you see yourself and your company by that time?
• How much should you grow your business?
• How much revenue do you expect your company to generate?
• How many employees do you see yourself having?

Let’s revisit the growth strategy example I shared earlier. Here’s what a hypothetical ten-year goal, and steps required to hit said goal, would look like for StartUp Masters:

By working backward, it becomes easier to set realistic goals and objectives of where the company will need to be in five years, three years and one year to hit that ten-year goal. You can even start smaller such as with a hypothetical five-year goal, which will help you to map out four, three, two, and one-year targets.

By working backward, it becomes easier to set realistic one-year, three-year, and five-year targets for your business to help you stay on track.

Now that you’ve defined your high-level goals, it’s time for the action part of your growth strategy—the steps you’ll need to take to hit those goals.

Step #2: Identify your inputs and outputs

Once you’ve established your high-level goals, the next step is to determine your key performance indicators (KPIs). For every goal you set, it’s crucial to identify key metrics and results that will help you gauge whether you’re on our way to hitting your goals. Here’s how to do it:

Determine your North Star

One of the first metrics you should identify is your North Star Metric. It’s also known as the, “One Metric That Matters (OMTM).” This metric is the number that best represents the value customers receive from your product. Here’s a handy explainer video by Alex from Web Profits:

Video link 

For example, Airbnb’s North Star metric is the number of nights booked. Why? Because it’s a clear indication of their product’s value.The more nights booked, the higher the chances are that customers are having a positive experience with Airbnb and the more likely they are to return to book their next stay. Keep in mind, your chosen North Star metric should have a direct correlation to your company’s revenue and retention goals.

Your chosen North Star metric should have a direct correlation to your company’s revenue and retention goals.

Here are a some more examples of North Star metrics:

• Customer lifetime value (for ecommerce businesses)
• Monthly recurring revenue (for B2B SaaS businesses)
• Total watch time (for media businesses)

Once you’ve chosen your metric, the next step is to figure how you’re currently performing for that metric. Let’s assume you started a new streaming service like Netflix. You’ve selected “total watch time” as your North Star metric. You’ve selected this metric because per your analysis, a higher watch time correlates to higher retention (resulting in more revenue).

Let’s assume users spend around 30 mins per day watching shows on your service. This is how you’re currently performing for your North Star metric. It's your baseline. One of the high-level goals you’ve set is to increase retention by 30% in the next 12 months. To hit this goal, doesn’t it make sense to focus on improving total watch time per user?

Bottom line: figure out how you’re currently performing for your North Star metric and how much that number will need to change to impact your high-level goals.

Set up your OKRs

OKRs stand for Objective Key Results. They refer to specific metrics you’ll track that will influence your high-level goals. In software startups, many founders follow the AARRR framework for setting OKRs. This stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referral.

Source

It can be overwhelming to influence each of these metrics. So, using the example company we began with above (“StartUp Masters”), we’re going to focus on acquisition and retention for now.

Here are the acquisition OKRs dentified during our Startup Masters growth planning example:

StartupMasters aims to influence acquisition primarily via their organic and paid traffic goals. The goal? Scale organic traffic by 130,000 and paid traffic by 70,000 visitors a month.

If you look at the inputs, there are many pages that drive traffic. They've also outlined the required traffic to various sections of their site in order to impact their OKRs:

By continuing to break down your goals into smaller and specific inputs, you’re making it that much easier for you to hit the ambitious goals you’ve set for yourself. And as you hit those goals, you can see your growth plan actually working.

And when setting OKRs, identify metrics you can manipulate on a smaller scale that will have greater leverage. As you continue to figure out which inputs impact your OKRs, start thinking of experiments you can run to influence your inputs.

By continuing to break down your goals into smaller and specific inputs, you’re making it that much easier for you to hit the ambitious goals you’ve set for yourself—and see your growth strategy working.

Step #3: Run growth experiments

Coming up with valuable experiments to run isn’t as easy as it seems. A common trap companies fall into when implementing new product features or marketing ideas is waterfalling. Waterfalling occurs when a team continues to add requirements to a project, to the point where the time required to implement it keeps increasing, similar to scope creep.

