Farah is a Senior Product Marketing Manager in Marin's Austin office. She's responsible for developing positioning, messaging, and competitive differentiation, and enables the Sales and Marketing teams to ensure they're aligned and working efficiently to generate and close opportunities.
In recent months, brands and retailers have had to adapt to a pandemic that no one saw coming, and one thing is for certain: engagement on sponsored content is increasing with more people at home and on social media. And while the pros of influencer marketing were prevalent to brands prior to COVID-19 (building trust and credibility, expanding your brand’s reach, etc), this new landscape requires both brands and influencers to adapt quickly to a market where priorities have shifted, consumers may be more sensitive, and actions may be more highly scrutinized.
Let’s take a look at how influencer marketing has evolved in recent years, what has changed during the COVID-19 crisis, and what brands can do now to stay impactful and relevant.
In a 2019 benchmark report by Influencer Marketing Hub, 92% of consumers believed that influencer marketing was an effective form of marketing. Due in part to features like Checkout on Instagram, which allows consumers to select from various options such as size or color and proceed to payment without leaving Instagram, 83% of consumers surveyed claimed to purchase items that are advertised by influencers.
The influencer marketing platform market is also growing at incredible scale as brands and agencies look to foster deeper connections with consumers being “influenced.”. With over 300 new influencer marketing-focused platforms and agencies entering the market in 2019, brands can now easily discover potential influencers, develop relationships with influencers, and run campaigns.
And while Instagram continues to dominate influencer marketing, other digital platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn increasingly play a pivotal role in extending a brand’s reach to engaged audiences.
Upon the introduction of COVID-19, the average screen time has increased and consumer habits have shifted, meaning that brands need to be vigilant about hitting all digital platforms more than ever. During this unprecedented event, trusted social media influencers continue to be a reliable source of information and an effective, authentic way to communicate with target audiences.
Here are some best practices for influencer marketing in the wake of COVID-19.
A good example of a brand effectively using influencer marketing is Alo Yoga. With spin classes, weight rooms and other fitness venues closed temporarily, health & wellness brands are creating unique ways for people to continue their daily workout routines during COVID-19 to stay active at home. The team at Alo Yoga entered into a partnership with influencer Callie Gullickson, who helped promote a workout series called Sweat & Tone (hosted on Instagram Live). Not only did Callie help increase awareness of the brand with her extensive following, but Alo Yoga also increased customer engagement with highly intensive workouts, which resulted in more traffic to its website, and better brand recognition and loyalty in a highly competitive space.
With demands shifting, and as both brands and influencers need to output the right kind of content in order to strive in a post-COVID climate, we can expect a lot more storytelling, with influencers showing their followers how they adapt to life at home and how different brands play into their new routines. Live content will also continue to become more popular, as professionals from all industries look for safe ways to stay connected, from athletic trainers to business consultants to live performers. Not to mention the element of authenticity and humanity Instagram Live brings to users.
The most human brands will continue to come out on top, especially the ones that invest in building long-lasting connections with their customers and partake in cultural conversations that are considered important to their target demographic. And, as the near-term effects of the coronavirus outbreak continue to be felt across the global economy, businesses and creators in the influencer marketing industry will continue to adapt to the new “consumer state of mind” by developing strategies with active listening of their consumers’ needs and determining how their brand fits into people’s new routines under #socialdistancing.
From spend monitoring to ad ranking, keeping tabs on your campaign performance across your different marketing channels can be a lot of work. And because optimization is the key to a successful campaign, it’s good to stay in the know. However, most of us are not on our computers all the time, so we need an easy and efficient way to stay on top of it all, and be notified of any major changes immediately.
With Marin’s Automated Alerts, you can stay in the know with automatic monitoring and notifications for all your marketing campaigns. These alerts bring changes directly to your inbox, so that you can be notified as soon as they happen. This means timelier analysis and action, so that your campaigns can continue running smoothly even while you're away.
Check out these 5 alerts that you can set up in Marin to stay productive, optimize strategy, and make the most out of each advertising dollar.
This may feel pretty standard. But as a reminder, the cost of an acquisition or conversion is important to ensure not only that our ads are converting, but that they are doing so at a profitable rate. It is important to modify an alert like this one with an impressions count to be sure that an ad or campaign has reached enough users to properly determine an ideal CPA.
