Five Carousel Ad Examples to Inspire Your Marketing

Carousel ads are becoming a favorite tool of myriad digital marketers. Check out these examples of brands that use the ad format to boost their customer engagement. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Forrester Wave Report Names Top Four Social Listening Tools

Research firm points out that with new features continually being added, social listening platforms are evolving into “social relationship” ones.



Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

Online Marketing News: ROI of Social Selling, LinkedIn’s Ad Targeting, Facebook Hits 3 Million

The ROI of Social Selling: Data-Driven Outcomes [Infographic]

The first rule of sales is you have to be where your customers are. If you aren’t, how will they ever find you? As we progress further into the digital age, salespeople and marketers are becoming more and more collaborative, to the benefit of their mutual employers. The secret sauce to any organization practicing marketing enabled sales lies in great content that meets your customers where they are at every stage of the buying cycle. This infographic explains the how and why of social selling. Sales for Life

LinkedIn Intros B2B Spin On Facebook’s Custom Audiences To Target Ads

LinkedIn has upped their ad game, enabling marketers to target ads to employees of an uploaded list of up to 30,000 companies. Their new account-targeting option will be similar to those at Facebook, Twitter and Google+. So how can eager B2B marketers get their hands on this new targeting capability? According to Marketing Land, “Only brands buying ads directly from LinkedIn’s sales team can use account targeting at the moment, but the company plans to eventually roll it out to brands buying ads through its self-serve tool.” Marketing Land

Facebook Reaches 3 Million Advertisers, Launches ‘Your Business Story’ Video Tool

On March 2nd, Facebook announced they’ve reached 3 million advertisers on their platform. “To put that in perspective” author Andrew Hutchinson lists, “Twitter has 130,000 active users, Instagram recently announced they’ve hit 200,000 advertisers, and Google, currently the leader in the online ads space, is believed to have more than 4 million active advertisers (though they don’t openly discuss this figure).” In celebration, Facebook launched a new tool called ‘Your Business Story’ that allows Facebook advertisers to use their Facebook Page’s photos and content to tell the story of their achievements and highlights. Social Media Today

Facebook is letting publishers use Instant Articles to collect email newsletter signups

Facebook is testing newsletter sign-up messages at the bottom of their Instant Articles. What many publishers hope, according to Digiday, is “the more they bump into the publisher’s articles on Facebook, the more likely they are to start coming directly to the publisher’s own site. There, publishers can not only keep all the ad revenue they generate but can sell the readers on subscriptions and newsletters and other products as well as collect data on their reading habits that can be used to improve the site experience.” As a fairly common call to action in the content marketing world, ‘Subscribe’ is a natural next step for readers that enjoy your content –and Facebook is facilitating that conversion. Digiday

Google Image Search tests colored filter buttons

It appears that Google is taking a cue from Pinterest in their latest test — using colored filter buttons on their image search. The change shows up on desktop for a select few users, with a diverse button background colors. This will certainly make image searching more user friendly, enabling users to narrow down their searches in an intuitive way. What does this mean for marketers? It’s more important than ever to use specific and helpful alt tags when optimizing your content for search. Search Engine Land

Brands and agencies are already experimenting with on-demand Snapchat geofilters

Snapchat is allowing people and businesses to design their own geofilters for specific “spaces during set periods of time — starting from just $5.” This is big news for event marketers who want to find a new way to spread the word about their events, whether that’s a college on orientation weekend, or even a marketing conference. Restaurants like IHOP are using the geofilters to target customers in their stores, while other organizations are using it to encourage their employees to experience the feature before they begin using it in future marketing campaigns. Digiday

Despite Tech Aids, B2B Marketers Struggle with Targeting

Getting the right message to the right audience at the right time is an ever-present challenge for marketers, even with all of the targeting advantages available to us through various digital media. According to Wakefield Research: “Seventy percent of the marketers surveyed said their advertising fails to meet their expectations either all of some of the time, and 96% admit it’s inevitable that their communications will reach a significant number of people outside of their targeted segments.” Others cited problems including measuring ROI, long sales cycles, and lack of quality leads. Direct Marketing News

What were the top online and digital marketing news stories for you this week?

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend! I’ll be back next week with more online marketing news. Have something to share? Tweet me at @Tiffani_Allen or send it to @toprank!