As a result, what was supposed to be implemented in a few weeks now ends up taking months. To avoid this, I’d recommend you operate on a one- or two-week sprint cadence. You can do this by breaking down big projects into minimum viable tests or MVTs. With MVTs, you can get valuable insights faster and validate whether a large-scale project is worth pursuing.

With minimum viable tests (MVTs), you can get valuable insights faster and validate whether a large-scale project is worth pursuing.

Start by deciding the OKR you’re trying to impact. In our Startup Masters growth strategy example, we're trying to increase retention by 10%:

The input? Push more users to complete one more project within three weeks. To impact this metric, one experiment they could run is to create a pop-up modal within the project dashboard pushing users to begin a new project upon hitting the 80% completion mark.

They’ve also hypothesized the results of this experiment and the effort required by each team to make it happen. Before pursuing any large or small test or experiment, run them through this flowchart to identify if you can further break them down into smaller MVTs:

Your goal when planning out MVTs is to run experiments which require low effort, but have a high output. These are “slam-dunks” because you get big wins in less time.

Your goal when planning out MVTs is to run experiments that require low effort but have a high output.

Realistically, not every experiment will be a “slam-dunk” but if you can avoid the “turtles” (experiments that are high effort and low output), you’re halfway there:

Chart created by Venngage

Here’s an example of a well-documented growth experiment, courtesy of Clearbit.

Step 4: Validate your growth experiments

Sometimes, breaking down an experiment into an MVT is still not enough to validate whether the test is worth including in your growth strategy.

You now need to determine if this experiment will have a positive impact on your customers. Afterall, your job as a marketer also entails providing a great customer experience.

Here’s a visual experiment validation checklist you can use to rigorously validate your experiments:

You can do the same thing by writing out your experiments (and areas of consideration) on a Google Doc or Trello card.

Our StartupMasters growth strategy follows the “Jobs to Be Done” framework, which focuses on the goals a potential customer has, rather than solely focusing on who they are as a person.

In this checklist, you can see the various “Jobs to Be Done” listed out. StartupMasters also considers personas an important factor in how they plan their experiments.

As I pointed out earlier, other important considerations include probability of success, effort required per team, and OKR impacted by this experiment.

Once your team starts following this process, two things happen:

1. It becomes easier for your team to consider all the areas of importance.
2. You’re ensuring your team is prioritizing the most promising experiments.

Google Docs and Airtable are the tools of choice for HubSpot's growth experimentation process. At Venngage, we use Trello for planning our weekly sprints, and Google Docs for validating our growth experiments—which are simple enough for any company of any size (including yours) to use.

Once you get the hang of the process, experiment with other tools to see what works best.

Step #5: Fost extreme accountability

Last but not least—and perhaps even the most important step in driving growth—is fostering extreme accountability within your teams. Every team member should be aware of the work they’re doing and how that work ties back to a company’s high-level goals. This part could be a separate post in itself. If you want to dive deeper, Brian Balfour’s guide on building growth teams is your bible.

Every team member should be aware of the work they’re doing and how that work ties back to a company’s high-level goals.

Here’s a visual summary of everything Brian touches on:

Source

We follow a similar process to foster ownership and accountability across our entire team (and not just marketing). In our monthly team meetings, every member (in charge of a project) shows the company what they launched, what the results were, and next steps moving forward.

The same goes for our marketing meetings. On a weekly basis, every member shares the experiments they launched so they can feel accountable about the work they’re doing. This process will help you accomplish two things:

• By encouraging your team to share what they launched and what they learned, you’re encouraging them to produce results.
• If there are underperformers that work at a slower pace or reap less valuable insights, this will push them to improve their output.

Not only that, but you’ll also be able to identify who is an A-player and who is an underperformer. This is often a wake-up call for the latter.

Get ready for consistent, predictable growth

To conclude, there’s no magic hack or silver bullet that’s going to unlock explosive growth for your business overnight.