Example: Alert me if impressions are greater than 1000 and CPA is greater than X.
This can help you monitor your budget pacing, and view the rate at which your campaigns spend. Take action before your cap is hit so that you make adjustments to achieve your performance goals.
Example: Alert me if total spend > $950 (where spend cap = $1000).
If your strategy includes top or absolute top impression share, this alert is for you. By receiving a notification when an ad’s impression share drops below your target, you can take the appropriate action (improve ad ranking, evaluate keywords, expand budget) before falling too far behind.
Example: Alert me if the impression share drops by more than 10%
If you’re testing out some new keywords for your campaigns, use this alert to monitor their performance and iterate when necessary. This alert is great for keyword strategy
Example: Alert me if CTR is less than 3% for selected keywords.
Your ads may not be converting because of audience targeting, ad copy, or user-experience on your landing page, you want to be notified about ads that don’t lead consumers to the end goal of a purchase or sign-up. This helps you save money and optimize your campaign for success.
Example: Alert me if I’ve spent more than $1000 and conversion rate is less than 10%.
Once you’ve created these alerts, you can breathe a bit easier knowing that if something dramatically shifts in a campaign, you’ll be notified and can take action immediately. Automated alerts in Marin are customizable and can be set up in just a few minutes. Schedule time with an account representative today to learn more!
In the world of search marketing, we are all very familiar with Google’s Smart Bidding. It combines machine learning and contextual signals to optimize bids at the auction level, and incorporates billions of data signals to calculate the likelihood of a conversion, based on the performance targets that have been set.
There are also a number of reasons why Smart Bidding works well for a business--it analyzes search queries rather than keywords, it leverages auction-time signals that are available exclusively via Google (browser, language settings, operation system, app, actual query, ad creative), and it incorporates a user’s historical behavior, like click and conversion rates, to determine bids.
This often prompts the question…”Well then why should we use Marin (or frankly any other bidding algorithm) when Google already has such a mature bidding solution in place?”
Well, here are a few limitations you should consider before putting all your eggs in the Smart Bidding basket:
Marin’s proprietary bidding algorithms stay agile and reactive to market changes, and are more flexible to meet the needs of your business. We ensure optimal allocation of your advertising dollars, and are entirely transparent in how we calculate our bids. Not to mention our solution optimizes for the advertiser, not the publisher, and works across many different channels.
Want to learn more about our premium bid management solutions? Schedule a demo with one of our dedicated account representatives today!
As digital marketers, we know that Google has implemented a lot of machine learning features into its bidding platform in recent years. We’re at a point where you can create campaigns in Google Ads and the search giant will pretty much optimize everything for you.
Smart Bidding, in particular, optimizes your bids to maximize conversions, tapping into Google’s vast tank of signals—including user search query, browser, and language settings; location; and a user’s historical behavior to predict the likelihood of a conversion. From there, Smart Bidding increases your bids when a conversion appears more likely.
But which tools can you leverage to gain an even bigger advantage with Smart Bidding?
When thinking of ways to be more strategic with Smart Bidding, the first thing to consider is your data integration. Marketing needs to be data-driven to be effective. There’s a lot of data you can generate in today’s world, and the data you’re pulling will be the core of a successful marketing strategy.
If you know your target user’s behavior, goals, pain points, and challenges, you can develop marketing campaigns that cater to their specific needs. Some of the data you could be collecting includes:
Marketing analytics and data are playing a larger and larger role in strategizing your business forward. The more insight you have, the better, more strategic decisions you can make. Which begs the question: are you incorporating all the data you have available?
Once you have the right data integrated, it’s important to assess your KPIs, or choose what to measure. You should always measure quantifiable metrics that align with your organization’s goals.
We often see brands optimizing to a CPA. However, this approach is far from ideal if you have different margins for groups or categories of products, and doesn’t follow the logic that “not all orders are created equal.” It’s always good to occasionally review KPIs—you can often realize huge gains by adjusting to a more granular KPI.