Infographic via Hubspot

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5 Ways to get SEO Traffic in a Hard Niche

It’s one of the biggest challenges when it comes to SEO.

You can read about tons of different SEO tactics on various blogs, but will they work for you?

After all, that’s the important part.

Not everyone wonders about this because they know that common SEO tactics will work for them, no problem.

But you might be different.

Your business may operate in a “hard” niche.

And it’s true, SEO is more difficult in these niches, so not all tactics will work.

However, I’ve worked with many clients in hard niches and have been able to achieve great SEO results with them.

That’s why I’m confident that there is an SEO plan out there that will work for you.

I’m going to help you make that plan for your specific business by showing you 5 ways to improve your SEO efforts in hard niches.

But before we start…

What is a “hard niche?” There’s no formal definition, but I’m referring to businesses that operate in niches that:

• have small online audiences 


• have lots of SEO competition


• are hard to get links in (there aren’t many blogs or sites that seem to link out)


• are “boring” (I’ll expand on this throughout the article with specific examples)

If your business falls into that category, I believe that by reading this post, you’ll learn at least a few ways to improve your SEO traffic. 

1. Competition depends on the scope (hint: change your scope)

We’re going to address those problems individually, starting with competition.

It’s easy to rank highly for a term when only a few pages on the Internet are optimized for that term.

However, if you’re going up against 10 experienced SEOs, you’ll have a hard time.

If your business is in a hard niche in the sense that traffic is incredibly valuable so competition is fierce (think loans, insurance, etc.), you’ll find that scenario often.

The very core of your SEO strategy needs to shift because you won’t be able to beat all your competitors.

Instead, you need to find keywords that they don’t even target because they don’t think that those words are worth their time.

But you’re smarter than that.

We’re talking about long-tail keywords here—longer, more descriptive keywords that have lower search volumes.

Even though they have lower search volumes, because they are more specific, the traffic they bring is usually more targeted and valuable.

While long-tail phrases don’t get as many searches per month as shorter ones do, there are way more long-tail phrases than the popular short-tail ones.

This isn’t a new concept by any means, but it’s an important one if you’re targeting a competitive niche.

Even a phrase that only gets 50-100 searches a month may be worth it if it’s for a term with high commercial intent (reader is likely to buy something from you).

How to find long-tail keywords: Sure, some SEOs are smart and target long-tail keywords because they know they’re easier to rank for, but there aren’t very many of those SEOs.

And since there are so many long-tail keywords, you can always find some new ones to target if you’re willing to dig.

Why?

Because the best keywords aren’t easy to find.

Most bad SEOs (and there are a lot) and business owners simply use the Google keyword planner (or a similar tool).

They plop in a broad keyword and choose keywords to target based on the results:

But thousands of people have done this for just about every niche imaginable. You’ll find more competition than seems reasonable for almost all of those terms.

Google has data on just about every search phrase you can think of but doesn’t always show it in these broad search results.

So, while using the keyword planner is fine, you need to enter seed keywords and phrases that are different from those everyone else is using.

There are many ways to find these, but one of my favorites is to head over to Reddit.

Type a broad keyword into the search bar. I typed in “drywall”:

Now, start looking at the results for keywords.

I quickly found “how to screw drywall” in one of the threads.

Put that into the tool, and it turns out that the phrase gets about 90 searches per month in the US:

No, that’s not a huge number, but it’s nothing to sneeze at either. If you rank for that phrase, you’ll also probably rank for other very similar phrases (e.g., “how screw drywall” or “how to screw in drywall”). Each of those will have small search volumes, but they’ll all add up to something substantial enough.

Put together 50-100 articles for long term phrases like those, and you’ll be getting a few thousand search visitors fairly easily, without the insane competition for popular keywords.

Look at the search results for that phrase:

The #1 result is a YouTube video, and the top content results don’t even have the phrase in their titles.

That’s as easy a keyword as you’ll find, and it’s because it’s not a keyword that comes up in those obvious searches.

If you put the time into finding great long-tail keyword phrases, you’ll make your SEO plan significantly easier and more effective.

There are many ways to find good long-tail keyword phrases. Here are a few resources with other specific tactics:

• 5 Modern Keyword Research Methods to Uncover Hidden Gems


• How To Generate 20,000 Monthly Visitors Through Long-Tail Search


• A Step by Step Guide to Integrating Long-Tail Keywords Within Blog Posts

2. If links are hard to find, think laterally

In some niches—such as marketing, recipes, and entertainment niches, for example—it’s very easy to get links.

