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Bing Ads Sneak Peeks Editor Updates, Acknowledges Burning Mac Version Question

Ginny Marvin

Microsoft’s Ping Jen has posted a look at upcoming changes to Bing Ads Editor, the desktop tool for managing Bing Ads campaigns. The changes include an updated user interface (UI) and faster data uploading. The UI updates are designed to make the editor align with “what you’re…

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Silicon Valley: Preaching to the Choir?

Bas van den Beld

The criticism amongst those not in Silicon Valley is that people within Silicon Valley only look at each other. But are they really?

Post from on State of Search
Silicon Valley: Preaching to the Choir?

Helping fund a non-profit: the digital donation funnel

Andrew Isidoro

A non-profit’s unique donor conversion funnel, steps that a prospective online supporter goes through before donating, is not a new concept to many third sector digital marketers.

Though each process is exclusive to the charity in question there are some basic similarities in the marketing process that we can explore:

Donor Funnel

Understanding your audience

By gaining a solid understanding of your market segments and their location in your donor funnel you can focus on providing them with the right message at the right time to improve their chances of converting into a paying supporter.

Marketing personas are a fantastic tool to create a well-rounded view of your charity’s market segments by forming a personification of your market segments to use as a reference point within campaigns.

Gather your existing data

Start by gathering all available qualitative and quantitative information about those who have already interacted with the brand; from recent event signups and newsletter subscribers to regular financial contributors.

When searching for demographic data for your personas, look no further than your own organisation’s social network profiles.

People freely volunteer their demographic information on social networks providing you with information such as age, gender, location and language about those already engaging with your non-profit. You can also gather information on demographics based on the advertising profiles of websites.

There are a number of great tools that can be used to mine persona data such as:

Don’t forget to have a look into your own website analytics data as this can be a great source of data to help identify intent and offer other clues about user behaviour.

Probe for more detail

Finding demographic data is great but it often needs supplementing with further information to get the full picture. Expand your research by gathering more qualitative customer feedback to deepen your insight into your chosen segment’s decision-making process.

Use wider market research (Econsultancy’s own resource section always a good source of information) to look for commonalities that align with the data you have already captured.

Build a data-centric set of personas

Using all of the data gathered you can begin to piece together a set of marketing personas that blend all of your research into a series of documents, each focused around a single personification of a market segment as this example highlights. Remember to maintain your persona profiles by adding in new data to keep them fresh.

With the persona completed, you now have a (hypothetical) person that represents a whole market segment. This allows you to imagine, understand and plan your campaign around how they might act in response to your charity’s marketing methods.

Awareness

Being aware of what affects a donor’s decision-making process is vital and allows you to tailor each of your marketing activities to guide prospective donors through the donor funnel, beginning with an awareness campaign focused on each persona’s specific characteristics.

This is the stage in which you can begin to raise the awareness of your cause in the mind of the supporter. Though each campaign needs to be creative and innovative there is value in learning from past attempts from similar organisations.

There are some fantastic examples of broad awareness campaigns in practice such as Water is Life’s great #FirstWorldProblems campaign.

This not only raised awareness of the good work the charity does but also gained monumental support from national media. Raising your awareness of your charity’s issues through real stories can be a great way to humanise a digital entity.

Use your social media accounts to share insight into the good work being done, the people being helped or the situations that need assistance from your supporters.

Engagement

Awareness campaigns are great in getting your cause in front of new audiences but to drive real value from those messages you need to engage with your new found friends.

Evaluate the responses to your awareness campaign and you will begin to identify influential evangelists that have shared, commented on, written about and helped broadcast your message. These people are fantastic to interact with as they are already open to your brand and interested in furthering your cause.

There are many tools on the market that attempt to measure the social influence of a user such as Klout and PeerIndex. These can be really useful as long as you understand the limitations social influence apps like these have.

Now that you have a list of prominent users, by reaching out to them to discuss your next campaign we can help drive social sharing of future releases and use their influence to create a network of vocal supporters.

This can be especially effective when working with bloggers as new relationships with their audiences as well as the SEO benefits you gain can drive real value.

Donation

Once a user has been engaged they are much more likely to convert into a paid supporter of your cause as they not only understand the need for their donation but also have a genuine relationship with the brand that further extends their empathy for the cause.

