In today’s world of consumer content, it can be difficult to stand out. Many companies spend a great deal of time and money developing content but few truly understand how to connect with readers by developing a point of view (POV).

A point of view is a valuable content strategy that allows companies to tap into the minds of consumers. Since consumers are generally more connected to one another than they are to a company, developing a business POV is a great way to market directly to customers and increase relateability. Additionally, a strong point of view is a great way to brand your company as a positive, enlightened, progressive force in your industry.

When it comes to marketing, a point of view is the way that a brand views the world and looks at certain situations. A strong and well-developed point of view gives a brand’s product personality, authenticity and individuality and makes it easier for customers to access.

Companies around the globe are focusing on their company’s point of view. Many times, POV is displayed in a company’s stance on important cultural or social issues. Customers want to know how companies feel and what drives their product. When customers can relate to your point of view, they’re much more likely to be loyal to your brand.

Why is POV Important?

According to em marketing:

“A POV creates a framework for a broader conversation around a series of topics and data that help shape your brand in the eyes of your customer.”

With this in mind, it’s obvious that a well-defined POV is a strong and valuable way for companies to boost their interaction with customers.

Customers today are very driven by values and they want a product that feels the same.

For example, after H & M was named one of the world’s most ethical company in 2014 on the basis of corporate and production standards, business boomed. This is because people are more likely to buy from companies they admire (think of how many people have boycotted big box stores due to low employee wages, utilization of sweatshop labor for product production and poor working conditions.) Customers care about what the companies they purchase from stand for and are more likely to feel familiar with and fond of companies that exhibit a POV that aligns with theirs.

3 Companies That Have an Emphatic, Successful Business POV

1) Patagonia

Patagonia, a well-known outdoors and lifestyle clothing and gear brand, has exemplified the power of a POV for years. Patagonia has made it clear that they care about organizational responsibility, paying all employees and production workers a living wage, fair labor practices, safe working conditions and sustainability in a series of well-written position statements. The POV is plastered all over their site and appears in everything from their product descriptions to their catalogues. By aligning themselves with this POV, they have managed to succeed hugely in connecting with high-income, like-minded customers. Additionally, this eco-friendly, ethical POV has made them a leading provider of active wear for a variety of outdoor events and allowed them to fund like-minded environmental work, which only serves to further establish them in their field.

2) Mozilla

Known for its web-wide call for Microsoft to undo aggressive and limiting user overrides, Mozilla has become a folk hero in the arena of the open web movement. Thanks to its strong POV, Mozilla, once a somewhat obscure name, has now become a virtual beacon on web freedom and user choice. It is clear that Mozilla’s prerogatives includes values like choice, control, opportunity and equality for all web users and the company even goes so far to state that they established themselves as a non-profit in order to better deliver these things to users. Because they are so outspoken about their insistence on user choice, Mozilla is likely to draw like-minded web users who are dissatisfied with other available services.

3) Apple

Anyone who has ever read a biography about Steve Jobs understands that he built Apple (now one of the most valuable companies in the world) on the power of POV. Jobs believed from the get-go that consumers would want a product that was beautiful, sleek, intelligent and unique and he was right.

Additionally, Jobs was obsessively focused on the intersection between art and technology and the way in which that intersection created a product that was well suited to make a definable difference in the world. Nowadays, Apple consistently dominates brand polls and has built up what may possibly be the most loyal customer base in the entire tech industry. This is no accident, of course, and owes largely to the fact that Apple has always been brilliant at defining its POV: innovation, intelligence, beauty, and creativity. As a result, consumers attracted to the same ideals and wooed by Apple’s marketing, production and technological scruples have fallen hard for the brand. Apple is and has always been great at helping their customers understand exactly what they stand for, and – notably – what they don’t. Apple customers feel like they know the company and, as such, they’re loyal to every single product the tech giant produces.

Developing a POV: 5 Things to Remember

Developing a POV is a sure-fire way to go beyond content and ensure that your company is truly making an impression. This, in turn, is the only way to ensure that customers don’t immediately forget about your brand or product as soon as they leave your site or store. A definable, well-written POV goes a long way toward ensuring long-lasting business and earning returning, loyal customers.