There are hundreds of thousands of blogs that are willing to link to you if you make a good case.

But in some niches, those blogs just don’t exist.

That’s when you need to get creative.

One very effective strategy is to get links from related niches.

For example, if you’re a plumber, related niches would be:

• home DIY


• home decor


• beauty/life (e.g., a proper way to unclog sinks or prevent clogs)

Basically, think of any other niche that you can add your expertise to.

Then, all the typical SEO tactics come back into play: guest posting, forum posting, etc.

Let’s go through an example.

Let’s say that you’re a home decorator.

One related niche is home buying and owning, which has a different audience from your typical home decor enthusiasts.

You could write about how home decor could add value to your home. In fact, that turns out to be a good long-tail phrase:

What could you do with this?

You could create content for your own site and then reach out to home buyer/owner blogs asking for a link. That’s a standard SEO tactic.

Alternatively, you could use the idea for a guest post on a popular site.

Not only will it rank for the long-tail keyword that you target (sending you continuous traffic), but it’ll also send you a lot of immediate referral traffic from the site you post on.

Start by thinking of as many related niches as you can, then generate as many ways as possible to add value to those niches.

3. Boring niche? Here’s how to make it more fun

What can you do in a boring niche?

Can you really make painting homes fun?

If you approach the subject with a notion that it is, in fact, boring, then you probably can’t.

But usually, there are ways to make content at the very least entertaining.

Brian Dean did a great case study of this exact idea. Mike Bonadio, who runs an SEO agency based in NYC, had a client who worked in bug control—boring.

However, he created a high quality infographic on an interesting topic: how bugs can help you defeat garden pests. That infographic got picked up by a few prominent blogs:

Gardening is a related niche for pest control (just as we discussed in the previous section).

But Mike took it a step further by creating “fun” content.

Bugs aren’t supposed to be fun, but he made it fun by focusing on the benefits that bugs can provide.

And you can do this in every niche by focusing on exciting benefits and surprises instead of the boring parts.

For example, do you seal driveways?

Well, that seems boring at first, but what if you created content like:

• How many gallons of sealant would it take to seal Leonardo DiCaprio’s driveway?


• Choosing the wrong driveway sealant will cost you money: A comparison of the true cost of paving a driveway

I’m not so sure that all of those are real things, but the point remains. Turn the boring parts into an important element of a story, but not the main focus.

Back to the case study—how did it go?

Extremely well, I’d say. After Mike reached out to sites in that related niche, he was able to get over 60 referring domains and hundreds of links:

On top of that, he got over 2,100 views from referral traffic in the short term. His client’s site still ranks #4 for the term “exterminator NYC.”

Can you make your niche interesting to your customers? I know this is difficult and requires some thinking, so let me give you another example: Blendtec.

Blendtec is a company that sells…blenders.

Not exactly a sexy product.

However, you might have heard of their “Will it Blend?” video series.

In these videos, they blend all kinds of crazy objects, like iPhones, superglue, and even skeletons to answer the question: “Will it blend?”

They now get millions of views on each video they produce.

More importantly, those videos get linked to a lot, and those videos link back to Blendtec’s website, which makes them rank highly for all sorts of blender-related terms.

4. Don’t start from scratch

If you’re in a hard niche and you also have a brand new website, it’s going to be a long journey to SEO success.

For some types of businesses, most notably local businesses, you have an alternative: use another site’s domain authority.

For example, if you search for “plumbing Chicago,” you get these results just below a map of a few plumbers:

Notice that these listings aren’t of sites that actual plumbers own but of review sites such as Yelp.

Any business can create a page on Yelp, which will automatically have more search authority than your brand new site.

More importantly, these sites have that authority because they already have good search optimization and huge quantities of backlinks.

All you need to do is show up highly on their important pages, and your page (on their site) will rank highly in the search results.

You don’t need links to do this. Usually, you just need reviews.

If you run a great business, these aren’t too difficult to get. Just ask all your happy customers to leave a review (and give them instructions).

In addition, here are some more resources that will help you get more online reviews:

• 5 Techniques to Get 5 Stars: How to Get More (and Better) Online Reviews


• How To Get Great Online Reviews of Your Business


• 7 Secrets to Getting Positive Online Reviews

5. Competitor analysis is always an important first step

The final complaint that I hear is that “no one links out in my niche.”