The key to success at this stage is to understand that the web has made us all incredibly lazy and impatient. Make donating easy. Keep web forms fields to a minimum and make sure that your website load times are kept to a minimum to stop users from bouncing away from your signup forms at the last minute.

How do you tailor your marketing approach to your organisation’s unique conversion funnel? Let me know in the comments below!

Companies more focused on acquisition than retention: stats

Graham Charlton

Acquisition vs retention

For many marketers, it is a given that it is cheaper to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones, particularly in industries, such as car insurance, where the lifetime value of a customer is a more significant metric than the profit arising from an individual sale. 

There are plenty of stats to back up the importance of retention: 

  • Attracting a new customer costs five times as much as keeping an existing one. (Lee Resources 2010).
  • Globally, the average value of a lost customer is $243.(KISSmetrics).
  • 71% of consumers have ended their relationship with a company due to poor customer service. (KISSMetrics).
  • The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20% (Marketing Metrics).

Companies and agencies were asked to provide details on their own and their clients’ marketing efforts specifically in the context of acquisition and retention.

  • Both companies and agency clients are significantly more likely to be focused on acquisition than retention (44% vs. 16% for companies and 58% vs. 12% for agency clients).
  • A substantial number state that they have an equal focus on acquisition and retention with this being the case for 40% of company respondents and 30% of agency clients.

Is your company more focused on acquisition or retention marketing? 

When compared against where they think they should focus, far fewer companies think they should be focused more on acquisition and see the value of a more balanced approach. 

  • Just 21% of company respondents think they should be more focused on acquisition.
  • 22%  believe they should focus more on retention.
  • 56% believe there should be an equal focus.

On which area do you think your organisation should be more focused? (company respondents) 

Responses on the agency-side were even more pronounced, with just 15% stating that they believe their clients should be more focused on acquisition. 

Channels used for acquisition and retention

Not surprisingly, PPC, display and SEO were seen as acquisition channels by the vast majority of respondents, while email was the major retention tool, followed by mobile messaging. 

Thinking about your organisation, are the following online channels more geared towards acquisition or retention marketing? (company respondents) 


For more on customer retention, here are 21 ways that online businesses can improve their customer retention rates. 

 

Econsultancy’s JUMP event on October 9 is all about creating excellent multichannel customer experiences. Now, in its fourth year it will be attended by more than 1,200 senior client-side marketers. This year it forms part of our week-long Festival of Marketing extravaganza.

The Future of User Behavior – Whiteboard Friday

willcritchlow

Posted by willcritchlow

In the early days of search, Google used only your typed query to find the most relevant results. We’re now increasingly seeing SERPs that are influenced by all kinds of contextual information — the implicit queries.

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Will Critchlow covers what exactly that means and how it might explain why we see “(not provided)” in our analytics more often than we’d like.

WBF – Will Critchlow – The Future of User Behavior

PRO Tip: Learn more about how Google ranks pages at Moz Academy.

For reference, here’s a still image of this week’s whiteboard:

Video Transcription

Hi, Moz fans. I’m Will Critchlow, one of the fans of Distilled, and I want to talk today about the future of user behavior, something that I’ve been talking about a MozCon this year. In particular, I want to talk about the implications of query enhancement. So I’m going to start by telling you what we mean by this phrase.

Old-school query, key phrase, this is what we’ve talked about for a long time. In SEO, something like “London tube stations,” a bunch of words strung together, that’s the entire query, and we would call it a query or a key phrase. But we’ve been defining this what we call the “new query” made up of two parts. The explicit query here in blue is London tube stations, again, in this example, exactly the same. What we’re calling the “implicit query” is essentially all of the other information that the search engine knows about you, and this what they know about you in general, what they know about you at this specific moment in time, and what they know about your recent history and any other factors they want to factor in.

So, in this particular case, I’ve said this is an iPhone user, they’re on the street, they’re in London. You can imagine how this information changes the kind of thing that you might be looking for when you perform a query like this or indeed any other.

This whole model is something that we’ve been kind of building out and thinking about a lot this year. Tom Anthony, one of my colleagues in London, presented this at a conference, and we’ve been working on it together. We came up with this kind of visual representation of what we think is happening over time. As people get used to this behavior, they see it in the search results, and they adapt to the information that they’re receiving back from the search engine.

So old school search results where everybody’s search result was exactly the same, if they performed a particular query, no matter where in the world they were, wherever in the country they were, whatever device they were on, whatever time of day it was, whatever their recent history, everybody’s was the same. In other words, the only information that the search engine is taking into account in this case is the old-style query, the explicit part.