In addition to the above, “not all customers are created equal,” either. At Marin, we believe that customer lifetime value (CLV) remains one of the best metrics to understand the overall impact of your performance advertising campaigns. Your customers aren’t just worth the amount of money they spend on your business today. They have future value if you’re able to retain them as customers.
Smart Bidding can only reach the next level of maturity when it works on conversion data that differentiates between the first transaction of a new customer and repeat purchases. Typically, only a CRM system can tell which of the two happened. And while connecting conversion tracking to CRMs presents a challenge to digital marketers, it’s possible with the right development resources.
Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s talk about how you can improve performance with signals that matter to your business.
Using Smart Bidding means relinquishing control across different market segments to what Google interprets as the most likely to convert. That’s fine in a vacuum, but an advertiser will commonly know more about their business than what’s reflected in historical online conversion metrics.
Still, there are many unique factors and trends that impact you as an individual advertiser that publishers aren’t aware of, such as seasonality, ratings, new product launches, coverage in the media, or social media buzz. Incorporating extraneous or contextual data into bid optimization can help you gain a competitive advantage and understand consumer intent—meaning more sales and revenue.
Weather and television-based contextual marketing are some of the more prominent examples of contextual marketing, but there’s no shortage of additional opportunities.
To give you an idea of how online KPIs can sometimes not match the real world, imagine a car rental company. If a particular location has very little inventory left, it might be worth considering bidding down, since a high percentage of traffic wouldn’t be able to rent.
Similarly, if a location has excess inventory, consider bidding up!
Modifiers can also be very useful to help handle promotional adjustments. Many brands have a calendar of sales or promotions, and while some of these happen at the same time every year, it’s likely that many are ad hoc, occur for different product lines, and happen for varying lengths of time each year.
Since all bidding engines leverage historical data, there will always be a delay from when a promotion begins to when bids are adjusted. Therefore, it’s important to modify your bid on the day the sale begins to capitalize, and likewise when a sale is over and conversions get back to ‘business as usual’—applying a negative modifier helps prevent overspending on bids while the bidding engine adjusts.
This is far more difficult to achieve with Smart Bidding, but easier by leveraging Google Ads scripts or a tech partner like Marin.
Once you’ve covered the basics and started to apply adjustments for your specific business data, another challenge that many brands face is optimizing to multiple stages of a conversion funnel.
There are many options for how to look to optimize in the most efficient manner. You could look to optimize to the point highest up the funnel—or the ‘lead.’ Or you can optimize to final sale.
However, if you have a long latency period from initial lead to final purchase, this limits how reactive bidding can be to current conditions, especially if you change targets. While it’s best practice to remove the days of latency from bidding decisions to make sure you’re using accurate data, it’s important to remember that it’s not current data.
So...what is the best bid strategy to optimize to downstream revenue in the bid calculation?
In the above example, we have a number of users who see an ad for a performance marketer. Some of the users will click the ad and decide it’s not a good fit for them, others will register, fewer others will continue to pay for a trial after being contacted, and finally even fewer will decide to buy the full product/service.
At Marin, we recommend trying to find the ‘best of both worlds’ to account for every step of the funnel, which requires making multiple bid runs. First, run bid calculations to the highest point of the funnel, or the ‘lead’, and then additional bid runs to calculate for the other points in the funnel or final revenue.
In this example, one keyword creates lots of leads, and therefore an accurate bid optimizing to leads equates to $5.
The second keyword creates far less leads, so a bid calculation for this keyword equates to $1.50.
However, the first keyword results in far less revenue from all those leads than the other keyword, and therefore a second bid run would need to calculate the adjustment required.
The first keyword is adjusted -50% to create a final bid of $2.50. The second keyword, which creates more revenue overall and far more revenue per lead, is adjusted by +500% to give a final bid of $7.50.
Marketers can leverage Marin’s full-funnel bid strategy to stay reactive and make sure the top of funnel is optimized.
These days, a data-driven marketer has to answer many budget allocation questions. Where should I invest my next dollar? Am I going to hit my revenue goals? Will I spend my entire budget? Plus, today’s online customer journey isn’t as simple as it used to be.
Consumers switch between channels (and devices) as they move down the purchase funnel, from inspiration and product discovery to more focused product research and comparison, and finally to conversion.
