The definition of video marketing is not complex. In fact, it’s rather simple: using video to promote or market your brand, product or service. A strong marketing campaign incorporates video into the mix. Customer testimonials, videos of live events, how-to videos, explainer videos, corporate training videos, viral (entertainment) videos — the list goes on.
It can increase your search engine ranking, click-through rates, open rates and conversions. But you have to reach your target audience. YouTube is the second largest search engine (second to Google). What’s better: YouTube is owned by Google. So that means a properly tagged video can work wonders for your SEO.
A recent study found that 57 percent of online consumers were more likely to buy a product they were considering purchasing after watching a video demonstration of that product. See a sample product explainer video below.
Video is Easily Accessible
There are endless platforms for video marketing. YouTube, broadcast television, video boards and street marketing, you name it. The possibilities are endless. With a smartphone, consumers can access online video anytime, anywhere. The same is not true with traditional, paper marketing. With video, you can reach your audience wherever they are in a cost-effective way.
Video is Effective
Studies show that retention rates for information that is both seen and heard is as high as 80 percent. Those numbers drop to 20 percent for information that is seen and just 10 percent for information that is heard. Combining visual and audio is powerful.
Video is Emotional
Video allows you to make a direct appeal to the emotional center of a person’s brain through music. With video, you are also able to attach a face to a concept. The human connection through video is more influential than reading facts in text. See an example of an emotionally appealing video below.
How to Develop a Video Marketing Campaign
Developing a video marketing campaign is most often accomplished by conducting market research, competitive analysis and gathering target market insights. Once you have this information and can shape your strategy, you can determine the message.
What do you want your audience to hear, see and feel? What message are you trying to convey? What is the call to action?
After creating a strategy and developing your message, you should select a production company to make your vision come to life. Sure, anyone can whip out a Flipcam and make a short video, but quality is key. A well-made video is the cream of the crop, and will rise to the top of the massive amounts of video available online today.
Frozen Fire is a Dallas internet marketing and video production company that helps companies harness the most powerful aspect of modern marketing—the internet—to engage customers in memorable and meaningful ways. Ways that ignite sales and business growth. Contact us to learn how we can help your business.
About the Google Display Network
It can help you reach people while they’re browsing their favorite websites, showing a friend a YouTube video, checking their Gmail, or using mobile devices.
How it works
AdWords has two main networks: Search and Display. The Adwords Search Network reaches people when they've been searching for specific goods or services. The Display Network helps you capture someone's attention earlier in the buying cycle. For example, if you run an art supply store, you can catch a mom's eye when she's reading reviews about the best brands of washable paints, but before she puts her toddler in the car seat and heads out to buy.
Find the right audience
The Google Display Network is designed to help you find the right audience across millions of websites. It lets you be strategic and put your message in front of potential customers at the right place and the right time.
- Reach users by keywords and topics: To find likely customers, AdWords uses contextual targeting based on your keywords or your campaign’s specific topic area.
- Select where your ads appear: Within the Display Network, you can select types of pages or specific websites for your ads, as well as audiences to show your ads. With manual placements, you can show your ad on specific webpages, online videos, games, RSS feeds, mobile sites, and apps that you select. You can even block your ads from sites you don't think are relevant.
- Find users who are already interested in what you have to offer: Show your ads on Display Network websites to specific groups of people, such as those who have previously visited your site, by creating a remarketing campaign. To reach TV-like audiences on a broad scale and drive brand awareness, you can use affinity audiences. To reach specific audiences ready to make purchases, you can use in-market audiences.
Use a variety of ad formats
The Google Display Network is your chance to engage users with appealing ad formats. Text, image, video, or rich media formats can appear on the Display Network. Color and motion attract attention. Animation or video can tell a story.
Meet your goals
Display ads help you to make a more lasting impression on people. Here are some common goals that you can achieve by advertising on the Display Network:
- Sell more products or services
- Build customer loyalty
- Engage with customers
- Increase brand awareness
Measure your results
AdWords lets you measure how well you’re meeting your goals. See exactly on what kind of sites your ads run, which ads deliver the most clicks, and which sites give you the most sales for the lowest cost.