Then, what we’ve seen is that there’s gradually been this implicit query information being added on top. You may not be able to see it from my brilliant hand-drawn diagram here, but my intention is that these blue bars are the same height out to here. So, at this point, there’s all of the explicit query information being passed over. In other words, I’m doing the same kind of search I’ve always done. But Google is taking into account this extra, implicit information about me, what it knows about me, what it knows about my device, what it knows about my history and so forth. Therefore, Google has more information here than they did previously. They can return better results.

That’s kind of what we’ve been talking about for a long time, I think, this evolution of better search results based on the additional information that the search engines have about us. But what we’re starting to see and what we’re certainly predicting is going to become more and more prevalent is that as the implicit information that search engines have grows, and, in particular, as their ability to use that information intelligently improves, then we’re actually going to see users start to give less explicit information over. In other words, they’re going to trust that the search engines are going to pull out the implicit information that they need. So I can do a much shorter, simpler query.

But what you see here is, again, to explain my hand-drawn diagram in case it’s not perfectly beautiful, the blue bars are declining here. In other words, I’m sending less and less explicit information over as time goes along. But actually, the total information that search engines have to work with, as time goes on, is actually increasing, because the implicit information they’re gathering is growing faster than the explicit information is declining.

I can give you a concrete example of this. So I vividly remember giving a talk about keyword research, and it was a few years ago. I was kind of mocking that business owner. We’ve all met these business owners who want to rank for the one-word key phrase. So I want to rank for restaurant or whatever. I say, “This is ridiculous. What in the world can you imagine somebody is possibly looking for when they do a search of ‘restaurant.’ ”

Back then, if you did a search like that, you got a kind of weird mix, because this is back in these days when there essentially no implicit information being taken in. You’ve got a mix of the most powerful websites of actual restaurants anywhere in your country plus some news, like a powerful page on a big domain, those kinds of things. Probably a Wikipedia entry. Why would a business owner want to rank for that stuff? That’s going to convert horribly poorly.

But my mind was changed powerfully when I caught myself. I was in Boston, and I caught myself doing a search for “breakfast.” I went to Google, typed in “breakfast,” hit Search. What was I thinking? What exactly was I hoping the outcome was going to be here? Well, actually, I’ve trained myself to believe that all of this other implicit information is going to be taken into account, and, in fact, it was. So, instead of getting that old-style Wikipedia entry, a news result, a couple of random restaurants from somewhere in the country, I got a local pack, and I got some local Boston news articles on the top 10 places to have breakfast in Boston. It was all customized to my exact location, so I got some stuff that was really near me, and I found a great place to have breakfast just around the corner from the hotel. So that worked.

I’ve actually noticed myself doing this more and more, and I imagine, given obviously the industry I work in, I’m pretty much an early adopter here. But I think we’re going to see all users adopt this style of searching more and more, and it’s really going to change how we as marketers have to think, because it doesn’t mean that you need to go out there and rank for the generic keyword “breakfast.” But it does mean that you need to take into account all of the possible ways that people might be searching for these things and the various different ways that Google might piece together a useful search result when somebody gives them such apparently unhelpful explicit information, in particular, obviously, in this case, local.

I kind of mentioned “not provided” down here. This is my one, I guess, non-
conspiracy theory view of what could be going on with the whole not provided thing, which is that actually, if Google’s model is looking more and more like this and less like this, and, in particular, as we get further over to this end, and of course, you can consider something like Google Now would be the extreme of this where is in fact no blue bar and pure orange, then actually the reliance on keywords goes away. Maybe the not provided thing is actually more of a strategic message for Google, kind of saying, “We’re not necessarily thinking in terms of keywords anymore. We’re thinking in terms of your need at a given moment in time.”

So, anyway, I hope that’s been a useful kind of rapid-fire run through over what I think is going to happen as people get used to the power of query enhancement. I’m Will Critchlow. Until next time, thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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SMX Social Media Marketing Agenda Posted – Register With Super Early Bird Rates!

Search Engine Land

Attend Search Engine Land’s SMX Social Media Marketing conference for two days of tactic-rich sessions on paid, earned, and owned social media. View the agenda here. All Access, Workshop, and Boot Camp passes currently available at our lowest Super Early Bird rates. Register now and save up…

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