It’s about driving consistent growth, which comes down to a strong understanding of data, relentless focus on influencing the right metrics, and experimenting with different marketing tactics to hit your goals.

Or as my favourite entrepreneur Biz Stone once said, “Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will make you look like an overnight success.”

About the author

Aditya Sheth is a growth marketer at Venngage—an online all-in-one design platform. When he’s not busy writing actionable content or running experiments, you can find him reading nonfiction, learning a new skill or listening to rap. You can follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

As the world grapples with COVID-19, it is imperative to take into account what the post-COVID world is going to mean for those of us in the digital marketing realm. The pandemic has accelerated the speed at which we are “going digital” and has given new power to many online industries. Never before have we been so dependent on Amazon or Zoom to simply get through the day, which means that as digital marketers, we want to make decisions that use this new reliance on technology to our advantage.

This article is going to cover six ways to do that. I’m going to discuss:

• The strategies that you can and should put into place to market successfully in a post-pandemic world.
• Tools you’ll want to have by your side to increase your efficiency and increase your ROI.
• Ways to use your pre-COVID foundation to build a well-run system that works for you.

Let's get started.

1. Focus on the customers you already have

If you are struggling to bring in new customers, try focusing more on the ones you already have or who are still with you despite the economic downturn.

In addition to creating services and ad campaigns to target their new needs, you may also want to issue refunds to clients who had prepaid memberships or were on auto-pay during the lockdown period. While this could hurt your cashflow for the short term, the money you give back will most likely come back to you tenfold when the economy restabilizes and your now loyal customers are ready to start buying again.

Neil Patel, for example, started to offer his premium UberSuggest features with the free version. But while he saw a decrease in free trial signups, he did see an outpouring of appreciation from dozens of people within the industry, emailing and thanking him, and some even buying the paid plan as a gesture of their gratitude.

Also, while he did not see more money coming in, he DID see more traffic coming in.

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The point is, look out for your customers, clients, and coworkers when times are tough and unemployment rates are high. They will thank you for it in some way or another. And you will likely see growth in other areas such as customer loyalty, brand awareness, organic traffic, social media engagement, and maybe even new prospects. 

The point is, look out for your customers, clients, and coworkers when times are tough and unemployment rates are high.

2. Move everything online

With the lockdowns and travel restrictions of the pandemic, it's no surprise that everything is shifting online. Scott Jones, the CEO of 123InternetGroup told Forbes that they have seen a spike in companies who want to create or update websites, create new social media campaigns focused on home-based workers, and focus more on ecommerce trends and channels.

Now is the time to increase your online presence. You likely already have some of your business functions online (perhaps you're using one of these 64 affordable online marketing tools) but the pandemic has shown us just how much more we can do online. 

For example, you could automate your email communication or even your services. iNECTA, a cloud ERP software for the food industry now allows customers to receive merchandise, track lots, create invoices, and manage their food business all through a tool that is 100% online.

The same goes for something as basic as online classes. Preply, a language learning company, saw a spike in sales after COVID-19 because they were ahead in the game. No matter what industry you are in, there are always more things you can take online, and having those capabilities will help to set you apart from your competitors and stand out to potential customers.

A couple of ideas on what this might look like:

• Investing in a good customer relationship management (CRM) software.
• Hosting informative webinars to build trust and attract new customers, or even to employees to take their skills up a notch.
• Supporting your employees' work-from-home needs.

The bottom line is, the more processes you can bring online, the more you can stay engaged with your customers and employees, which is crucial for a business to stay resilient and thrive.

The more processes you can bring online, the more you can stay engaged with your customers and employees, which is crucial for a business to stay resilient and thrive.

3. Invest in Facebook ads

As more people spend time at home and on social media, the ROI on PPC ads in many industries has skyrocketed. This is a good way to remind people that your business is alive and well and that you aim to be a very significant part of the ‘new normal’.

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Facebook ads in particular are quite affordable—even for local businesses—and can help you showcase any changes you have made to your business or any COVID-19-exclusive discounts or promotions you might be offering. Online ads have always been engaging, affordable, and well targeted, but now more than ever before, they offer you the ability to truly scale your business.