The million dollar question is always how and where to spend your budget. While we’re not going to touch so much on attribution, it’s important to note that leveraging predictive models to correctly allocate budgets across different campaigns and channels can help drive overall uplift.
With tools like Marin’s Budget Optimizer, marketers can forecast, monitor, and automatically reallocate budgets across their most efficient campaigns and marketing channels with ease.
Take this WorldFirst customer example.
Using historical performance, Marin’s algorithm paced the budget across search and social to achieve the best results per the customer’s business objectives. As a result, WorldFirst has seen conversions increase by 107%, and has a much better understanding of which campaigns drove more sales and where budgets were best allocated.
This kind of financial modeling can be applied on top of your bid strategies to have a continuous view of investment opportunities and high-potential returns.
Finally, let’s finish with thoughts of technology.
To recap the above: while Smart Bidding does offer a quick answer to some common PPC challenges, Google’s broad data doesn’t necessarily reflect your target audiences, which are unique from the average user.
More importantly, Smart Bidding gives you no visibility or control over the data being used, which means an advertiser has no access to the complete bid history of any keyword or any individual auction. For advertisers looking to analyze granular performance, the possibilities with Google are limited.
To truly maximize your campaign performance, you need to take control of your own bids and the data being used to optimize them, and do so in an automated fashion.
Leveraging a third-party advertising technology tool like Marin can help you coordinate with Smart Bidding. Marin works as a performance layer for those who want a powerful bidding solution to automatically scale their accounts while maintaining a certain degree of control.
eCPC is a smart bidding strategy that allows you to continue to place the base bid outside of Google, while still allowing Google to make the ‘Auction Side Adjustments’ based on the data they hold. This is almost the “best of both worlds” and allows you to capitalize on some of the strategies we’ve discussed, without giving up Smart Bidding as your automated bidding solution.
By using this hybrid approach, Marin continues to help brands outsmart Smart Bidding, or more accurately, work hand in hand with Google to get an edge over their competitors.
We’ve talked about several areas you can focus on to drive uplift:
Want to learn more? Join our webinar, How to Outsmart Smart Bidding, on Wednesday, December 11th at 10am PT / 1pm ET.
Automation should be a key part of any marketer's toolkit, reducing time spent on repetitive tasks and avoiding missed opportunities. Marin’s automation features will help free up your marketing team’s time from performing mundane work, and give them the capacity to brainstorm new ideas and boost productivity in other areas. These tools do a lot more than just making sure you don’t forget things—they make the existing workflows in Marin even more powerful.
For over a decade, we’ve been making it easier to manage the complexity that goes into digital marketing. Here, we highlight three ways our advertisers automate their efforts to simplify their work.
Over time, any automated (or manual) bidding solution will bid down underperforming keywords. Generally this is a feature, not a bug—if they’re not converting profitably, you want to minimize wasted ad spend, even when those keywords have generated a decent number of clicks.
However, some of those keywords may be relevant to your organization and perform as your business evolves or competitive conditions change. If you shut off these “low-performance” keywords altogether, you may miss out on some conversion-ready traffic. This is especially true for keywords with low impression share.
With keyword resuscitation, Marin automatically increases your bids temporarily to ensure you’re not missing any click opportunities. If the keywords keep underperforming, Marin bids them back down.
If you find yourself working on Google Ads accounts with hundreds of active campaigns, keeping track of what’s happening where can be a pretty daunting task.
Marin’s Dimensions help keep advertisers organized, by allowing them to easily aggregate their data across an ad group, campaigns, keywords, or the entire account—faster and easier than exporting to Excel and running a pivot table. You can also use Dimensions for tagging your different objects for easy filtering, and then using those filters to monitor performance.
How are your brand campaigns performing against your non-brand campaigns? How are your experimental keywords performing? Do you have promotional ad copy you’re closely monitoring? Do you have different bidding rules you want to manage across your keywords? Dimensions help you tag and streamline all these views.
What about the keywords, ad groups, or campaigns you’ve missed? Manually having to set dimensions for a lot of ads or keywords requires a lot of time and resources.
Now you can auto-populate dimensions based on rules you specify. You can set rules on keyword text, campaign structure, or any performance metric, giving you flexible and powerful control over your reporting.