You can adjust your targeting and bidding strategy based on your campaign reports. For example, the data may show that a click from a Google Network page is more (or less) likely to help you meet your specific goals—such as online sales, registrations, phone calls, or newsletter signups. This may prompt AdWords to automatically adjust your bid. This adjustment would help you stay on a budget, gain value, and reach your business goals.
Plan ahead
Changes in the Display Network can take 12-24 hours to apply and may not show right away. Keep this in mind while creating a new campaign or making changes to an existing campaign. You may want to set up your campaign a few days before the launch and set the start date in the future.
WHAT IS EMAIL MARKETING?
If you've decided to implement an email marketing program or are ready to talk to your marketing team or a consultant about email marketing, this article will introduce you to the important email concepts, terminology and metrics that you'll need to understand. Once you have a basic grip on those email concepts, you'll be able to properly evaluate the success of an email campaign or the knowledge of any consultants you may be interviewing.
Learning of Email Marketing
The first step to creating a successful plan of action is to understand the key concepts of Email Marketing so that you can speak the language! Comm100 has boiled it down to a top ten, though reading all of the resources in this section of the website can give you a much greater jump start.
Email Concepts No. 1: Open Rate
Email open rate means, quite simply, how many people (in percentage form) opened the email that you sent. This metric, however, is becoming less important in anything other than a relative way. Email open rates are tracked using a small graphic in the email. Many email providers block graphics. Because of this graphic blocking, a client may open an email and have it not register as being opened unless the client actively turns on graphics. Some reports suggest that standard open rate reporting can be off by as much as 35%, depending on your email list.What you should remember is that open rates should be highest when emailing your existing customers and lowest with cold leads. Comparing open rates across various sends is useful, too. It's not a 100% accurate number, however.
Email Concepts No. 2: Click-Through Rate
Email click-through rate compared to the number of opened emails (NOT to the entire send). Different companies measure this in different ways. Unfortunately, there isn't a standard answer for the question: "Is it all clicks or does only one click count per open?" This measurement is important because the entire purpose of your email is to drive traffic to your landing page or website.Email Concepts No. 3: Deliverability
Email Deliverability means the number of emails from your send that actually made it to the inbox (as opposed to the junk folder or the black hole of "unknown address"). Getting your email into the inbox can be a complicated process, and Comm100 has gone into detail in a full article in this section.Email Concepts No. 4: Personalization
Personalization is when you use a client's user name, first name or other unique information in the email that you send. To do this, your database needs to capture that information, and your email service provider needs to accept and include data fields that match. Be careful using personalization. It's not appropriate for every industry. However, in the right context, it can improve email conversions dramatically.Email Concepts No. 5: List Cleaning/List Scrubbing/List Pruning
Keeping your email list "clean" is important. The more bad email addresses (typos, defunct accounts, etc.) that you have on a list, the more likely you are to get flagged as potential spam. Also, your reporting metrics won't reflect your email's true performance. Many email providers automatically prune lists of bad names as you go along. Explore your options with your email provider.Email Concepts No. 6: CAN-SPAM
CAN-SPAM is a piece of U.S. federal legislation that was passed in 2003. It's a set of rules that you MUST follow when sending email if you want to not be classified as spam and potentially face federal fines and penalties. Comm100 has included an article in this section that details the rules. Make sure you know them!Email Concepts No. 7: Opt-In/Double Opt-In
There are three kinds of email lists. "Opt-In" means that your users have "opted into" your email list and given you permission to email them. "Double Opt-In" means that users have given you permission twice (usually via a confirmation link in an email). All other lists are considered cold lists or prospect lists (usually bought or rented). There are different benefits to each kind of list. See our full article to figure out which is best for you!Email Concepts No. 8: Unsubscribe/Opt-Out
Quite simply, "Unsubscribe" / "Opt-Out" is the ability of users to unsubscribe from your email list. There are two types: Universal Unsubs and List Specific Unsubs. Universal Unsubs are users who unsubscribe from all future emails of any kind from you. List Specific Unsubs will unsubscribe from just a portion of your list. For example, they don't want special offers but do want weekly newsletters.