With Facebook's granular audience targeting capabilities, you can reach customers based on gender, location, hobbies and interest, marital status, profession, and the list goes on. 

To see all of Facebook's ad targeting options, check out our epic infographic here.

The pandemic has also lowered the CPM (cost per thousand impressions) on ads since companies do not have a very big marketing budget to play around with. This is a good time to invest in a good Facebook ads strategy that can serve as an affordable way to bring in leads and sales that will help you make more money.

Advertising messages are most effective when they are consistent and repeated. Which is what makes Facebook retargeting another strategy to try during/after the COVID-19 pandemic. With retargeting, you target your ads at people that have already had some form of contact with your brand. Referring to my first point about investing in your existing customers—it really is the same logic.

4. Run exclusive deals and offers

As businesses begin to reopen, a good way to get people interested in coming in is by offering exclusive sales promotions or deals. You can announce or even advertise these offers on social media platforms as well as promotional emails.

These kinds of offers will help bring in new customers while also getting old ones interested in coming back. This idea can work for multiple industries (theatres, spas, gyms, etc.) but it works particularly well for industries that have been hit hard by the coronavirus—restaurants and travel, for example.

Discounts, freebies, and similar saving options could be the incentive customers need to invest in you. You could even offer membership deals for customers that choose to invest in you during a certain time period. This will help you earn some money even when times are tough.

5. Give your communication strategy an overhaul

As people’s priorities and schedules change, the previous communication strategy you had in action may not be right. It would be wise to rethink the newsletters you are sending out, the content you are creating, and the general approach you have towards your customers.

This could mean redoing your content calendar altogether or maybe putting some blog posts on the backburner while you focus more on articles that cater to doubts, fears, and questions related to the current situation. This also means that you need to take the time to get to know your post-COVID-19 customers.

One way to do this is to send out an email survey with questions about their current priorities, pain points, and desires. Make them easy to answer (multiple choice or choose a point on a scale), but keep some questions open-ended because this way you might discover a few golden nuggets of information about your customers.

You can then use this information to rethink your communication strategy and serve your customers better.

You may even give your ads, emails, videos, webinars, and podcast episodes an overhaul so you are keeping the current priorities of your customers in mind. (For more help in this area, head to our post on marketing during COVID-19).

Mediavine, an advertising network geared towards bloggers, did a great job with sending out regular emails both during and after the peak of the pandemic, with helpful resources, updates, and supportive messaging. Taking the time to communicate to your clients that you are there for them right now will have a lasting impact beyond the pandemic.

6. Focus on a few main paid advertising channels

As I mentioned above, PPC ads are the way to go right now but focusing on Google Ads, LinkedIn ads, Twitter ads, Facebook ads, and Instagram ads all at once is going to you no good. You need to figure out where your target audience is hanging out and then focus most of your PPC efforts on those channels.

So, for example:

• If you are a beauty business, your target audience is likely to be on Instagram.
• If you have a more serious business like an addiction treatment facility, you could focus more on Google.
• If you have a business-related tool or service like a keyword research tool, LinkedIn would be your go-to.

Use these strategies to survive and thrive in the age of COVID-19

Having a few solid digital marketing strategies to depend on while the world settles down can not only help your business get back on its feet but also give you a headstart against your competitors. The key piece of advice you should keep in mind is to focus on your customers’ priorities as much as your own.

The key piece of advice you should keep in mind is to focus on your customers’ priorities as much as your own.

They are the people that make your business and they are the ones who are going to help you grow it—no matter what your strategy is.

About the author

Burkhard Berger is the founder of awesomex™. You can follow him on his path from 0 to 100,000 monthly visitors on www.awesomex.com. His articles include some of the best growth hacking strategies and digital scaling tactics that he has learned from his own successes and failures.
Feel free to follow him on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

In order to survive and grow, your business needs customers. In order to get customers, you need to promote your business. In the good old days, this was a matter of deciding between a flyer, a brochure, a postcard, or an ad in the local newspaper.