Always be testing. Your creatives shouldn’t have to have a long shelf life, and you should continually look to improve performance with new messaging ideas.
If you run multiple versions of a creative in a group, Marin can automatically pause the underperformers when there’s statistical significance so you can add a new challenger creative. Even better, with rules-based adjustments, you can replace the loser creatives with new ads, further automating your ad testing experience.
This was just a taste of three automations we frequently see with our customers. We don’t want to limit you just here, however. Marin’s platform is flexible, and it’s easy to get creative to meet your specific business needs.
Whether it’s using performance criteria to automate the movement of your ad groups into different bid strategies, auto-populating objects with missing data, or scheduling ads for special promotions or events, the custom parameters are entirely up to you. Just talk to your account representative and we can get the ball rolling.
Or, if you’re new to Marin and would like to start powering your ad campaigns with easy, time-saving automations, get in touch today.
Earlier this year, Facebook rolled out Automatic Placements, a setting that ensures that your ads will serve on Facebook, Audience Network or Instagram, to achieve your most desired result based on the bidding objective you choose.
Similar to Google, Facebook wants advertisers to entrust its machine learning to place ads in the most effective way possible, with the intention of creating the best user experience and serving the right ad at the right time. Facebook uses advanced algorithms to determine which placement type performs the best and is the most effective for your brand. The algorithms then attempt to serve more ads in those winning bids.
This setting is designed to get your ad the lowest average cost for the event you optimize your campaign for (e.g., link clicks, landing page views, video views). This takes the guesswork out of where your audience is. The Automatic Placements feature also reduces the time it takes to manually optimize placements, since Facebook does it for you, and extends your ads’ reach by enabling placement on more platforms and multiple placements within these platforms.
By choosing Automatic Placement, you tell Facebook to find the most relevant people across all of the eligible placements at the cheapest overall average cost available.
There are 14 placements to run ads within the Facebook Network. We anticipate that number will grow as Facebook expands to more of their network of apps. (We expect to see WhatsApp appear as a placement soon, as well as the Instagram Explore Feed.)
Facebook News Feed
When it comes to serving social media ads, the Facebook News Feed placement is the one that sparked the movement. It’s important to remember that people don’t like being disturbed from their online activities, including Facebook browsing. Placing your ad on the desktop News Feed reduces the intrusiveness of your ads since they appear with the posts of your audience’s Facebook friends and pages they like.
Instagram Feed
Not only do over one billion people use Instagram every month, but engagement numbers for the app are higher than both Facebook and Twitter. For advertisers with highly visual products or services, Instagram ads are a must. As you might have guessed, you only have the capability to target mobile users on Instagram.
Facebook Marketplace Feed
Marketplace is Facebook’s equivalent to eBay and Craigslist. The major advantage it has over the competition is the existing Facebook user base.
Facebook Suggested Video and Facebook Watch Feed
When clicking a video in your mobile News Feed, a “Suggested Video” feed that takes up the entire phone screen can come up. Scroll down on the pop-up and you’ll see additional video suggestions. These are chosen by an algorithm and related by topic or publisher.
Facebook Right Column Sponsored
Right column ads will appear on the right rail or right-hand column of the Facebook screen. This placement is only available to show to consumers on laptop or desktop computers. Right column ads typically have less expensive clicks and conversions, and they also appear smaller and look more like a traditional ad.
Messenger Inbox Feed
This is ideal for companies who want to explain their offer, directly communicate with their audiences, convince them to try another product, or remind them to revisit your store.
Stories Feed Placement for Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger
The Stories platform provides a great space for brands to maximize reach, build brand loyalty, and generate new customers. Since Stories disappear after 24 hours, there’s a lot of opportunity to be experimental, spontaneous, and transparent.
Facebook In-Stream Videos
This ad placement allows advertisers to deliver 5-15 second, non-skippable, mid-roll video ads to people who are already watching Facebook videos on a mobile device. Since these ads don’t appear until at least 60 seconds into the main video content, people are actively engaged in “lean-back” watching mode, and the ad is just like a commercial break for the actual video.