Well, I’ll tell you something: everyone else is getting their links from somewhere.

And with the tools available to you today, there’s no reason why you can’t get many of those same links.

This is not a new technique, but it remains one of the most cost-efficient and effective ways of getting backlinks and improving your search rankings.

It’s not difficult either, but it will take some work on your part.

Here’s the simple procedure.

Step #1 – Make a list of competitors: First you need a list of sites similar to your own—your competitors.

If they are similar, you should be able to get most of the same links they have.

To make this list, start searching for popular terms in your niche, and then write down the URLs of the top 10 results (or fewer) in a spreadsheet or list:

If it’s a site on a specific topic, you can write down just the domain name, but if it’s a huge site (like hgtv), copy down the exact URL of the page.

Step #2 – Get a list of their backlinks: Next, you need to sign up for either Ahrefs or Majestic.

Those are not affiliate links; those are just the two best link databases by far.

The small monthly cost is more than worth it if you’re serious about SEO.

Go through your list, one by one, and enter the URLs or domain names into the site explorer:

Then, go to the “backlinks” panel on the results, and you’ll get a list of all the backlinks to that page or site:

Step #3 – Determine if it’s possible to get any of those links: Here’s where the work really comes in.

You need to visit each of those pages that link to your target page and see if it’s possible for you to get a similar link on those pages.

For example, one of the above links looks like this:

It’s a page that links to tons of resources.

If you had an appropriate resource page, it would be simple enough to email the owner and ask to be included.

Other times, you might see that the link is from a guest post. You can email the owner pitching a guest post of your own.

While you won’t get a 100% success rate, you will be able to duplicate a good portion of the links for each competitor.

The links are out there, and this is one of the best ways to find them.

One final note is that I recommend you batch each step to improve your efficiency.

Don’t try to get each link as soon as you find it. Instead, record it in a spreadsheet, and do all your link outreach at once.

Conclusion

Not all niches are created equal.

Some are in fact more difficult when it comes to SEO.

However, that doesn’t mean that it’s not doable.

I’ve shown you 5 ways that can help you improve your search traffic in almost any industry (hard ones included).

Start by trying out at least one of these, if not more.

If you have any success stories about SEO in a boring niche, I’d love it if you shared them in a comment below.

CardioBrief: Triglycerides Cause CV Disease, Genetic Studies Say

(MedPage Today) -- Two large studies point to important role

How to Execute Event Marketing like a Data-Driven Machine

We know you’re a data-driven marketer – a thoroughly Modern Marketing Maven. You have put together a powerful arsenal of marketing tools which include:  

• Customized emails to nurture prospects through their buying journey, with nurturing tracks and lead scoring to tell you which ones are hot and which are not.


• Content marketing assets, both static and video to engage, educate and inspire your readers.


• SEO, pay-per-click and social programs to ensure that your messages are heard by your intended audience.

And of course, you’ve integrated those workflows so that Sales has the information to reach out to the right contact at the right time to achieve their goals and make happy customers out of curious contacts. Because you value data-driven decision-making, you’ve merged the data from each of these channels to inform your actions and evaluate the effectiveness of each campaign.

But what about events? While you and your sales team know events are a great way to interact with current and future customers, you still have no way to use the data collected at these events to drive campaigns. Nor do you have a way to attribute revenue to this resource-intensive marketing investment, or to show ROI from events. Like most B2B marketers, 30% of your marketing spend is allocated to events, but if you’re not sure if you’re maximizing the effect of this critical marketing tactic, you are not making the best use of the data collected with events, and you don’t have line of sight into the impact of these events.

This brings up two important questions: what steps can you be taking so that your event and marketing automation systems are in-sync and you capture valuable attendee insights? And secondly, what are the essential elements of the event lifecycle and how can you measure event success?

To help you answer these questions, we’ve developed an event marketing infographic so that you can see how you can leverage the data from events, prospect data from your marketing automation system, and customer data from your CRM system to accelerate sales, engage attendees, inform your marketing decisions, and demonstrate ROI for events. This infographic illustrates the relationships between systems before, during and after the event, and this information will help you craft your data strategy and attendee engagement approach so that you can do event marketing like a data-driven machine. (Click the link above or this box to view the infographic).