But in today’s digital world, the possibilities are endless (read: overwhelming).

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So if you are struggling to figure out the best ways to promote your business; or even just what your options are, you are (a) not alone and (b) in the right place.

In this post, I’m going to cover the 30 most effective ways to promote your business, whether you have no budget, a limited budget, or some wiggle room. We’ll go over how to spread the word with respect to:

• Search engines (namely, Google Search and Maps).
• Social media channels (including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and Pinterest).
• Online directory listings (there's more to them than you may think!)
• Your local community (events, sponsorships, and press).

Promoting your business is a must if you want to stand apartfrom your competitors and out to your customers, so let's get started with the most popular channel: Google.

How to promote your business on Google

Using Google to promote your business is a no-brainer. Capturing more than 90% of the market share, it’s one of the best ways to get in front of consumers that are actively searching for solutions. Here are the best ways to use Google to get your name out there:

1. Create and verify your Google Business Profile

Your Google Business Profile (Google's term for your Google listing) is what allows your business to show up in Google Maps results, the local section of Google Search results, and also—when someone types in your business name and location—the right-side Knowledge Panel in Search results. As Google gets better and better at catering its results to the searcher’s location, this free listing should be a top priority.

The key to using your Business Profile to promote your business is to verify ownership of your listing through your free Google My Business account. Once you have ownership, you can optimize your listing to show up higher in search results and for more relevant searches.

If you’re ranking on Google Maps or showing up in the Local Pack (as seen above) of regular results pages (this is very doable), your business is basically promoting itself 24/7. Even better, you can publish posts directly to your Google listing, putting attractive promotions in front of your audience at a time when they have high intent.

For a deeper dive into this very free, very effective method of promoting your business, visit 13 Google My Business Optimizations for 2020.

2. Get a website

Every business needs a website, no matter how old-fashioned your business or clients may be. Your website is the go-to for current and prospective customers. Even if they find you on social media or Google, they will want to go to your website and, like your Google listing, it serves to promote your business around the clock.

A good business website not only serves as a promotional tool in and of itself—it tells the story of your business and what you offer, provides contact information, and reflects your brand’s personality and distinguishing characteristics—but it is also essential for measuring and improving the success of your other promotional tactics.

For example, when you run ads, you need landing pages, which live on your website. When you post helpful information on social media, it should link to its home on your website. With all of your marketing channels flowing into your website, you can use analytics to see which strategies are working best and get invaluable insights about your audience.

Although there are completely free solutions to get a website in place for your business, almost inevitably you will need to move to some form of a paid website if you are serious about promoting your business. Having your own domain name, a professional look and feel, and the ability to scale and add features as needed are all essential for growth.

3. Implement search engine optimization

It’s one thing for you to promote your business; it’s another thing for Google to promote your business. SEO is a set of practices that align your business with Google’s ranking algorithm. But because this algorithm has evolved to use machine learning and user behavior to produce the most accurate and quality results for searchers, optimizing for search engines is really just optimizing for searchers—particularly those searching for what you have to offer.

SEO isn’t just one tactic, but many tactics that collectively work together to improve your rank. Also, because Google has superb location-based results, you have just as much of a chance as big retailers to show up on the first page of Google— without spending a dime! (With the exception of the costs to get a website, of course).

SEO tactics to promote your business include:

• Adding relevant (industry- and location-based) keywords to specific places on your website.
• Producing original, high-quality content regularly, with tagged images.
• Maintaining high page load speeds and security.

For more SEO tips, check out this post on The Top 10 Google Ranking Factors of 2020 (+How to Optimize for Them).

When your business is ranking high in results, Google is basically promoting your business for you—and not just to anyone, but to the people searching for what you have to offer. Doesn't get much better than that.

4. Create a business blog

We just touched on this in the previous strategy, but content is such an important driver of SEO that it really deserves its own category as a promotional strategy. A blog is not LiveJournal for businesses. Sure, you can create some posts about milestones and events, but a lucrative business blog is one that produces educational content, in your brand voice, around questions and terms your ideal customers are searching in Google.