Messenger Sponsored Messages
These are ads directed to target users you’ve already had a past conversation with. They’re messages sent to followers that include relevant promotions. They’re an effective way to re-engage the people who currently have an open chat with your Facebook Page and to nurture those relationships by providing relevant content, promotions, and updates.
Facebook Instant Articles
Unlike the audience network, ads on instant articles are displayed on articles that can be easily loaded on Facebook. Ads are usually sandwiched between paragraphs of the article. This is ideal if you’re targeting audiences who frequently read longer content not available on the News Feed.
Facebook Audience Network
The audience network is a group of Facebook’s affiliate apps and websites that can be accessed through mobile. Placing ads on the network extends the reach of advertisers to 16% more people (1 billion) than advertising on Facebook alone. The network includes some of the biggest publishers like Washington Post, Univision, and the Daily Mirror. You can you can exclude specific categories of apps and websites from the targeting, reducing the amount of wasted ad spend.
Facebook has established automatic placements in an effort to help advertisers get the best results across all default placements. This allows Facebook to choose results from the broadest range possible, which implies that automatic placements are typically the most efficient use of an advertiser’s budget because they help control costs.
Marin is a certified Facebook Marketing Partner and fully supports Automatic Placements in the MarinOne platform. Schedule a demo today to learn more!
Starting in October, Google will no longer be offering average position as a metric. Read on to learn more about transitioning to the new impression share and impression rate metrics and what Marin can do to help.
By definition, impression share is the percentage of impressions that your ads receive compared to the total number that your ads are eligible to get in the top five ad positions on the search engine results page (SERP). Impression share is a great way to find out how much more you can be doing—it shows you any missed opportunities by indicating how often a particular ad showed up in the top search results.
Average position didn’t accurately measure if ads were showing up above the organic results or not, only the order versus other ads. This left advertisers guessing.
Impression % (or rate) shows you how often your ads are showing at the top of the SERP. In other words, for each of the top five ad positions, you can see the percentage of appearances that your ad is making. This addresses another shortcoming of average position, as even an ad in position 2 might be at the bottom of the page.
Impression share metrics
The three versions of impression share all measure your impressions divided by the total eligible impressions for your ads, based on different locations on the SERP:
Impression rate metrics
These two metrics are only based on your impressions, not the total number of eligible impressions.
A quick way to remember the difference between impression share and impression rate: impression share is the percentage of total possible impressions in the top five SERP slots; impression rate is the percentage of impressions for each of these five slots.
Advertisers who are more focused on driving awareness than ROI can focus on impression share or impression % (rate).
We recommend advertisers be careful with Google’s new impression share options in Smart Bidding. The impression share data isn’t available the same day, so it’s hard to monitor performance—setting a high target may significantly increase your spend by making you eligible for additional, unwanted auctions.
The easiest way to set your targets is to use your recent performance for campaigns across the impression % (rate) metrics and use this as a starting point. This will ensure the smoothest transition from targeting a position to targeting impression share.
The table below shows our default mapping from a position target to impression %. This should only be used for advertisers with limited historical data.
How do you make the switch from average position to impression share?
Marin now offers a bid strategy known as Awareness Targeting, which targets impression rate instead of target position for Google campaigns. Think of this as automatically setting bids to achieve your awareness goals.
For existing Marin advertisers, impression rate targets for Google are automatically set based on recent performance. All current customers can login to MarinOne to view their new awareness targets.
The benefits of Awareness Targeting include:
Google has been making changes to depreciate the value of ad position metrics for quite some time, and has been encouraging advertisers to focus on targeting impression share. Now that Awareness Targeting is readily available in Marin, it’s easy for our advertisers to drive campaign goals that maximize the reach on the search results page.
Want to learn more? Schedule a demo, or if you’re a current customer, reach out to your dedicated account representative today!
More than 500 million people use Instagram Stories every day. And, a third of the most-viewed Stories come from a business account. With stats like these, it’s clear the Stories platform provides a great space for brands to maximize reach, build brand loyalty, and generate new customers.
Advertising with Instagram Stories is also a great way to give your brand a voice and help humanize it by discussing relatable topics or current trends. Since Stories disappear after 24 hours, there’s a lot of opportunity to be experimental, spontaneous, and transparent.
As you plan your creative content, here are a few things to incorporate into your Instagram Stories marketing strategy.