Email Concepts No. 9: HTML Email/Plain Text Email
These are the two types of email that you can send. An html email includes colors, tables and graphics. A plain text email includes only text. In truth, you should send both formats because not all email clients (and particularly some phones) accept html email. However, figuring out what balance works for you may be trial and error.
Email Concepts No. 10: Bounce Back
Bounce back is the number of names on a list that get returned to you as "undeliverable". This could be because the email address was mis-typed, the email address doesn't exist any more, the email address has a full inbox, or any other number of reasons. This metric is most important when you're using a bought or rented list because it shows you how many bad email addresses you purchased.
Email marketing is obviously more complicated than just ten email concepts! But this will get you started.
What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media itself is a catch-all term for sites that may provide radically different social actions. For instance, Twitter is a social site designed to let people share short messages or “updates” with others. Facebook, in contrast is a full-blown social networking site that allows for sharing updates, photos, joining events and a variety of other activities.
How Are Search & Social Media Marketing Related?
Why would a search marketer — or a site about search engines — care about social media? The two are very closely related.
Engine Land, as well as the day’s news sources all over the web
Social media often feeds into the discovery of new content such as news stories, and “discovery” is a search activity. Social media can also help build links that in turn support into SEO efforts. Many people also perform searches at social media sites to find social media content. Social connections may also impact the relevancy of some search results, either within a social media network or at a ‘mainstream’ search engine.
Social Media Marketing At Marketing Land
Marketing Land is the sister site to Search Engine Land that covers all facets of internet marketing, including these popular topics within social media marketing:
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
Pinterest
Linkedin
YouTube
Social Media Marketing How To Guides & more!
To keep up with social media marketing, subscribe to our weekly Social Media Marketing digest and Marketing Day daily recap newsletters, with the latest articles from Marketing Land and Search
What Is Search Marketing?
Search engine marketing, or SEM, is one of the most effective ways to grow your business in an increasingly competitive marketplace. With millions of businesses out there all vying for the same eyeballs, it’s never been more important to advertise online, and search engine marketing is the most effective way to promote your products and grow your business.
In this guide, you'll learn an overview of search engine marketing basics as well as some tips and strategies for doing search engine marketing right.
Search engine marketing SERP example
Search Engine Marketing – An Overview
Search engine marketing is the practice of marketing a business using paid advertisements that appear on search engine results pages (or SERPs). Advertisers bid on keywords that users of services such as Google and Bing might enter when looking for certain products or services, which gives the advertiser the opportunity for their ads to appear alongside results for those search queries.
These ads, often known by the term pay-per-click ads, come in a variety of formats. Some are small, text-based ads, whereas others, such as product listing ads (PLAs, also known as Shopping ads) are more visual, product-based advertisements that allow consumers to see important information at-a-glance, such as price and reviews.
Search engine marketing’s greatest strength is that it offers advertisers the opportunity to put their ads in front of motivated customers who are ready to buy at the precise moment they’re ready to make a purchase. No other advertising medium can do this, which is why search engine marketing is so effective and such an amazingly powerful way to grow your business.
Keywords: The Foundation of Search Engine Marketing
Keywords are the foundation of search engine marketing. As users enter keywords (as part of search queries) into search engines to find what they’re looking for, it should come as little surprise that keywords form the basis of search engine marketing as an advertising strategy.
Keyword Research
Before you can choose which keywords to use in your search engine marketing campaigns, you need to conduct comprehensive research as part of your keyword management strategy.First, you need to identify keywords that are relevant to your business and that prospective customers are likely to use when searching for your products and services. One way to accomplish this is by using WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool.
Simply enter a keyword that’s relevant to your business or service, and see related keyword suggestion ideas that can form the basis of various search engine marketing campaigns.
Search engine marketing free keyword tool
WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool provides you with a range of valuable information, such as search volume for each individual keyword in Google and its general competitiveness.
Search engine marketing free keyword tool example
In addition to helping you find keywords you should be bidding on, thorough keyword research can also help you identify negative keywords – search terms that you should exclude from your campaigns. Negative keywords aren’t terms with negative connotations, but rather irrelevant terms that are highly unlikely to result in conversions. For example, if you sell ice cream, you might want to exclude the keyword “ice cream recipes”, as users searching for ice cream recipes are unlikely to be in the market for your product.