1. Make it About the Customer

A large part of an effective POV is ensuring that your message applies to your customer. Much the same way nobody enjoys talking to a self-obsessed blowhard, customers don’t want to hear endlessly about what you do and why it’s so great. Keep in mind that they do need to understand exactly how you do what you do, as in the earlier Patagonia organizational responsibility example and, specifically, their pledge to protect migrant workers.

Customers need details, yes, but primarily they need to understand how what your company does affects or benefits them. The bulk of all of your POV content should be dedicated to providing useful information and statistics on topics of interest to the consumer and helping them to see how, exactly, your company’s POV can benefit their lives. Are your clothes more sustainable? Longer lasting? Organically sourced? Focus on the benefits to the customer and the customer will love your brand in return.

2. Tap into the Community

The entire purpose of a POV is to tap into the community at large. Who else is in the conversation and how can you join them? One great way to do this is by creating content that taps into the larger conversation (Apple could write about tech concerns, for example) that customers are interested in.

This content shouldn’t be focused on hawking your company’s products and, in fact, should probably not even mention them. Instead, it should focus on developing POV-focused content that your consumers will find interesting, engaging, illuminating, valuable and inspiring.

3. Avoid Being Combative

Customers like companies with values, but they won’t appreciate a company that takes the world to task on every detail. This simply comes off as combativeness, which is not a great trait for a company. Be passionate but pick your battles. Aim for being engaging and inspiring rather than petty and inflammatory. Consumers will value intelligence over insistence.

4. Package it Well

If you shout your POV out to the web and nobody is around to hear it, did it still happen? Like most things, a POV is pretty useless if it isn’t properly disseminated and packaged in order to be as shareable and social as possible. Focus your efforts on creating POV content that encapsulates your company’s philosophy and values but also benefits your customers and makes it something they will want to share with their friends. This is the best way to spread word about your company’s values and, when done correctly, can be an effective way to draw new customers.

5. Be Authentic

A phony POV is about as obvious as having a cut-rate nose job and, trust us, people are going to notice. For this reason, it’s important to approach your POV from a place of authenticity and, also, to participate authentically throughout the course of engaging with your POV.

Find out where people are talking about the things your company is interested in and then get in on the conversation. Talk to consumers, comment on their thoughts, respond to debates and create content that addresses current issues from your own unique POV. Consumers appreciate authenticity and putting your most authentic face forward will win you great business.

Did You Do it Right? 8 Questions to Ask Yourself When Creating POV

According to Marketing Interactions, there are several questions content marketers can ask themselves when addressing their POV content.

In order to serve the reader as well as possible, POV content should meet the following criteria:

1. Is it helpful?
2. Is it generous?
3. Does it provide valuable information
4. Does it display expertise?
5. Is it flexible?
6. Is it kind?
7. Does it promote reader interaction?
8. Is it definitive?

These questions can help companies decide whether or not the content they’re creating is truly POV and can assist them in the process of disseminating high-quality information to their customers.

The Case for POV: Why Companies Should Pay Attention

Unlike mass content creation, a POV is a special way of communicating with customers. POV’s are more organic than many defined and rigid content strategies and provide customers with more honest, valuable and helpful information about a company they are interested in purchasing from. When done well, a great POV can draw new customers in and provoke existing customers to spread the word and remain loyal for many years.

All strong companies develop an easily identifiable POV that is unique to their business and helps brand them, allowing them to stand out in the market. Additionally, a POV is an ideal way for companies to live in the important place where their brand and products intersect with the community at large.

What Do You Stand For?

Chances are, your customers want to know.

This is by far the most valuable component of developing a company POV: allowing customers to glance inside and see exactly what truly makes your company tick. When a company is willing to wear its values on its sleeve, it has a high chance of bringing in new customers and making a name for itself in an increasingly competitive and saturated world.

About the Author: Julia McCoy is a self-taught copywriter and Internet marketer who founded Express Writers at 19 years old. Today, it’s a full-size copywriting team providing agencies and businesses of all sizes with high quality content. Subscribe to her blog to learn insider tips and news on blogging, web content and all things copywriting. Follow Julia on Twitter.

Source: KISS

Everyone and their mom knows that Periscope is becoming more and more popular. In fact, according to TechCrunch, over a million people signed into the app in the first 10 days after the launch on March 26.

That’s just incredible!

Want to know the best part?

Periscope still “fresh”, and you (as a marketer) have a HUGE opportunity to start growing your network. This is why I decided to create this guide; to show you step-by-step where to start and how to crush it with live video streaming.