Stories have many interactive features specific to the format that aren’t available for Feed Posts, and experimenting with these can really help differentiate you from the competition. These interactive elements bring people closer together by allowing them to directly participate in your shared expression or announcement—and they help encourage conversation both on and off the platform.
Remember, these sort of add-ons really entice users to watch longer. By gaining and keeping their attention, you become a brand that goes beyond focusing on just sales or conversions—instead, you can build an audience connection and create a community with an ongoing relationship.
Examples of interactive features include:
Unlike regular Instagram Stories that vanish after 24 hours, Instagram Stories Highlights can live permanently on your profile (you can always delete or edit by tapping and holding your Story Highlight). Your highlights live front and center on your Instagram profile—meaning they’re essentially prime real estate, and perfect for helping new visitors who are discovering your brand to learn what your company is all about.
This can be a great opportunity to display your evergreen content, such as customer testimonials or reviews, as well as how-to tutorials and product displays. Displaying any event experiences or brand collaborations will also bring more transparency to your business and will make people feel like they were part of those milestones.
With that said, it’s also the perfect place to direct your community of followers to your most valuable and interesting content!
This is when you encourage your fans to post pictures or videos with your content and re-post them as part of your brand’s story. With user-generated content, you give your fans the opportunity to tell your narrative. As we’ve seen, this helps in making fans feel happy and honored to be part of your brand’s messaging. When people see content from actual customers, it increases your brand’s credibility, and anyone discovering your brand will view your content as more genuine and trustworthy. User-generated content helps your most loyal customers become your biggest brand advocates, effectively building communities around your products and services.
We hope you’ll take full advantage of the features above to help improve your brand’s engagement and relationship with both followers and prospects! Instagram’s ability to bring people together is its biggest value-add, and something all brands should be leveraging.
Want to learn more about developing a successful marketing strategy with Instagram Stories? Watch our joint webinar with Facebook today.
It’s been a few years since Apple introduced Search Ads, giving marketers the opportunity to promote their app at the top of relevant search results in the App Store—and it’s no surprise that they’ve proven to be effective in driving highly relevant app installs. If your business publishes iOS apps, it’s definitely worth taking a closer look at Apple Search Ads to reach more potential customers.
Before digging into the “how,” I should mention that there are two different systems you can opt into: Apple Search Ads Basic and Apple Search Ads Advanced. Search Ads Basic is exactly how it sounds—it offers limited reporting, has no keyword or audience refinements, and has a monthly budget of $5,000. A big key differentiator is that businesses pay for installs versus taps.
In contrast, Search Ads Advanced operates more like a standard PPC channel. You pay for taps, and have both flexibility and granularity with the keywords and audiences you can choose, including demographics, device, types, and locations. Marketers are able to fine-tune their campaigns to the exact people they want to target. On top of that, the reporting dashboards are more sophisticated, and make it easy to track improvements over time. A/B testing with different demographics becomes a whole lot easier.
Because it's designed for, well, more "advanced" advertisers running enterprise marketing campaigns who are continually looking to scale and allocate spend more efficiently, Marin offers full support for Search Ads Advanced.
Like most popular search engines, such as Google or Bing, a user searches for keywords and if there are advertisements that align with the query, they’ll appear at the top of the search results. Ads are apparent to the user by their blue background and a small blue “Ad” notification next to the app name.
Ads are automatically created from the app’s metadata and imagery that businesses create for their App Store product page. Apple’s algorithm takes into account both the bid and app relevancy when determining if your ad displays. This is why optimizing your listing for keyword relevancy is a very important first step.
You can add keywords individually, or bulk upload them using a spreadsheet. There’s also a “Search Match” tool within the Apple Search Ads campaign builder to help you identify keywords most relevant to your app.
In terms of ad scheduling, you can set up your ads to start and stop on specific dates, or show only on specific days of the week or times of the day.
According to Apple, Apple Search Ads have a conversion rate of 50%, with about 65% of app downloads coming from App Store searches. This makes this ad format an effective marketing channel for acquiring new and engaged users, and an essential part of improving an app’s visibility on the App Store.