This concept is known as search intent, or the likelihood that a prospect will complete a purchase or other desired action after searching for a given term. Some keywords are considered to have high commercial intent, or a strong indication that the searcher wants to buy something. Examples of high commercial intent keywords include:
Buy
Discount(s)
Deal(s)
Coupon(s)
Free shipping
Read more about commercial intent keywords in this blog post.
Keywords and Account Structure
Another crucial aspect of keywords that is essential for the success of a search engine marketing campaign is account structure.
Logical keyword grouping and account structure can help you achieve higher click-through rates, lower costs-per-click, and generally stronger overall performance, and keyword research can help you think about how to best structure your account.
AdWords and Bing Ads accounts should be structured in the following way for optimal results:
Search engine marketing account structure
As you can see in the figure above, an optimally structured account is comprised of five distinct elements:
Ad campaigns
Ad groups
Keywords
Ad text
Landing pages
Ad campaigns can, and should in many cases, focus on similar products or services. For example, if you run a hardware store, one ad campaign could focus exclusively on autumnal products such as leaf blowers, rakes, and leaf bags, whereas another might focus on power tools and so on.
Ad groups allow for each campaign to be further subcategorized for relevance. In our hardware store example, one ad group could be for different types of rakes or varying models of leaf blowers. For the power tools campaign, one ad group might focus on power drills, while another could focus on circular saws. This level of organization might take slightly longer to set up initially, but the rewards – namely higher CTRs at lower cost – make this effort worthwhile in the long run.
The Search Engine Marketing Ad Auction
One of the most enduring misconceptions about search engine marketing is that whomever has the largest advertising budget wins. Although a larger advertising budget can certainly be advantageous, especially when targeting highly competitive keywords, but it’s far from a requirement for success with search engine marketing. This is because all ads go through a process known as the ad auction before appearing alongside search results. For the purposes of this explanation, we’ll be focusing on the ad auction in Google AdWords.
How the Ad Auction Works
The ad auction process takes place every single time someone enters a search query into Google. To be entered into the ad auction, advertisers identify keywords they want to bid on, and state how much they are willing to spend (per click) to have their ads appear alongside results relating to those keywords. If Google determines that the keywords you have bid on are contained within a user’s search query, your ads are entered into the ad auction.
How Ads ‘Win’ the Ad Auction
Not every single ad will appear on every single search. This is because the ad auction takes a variety of factors into account when determining the placement of ads on the SERP, and because not every keyword has sufficient commercial intent to justify displaying ads next to results. However, the two main factors that Google evaluates as part of the ad auction process are your maximum bid and the Quality Score of your ads.
Maximum bid is the maximum amount you have specified you are willing to pay for a click. Quality Score is a metric based on the overall quality of your advertisement. Google calculates these metrics during the ad auction to determine placement of advertisements. The result of this calculation is known as ad rank.
Search engine marketing ad rank
The Importance of Quality Score in SEM
Given that Google AdWords’ Quality Score comprises half of the ad rank formula, it is one of the most crucial metrics search engine marketers can focus on. High Quality Scores can help you achieve better ad position at lower costs, because Google favors ads that are highly relevant to user queries.
In the table below, you can see that although Advertiser 1 has the lowest maximum bid, they have the highest Quality Score, meaning their ads are given priority in terms of placement during the ad auction:
Search engine marketing ad auction
Quality Score is arguably the most important metric in search engine marketing. To learn more about Quality Score and the impact it can have on your campaigns, read this resource at PPC University.
Succeed at Search Engine Marketing with WordStream
At WordStream, we eat, sleep, and breathe search engine marketing. Whether you’re a newcomer to paid search marketing or a seasoned professional, we want to provide you with everything you need to succeed at search engine marketing.
Our integrated PPC management platform, WordStream Advisor, makes managing your search engine marketing campaigns easy and efficient, leaving you more time to focus on what really matters – growing your business.