Let’s get rolling…

Fundamentals: How to Develop a Successful Plan

As with anything in marketing, you need to start with a plan. Why? Because this way you’ll know where you are going, why you are going there and exactly how to get there.

Most importantly, a well-thought plan helps you stay focused on the right things, which ultimately will save you a ton of time and money.

In simpler words: Without a plan, you’re going to fail.

The question is: How can I develop a plan?

Start by following the next steps:

1) Set Your Goals

You need to know exactly why you are using Periscope in the first place. Just because your competitors are doesn’t mean you should. Start by answering the next questions:

What do I want to accomplish?
Do you want to drive traffic to other channels? Do you want to get more leads or customers? Do you want to build your brand? Whatever you want to achieve, just write it down.

Writing your goals will invite accountability and will be easier to measure the results. The more specific, the better.

For example, if you decide to use Periscope to drive traffic to your blog or social media accounts, your goals could be:

• 1st quarter: 5,000 extra visitors
• 2nd quarter: 8,000 extra visitors
• 3rd quarter: 10,000 extra visitors
• 4th quarter: 12,000 extra visitors

This way, all your goals will be measureable and tracking results will be relatively easy.

Now that you know what you’re trying to achieve, you need to define why you’re trying to achieve it. Numbers alone don’t mean nothing. You need to know the why.

Why do you want 5,000 extra visitors? Why do you want 10 leads every day? How can these goals influence your business? Write it down.

2) Perform a Competitive Analysis

One of the worst mistakes you can make is to try to develop a strategy from scratch. It can work, but chances are that you’ll fail.

It is much better to analyze what competitors are doing, and then model those things that are giving them the most success. This way, your chances to win increase.

Start by following your competitors on Periscope and analyze what kinds of videos they create, how often they’re sharing new content, what topics they’re covering and even the gaps or what they’re not covering in their strategy.

Become an active member of their communities. You’ll learn a lot by watching.

3) Create a Differentiator

When you’ve been studying your competitors for a while, you start noticing certain patterns on what they do – you start noticing gaps.

And when you find gaps in your competition’s strategies you can create content that helps your audience in better ways.

This is where you need to find a differentiator. Something that makes your content unique – it might be your style, specific topics or certain angles your competitors don’t cover – this will help you stand out from the crowd and get noticed.

For example, Derek Halpern, from Social Triggers, focuses on “scooping” marketing and entrepreneurship insights from a psychological perspective. That’s his differentiator.

How to Setup and Use Periscope

Now that you’ve created a plan, you’re ahead of most of your competitors. However, in order to get results you need to get familiar with the app.

Don’t worry, it’s really straightforward, just follow these steps below and you’ll be ok.

1) Download the app – you can choose between Apple or Android.

2) Sign-up – you have two options:

You can either:

A. Log in with your Twitter credentials (the easier one)
B. Sign up with your phone number

3) Create a username – Periscope still has a lot of usernames available, so this is your opportunity to get the name you really want.

Although there is no real science of choosing the right username, it’s highly recommended that you go personal and choose your real name.

4) Do something cool – the best thing about Periscope is that it’s really simple. Once you’ve signed up, you have three options:

• Follow people
• Start a broadcast
• Watch other people’s broadcasts

I recommend that you start by watching other people’s broadcasts, so you can see how the thing works – you only need to click the globe icon to see who’s live right now.

How to Crush it With Live Video Streaming

I’ve seen many people fail with video streaming just because they focus on applying trendy techniques, but forget to follow the principles.

Remember, techniques change over the time, but principles remain the same. This applies to any subject, so if you learn and master principles, you’ll always ok.

Here are the 5 counterintuitive principles of live video streaming:

1) Tell a story that matches up with your audience’s worldview – It’s not a big secret that storytelling is a powerful tool to engage an audience. However, there are good and bad stories, so you need to make sure you’re telling a story your audience really want to hear.

Of course, you need to know your audience to make this works. You need to know who they admire, what are their problems, what makes them feel good or bad – this is where buyer personas come in handy – so you can start creating stories around those things.

For example, Spotify constantly shares behind-the-scenes videos with celebrities their audience admire.