MarinOne helps deliver growth from your Apple Search Ads programs, giving you the opportunity to promote your app at the top of relevant App Store search results. With Marin’s support of a number of premium publishers, our all-in-one solution gives advertisers the opportunity to manage all of their mobile app ad campaigns in one place and at scale, reaching the users that matter.
Apple Search Ads’ tools to efficiently drive app downloads, paired with Marin’s proprietary marketing technology, delivers the next level of performance for mobile app marketers.
Some of the benefits of running Apple Search Ads through MarinOne include:
Interested in integrating your Apple Search Ads into your MarinOne application? Contact your account representative for more information, or request a demo today!
Advertisers continue to look for the best ways to measure the impact of their advertising campaigns on sales. Without an accurate picture of the full customer journey and every touchpoint to conversion, they fall short of achieving the most streamlined campaigns, the most appropriately allocated budgets, and the highest possible revenue.
Marin’s Offline Connect gives advertisers the opportunity to upload transaction data into their Marin application, and then tie those users back to an online event that took place on the advertiser’s website. By connecting offline behavior such as in-store purchases, to online behavior like booking an appointment, advertisers can better understand the resulting uplift from ad exposure.
Brand marketers need effective tools that tie digital ad spending to in-store foot traffic and purchases. The reality is that a big percentage of purchases are still made offline, and both the digital and non-digital are important for today’s consumer.
By having a holistic view into high-ROI marketing activities, advertisers have the opportunity to more effectively allocate marketing budget to the appropriate channels—a big piece of the puzzle when it comes to effective cross-channel marketing and engaging with consumers in a targeted, more personalized way.
Also, with the use of third-party data becoming increasingly regulated and unreliable, it’s more important than ever to tap into your goldmine of first-party data. Offline Connect ensures that the data you’re mining—your own—becomes a powerful tool in crafting a solid, “always-on” ad strategy.
All businesses have unique event IDs that they assign to individuals once they perform an action on their website, such as booking an appointment or scheduling a demo. As those people complete a transaction in-store, businesses are able to upload their transaction data into Offline Connect.
This triggers a match between that person and the unique event ID that houses his or her information, tying the offline conversion data to the ad clicks that drove the “connecting” online event. The result: a merging of offline behavior to online actions, giving you a more holistic view of attribution.
Offline Connect includes:
As an open and independent platform, Marin’s goal is to seamlessly connect an advertiser’s business to their marketing efforts. This means closing the loop by tracking what happens after the ad impression or click, including in-store purchases.
Want to learn more? Contact your account representative today, or sign up for a demo if you’re not currently a Marin customer.
Our social marketing clients use Marin’s Message Booster to automatically promote organic posts with high engagement metrics as paid advertisements.
The reality is that organic content on social media is still very important, with its unique ability to help brands create a community of loyal followers and customers. Despite their reach shrinking on social, organic posts still play an important role in communicating a brand’s lifestyle and values to consumers and potential consumers, giving that brand a “voice” for users to research and relate to.
Organic posts trigger conversation and the content brands create evokes a response from readers. Good content creation focuses on posts, videos, tweets, and pictures that a brand’s ideal audiences want to engage with.
Enter Marin’s Message Booster.
Message Booster is a dedicated social media management tool aimed at streamlining Community Management (CM) processes and paid media content promotion. Where engagement rates on organic content are high, the Message Booster functionality allows you to promote it as a paid page post, with a simple click of a button.
Now, the same content that’s resonating with your audiences at an increasingly high rate can break through Facebook’s algorithms and into feeds as paid media, for incremental reach and exposure. Think of it as a vetting process—you know which brand messaging is working, and now you want to allocate more budget to it!
Like all paid advertisements on Facebook, you can set additional controls such as ad set budget, audiences, delivery method (standard/accelerated), and ad scheduling. However, you can also set rules to automate these controls.
Once created, these rules are “always-on” and ensure that every trending opportunity is capitalized, without the need for manual activation. You can use metrics such as engagement on post, engagement rate, negative feedback, reach, and specific post elements (caption, description, title, etc.) as conditions to trigger the creation of the post, as shown here:
Key benefits of Marin’s Message Booster include:
Want to learn more about Message Booster? Contact your account representative today, or sign up for a demo if you’re not currently a customer!