WordStream Advisor and the 20-Minute Work Week
WordStream Advisor’s 20-Minute Work Week has revolutionized paid search management for thousands of businesses. Our intelligent, customizable alerts highlight areas of your AdWords and Bing Ads accounts that are performing strongly, and identifies areas in which improvements can be made for immediate results.
20 minute work week for search engine marketing
WordStream Advisor is the only PPC management platform on the market that is fully integrated with Google AdWords and Bing Ads, making it easier than ever to manage your search engine marketing campaigns from one intuitive, centralized dashboard.
WordStream’s AdWords Performance Grader
One of the most challenging aspects of search engine marketing is understanding which parts of your campaigns need attention and which are performing well. To find out how well your account is doing, try WordStream’s free AdWords Performance Grader.
Search engine marketing AdWords Performance Grader
In 60 seconds or less, the AdWords Performance Grader performs a comprehensive audit of your search engine marketing account and identifies areas in which immediate improvements can be made. Accounts are graded against 10 key search engine marketing benchmarks, including:
Wasted spend
Click-through rate
Quality Score
Negative keyword usage
The WordStream AdWords Performance Grader is absolutely free, so get your grade today and start making immediate improvements to your search engine marketing campaigns.
What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?
All major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo have primary search results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. Payment isn’t involved, as it is with paid search ads.
VIDEO: SEO Explained
New to SEO? Start with this quick and easy to understand video about search engine optimization. It’ll quickly cover the basics:Search Engine Land worked with Common Craft to produce the video, and they have many more great explainer videos like this in the Common Craft video library, so check that out.
More SEO Advice For Beginners:
Periodic Table Of SEO
You can click on the table to view a larger version of it. You can download a copy to print for easy reference!
Search Engine Land’s Guide To SEO
As a companion to the table, Search Engine Land’s Guide To SEO explains the ranking factors in more depth, in a tutorial providing tips and advice on implementing them.
Links to the entire guide are shown below (start at the beginning, and each page will take you to the next):
Chapter 1: Types Of Search Engine Success Factors
Chapter 2: Content & Search Engine Success Factors
Chapter 3: Site Architecture & Search Engine Success Factors
Chapter 4: HTML Code & Search Engine Success Factors
Chapter 5: Trust, Authority, Identity & Search Rankings
Chapter 6: Link Building & Ranking In Search Engines
Chapter 7: Personalization & Search Engine Rankings
Chapter 8: Social Media & Ranking In Search Results
Chapter 9: Violations & Search Engine Spam Penalties
More SEO Guides & Books
Another excellent guide is Google’s “Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.” This is a free PDF download that covers basic tips that Google provides to its own employees on how to get listed. You’ll find it here. Also well worth checking out is Moz’s “Beginner’s Guide To SEO,” which you’ll find here, and the SEO Success Pyramid from Small Business Search Marketing.
Daily SEO News & Expert SEO Advice
In addition to daily news stories from our editorial staff, Search Engine Land publishes daily articles from expert contributors that cover SEO issues mainly from an in-the-trenches perspective. Browse the SEO Channel for the most recent SEO news stories and expert columns, or sign up to receive all of our SEO related content via email.
Search Engine Land’s SEO Library
The SEO Library is an area within Search Engine Land that provides a collection of all stories we’ve written on the topic of SEO. We also have sub-categories, including:
SEO: Blogs & Feeds
SEO: Cloaking & Doorway Pages
SEO: Content and Writing
SEO: Crawling and Robots
SEO: Domains & URLs
SEO: Duplicate Content
SEO: Flash
SEO: General
SEO: Image Search
SEO: Local
SEO: Mobile Search
SEO: Redirects & Moving Sites
SEO: Spamming
SEO: Submitting & Sitemaps
SEO: Tagging
SEO: Titles & Descriptions
SEO: Video Search
Also see our related Link Building category and these sub-categories:
Link Building: Link Bombs
Link Building: Linkbait
Link Building: Paid Links
In addition to covering SEO generally, Search Engine Land also has search engine optimization areas specifically for each of the major search engines:
Google SEO
Bing SEO
Yahoo SEO
Also within our library is the How To: SEO section, which is devoted to practical tips and tactics about search engine optimization.