Stakeholders work together to define your audience and event objectives

Not all attendees are created equally, nor do they all have the same objectives. So you’ll want to identify your target audience: is your event designed for customers? Prospects? Partners? All of these? “Big tent” events typically include a wide variety of audience types. If this is the case for your event, you’ll want to ensure that you have specific definitions of success for each of those audiences. In addition, different stakeholders within your company may have different definitions of success, so giving yourself plenty of lead time to bring those stakeholders together to agree on success metrics will be critical.

The same can be said of event stakeholders – they may have different definitions of success as well. Stakeholder types for a big event may include: Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Professional Services, Business Development, Product Management and others. Smaller events may include a subset of these. For either type of event, work with stakeholders to define different buying journeys for the attendee types which are of greatest interest to them. Then, define success for those attendee types.  

For example, Sales will want to convert prospects to customers.  They will focus on prospects who are far along in their buying journey. So, this stakeholder type will be measuring revenue.

Customer Success may be working towards customer satisfaction or cross-selling to an existing customer. Product Management may be seeking customer feedback with the ultimate goal of increasing NPS scores or additional product adoption. And of course, Marketing will likely define success in terms of number of leads.

Deliver a customized pre-event experience

Start with your marketing database of record to segment according to your intended audiences. This could include prospects, existing customers, various partners of all types, event sponsors, VIP’s, event staff and other employees. You will do your segmentation here and customize each message to the attendee type and their pre-event interactions. This is where the richness of your event data begins. Since registrants are typically more willing to share accurate information for an event than they are for other marketing channels, take this opportunity to ask questions regarding their preferences, use updated profile information to refresh your marketing database profiles, track who views your promotional video content and capture custom agenda items as your attendee builds their agenda – these are all interest indicators and buying signals!

Use customized landing pages for each participant type as well. Think about using profile and interest data to define and deliver custom-generated content as well as video to engage your attendees and build excitement around the event. Let your attendees “pre-build” a customized agenda by using a mobile app as a way to personalize the experience and allow you to collect more data prior to the event. Pre-schedule meetings during the event based on this information.

The big day is here!

At the event, collect attendee interest indicators and buying signals. These are collected through the initial badging process, badge scans at sessions, check-ins at pre-scheduled meetings, specific product areas or micro-events, badge scans at booths, at-event surveys at kiosks, polling questions during sessions, and appointment scheduling using your event app. Push this data into your marketing automation system so that you can take action in real time: request a follow-up appointment from the attendee, alert Customer Success of an unhappy user that they need to contact, text Sales that a prospect is broadcasting buying signals and to get to the meet-up location (stat!) to do an on-the-fly demo, notify the attendee of related sessions or assets related to their expressed interest, moving them along in their buying journey.   

After the event

Link your marketing database to your event management solution. Of course, your Marketing Automation system receives all this detailed data from the event management system. Now you have enhanced profile information for your attendees as well as interest and engagement data to use for lead scoring and nurturing as well as for analyzing the effectiveness of the event.

After the event, use all the information and interest signals to move your prospect through the sales cycle.  Do you need to reach out to schedule a demo, offer a related product or service, arrange a little more face time? The information gleaned about prospects at an event add color and texture to a prospect whose needs and interests could be otherwise somewhat opaque.  

So that Sales has all this “profile plus” information at their fingertips you will want to ensure that your marketing automation and CRM systems are synchronized in real time as well. Some organizations structure their marketing data architecture differently and maintain a master marketing database of record outside the operational systems of marketing automation or CRM, and synchronization of all operational systems is to that database. That works too!

Back to your attendee - since you have such good information about your attendees, you can send customized follow-up, rather than a generic “thank you.” Do thank them, but create value by including relevant information, advice, or recommendations.

Finally, do the analysis. What’s the ROI for the event? Because it’s all linked to specific prospects and you have included events in the map of each customer’s journey and tied it to revenue, you can include that event spend into your attribution model with all your other marketing activities. The result is credible ROI than can drive decision for future marketing investments.

Your events are no longer cost line items, they’re investments with a proven return and you have line of sight into the impact of all your marketing programs — whether digital marketing campaigns or face to face events.  So start planning your next event like a data-driven machine!

Since marketing automation is a key part of this data-driven process, download the Marketing Automation Simplified guide to get your machine up and running.

Donald Trump Releases Details Of Health Care Plan

Donald Trump has promised to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, and now he has released some more details of how he would do that on his website.