LIVE on #Periscope: We're about to go live with @ImAveryWilson on @periscopeco, interviewing him with our questions… https://t.co/NCxLortkht

— Spotify (@Spotify) May 13, 2015

2) Develop a distribution plan before you start the broadcast – People only have 24 hours to watch a replay. This means that you have a limited amount of time to promote your videos. If you start to develop a distribution plan after your presentation, you’re screwed.

Instead, start planning with at least 2 days of anticipation, this way you’ll always have an ace up your sleeve. For example, I always create a list of 100 to 250 people who might be interested in what I’m going to publish the upcoming week. Then, once the content goes live, I let them know about it.

You can also let your audience know ahead of time. For example, you may say “this Thursday at 2PM Central I’ll be on Periscope discussing how to market electric cars. Mark your calendars! I’ll tweet with the link once we go live.”

3) Encourage users to participate – You’ll reach more people and be more effective if you can turn your audience into promoters. This is why you need to encourage them to comment and share.

Giveaways are a great way to encourage people to participate, so you can try to create some kind of “mini-contest”. For example, Doritos is releasing a contest that consists on tagging three people with the hashtag #DoritosRoulette. Those people participate as a team and have the opportunity to win great prizes.

LIVE on #Periscope: WIN FREE PRIZES ON DORITOS ROULETTE LIVE!!! https://t.co/D7bTSCtPb5

— Doritos (@Doritos) June 30, 2015

Of course, they share the live event through Periscope. It’s a really smart strategy.

4) Use Periscope to solve specific needs – If you focus on solving your audience’s problems, they’ll come back again and again – you’ll create a loyal community. Start by asking your audience what topics they want you to talk about, and start developing ideas based on that information.

How to Create the Perfect Headline for Your Broadcast

I don’t need to tell you that headlines are basically the most important thing of any piece of content. If your headline sucks, nobody will care about the rest of your article, video or audio. This is why you need to spend enough time on this.

But don’t worry, creating a good headline is not that hard. There’s lots of information on headline copywriting you can get through, but in the meantime you can start by following the next “hacks”:

Step 1: Find a proven headline idea

Instead of using a headline you think might work, it’s much better to use a headline that has a proven record of success – there are two options:

A) Reverse engineer BuzzSumo results:
First, go to BuzzSumo and type in a keyword related to your main topic.

B. Select “Video”:

C. Then, sort the results by Twitter shares:

D. Select 2-3 successful headlines and create a template.

For example: Is this the ______ [Your Topic] job ever?

B) Find popular YouTube videos:

• Go to Youtube and type in a keyword related to your main topic
• Look for videos with over 100,000 views
• Take 2-3 of them and create templates

For example: Top [number] [your topic] mistakes (and how to avoid them)

Step 2: Use Twitter to Test Your Headlines and Find a Winner

Once you have 3-5 headlines, it is time to test which of them is best. To do that, you need to have access to:

• Twitter account with at least 1,000 followers (or at least get someone with a high follower count to retweet you)
• Your best time to tweet

First, tweet out one of your headlines when most of your audience is online, wait 24 hours and then tweet out the other headline. Repeat the process with each of your headlines and see which of them got the most engagement. That’s the winner.

This might not be an exact science, but will give you an educated clue of what people want.

As an alternative, you can list out your headlines in 1-3 tweets and ask your followers which they like best. In most cases, this will only work if your audience is copywriters, marketers, or writers.

How to Get More Periscope Followers

The more followers you have, the more reach you’ll get, right? Here are some ways to get the most out of your current resources to get more Periscope followers:

1) Follow Other People

I’ve heard a lot of people who say that the “follow back” approach doesn’t work. That’s BS. It works extremely well. As long as you just follow relevant people and avoid spam you’ll be fine.

The first step is create a list of at least 100 people in your industry who are already using Periscope to market their businesses. Then, follow them and start the conversation.

Start watching their broadcasts, commenting and even creating content around them. If you do that, you’ll definitely get noticed and a good percentage of them (and their followers) will follow you too.

2) Respond to Every Single Comment

People always come back to the places where they feel appreciated.

Think about it: Which store would you come back to? The store where employees are rude, or the store where everyone treats you incredibly well?

The answer is obvious.

If you treat every member of your community like if she or he were the most important person in the world, they’ll feel really appreciated. And one of the best ways to demonstrate your appreciation online is by responding to their comments.

This will encourage more people to follow you because it will help turn followers into evangelists.

3) Don’t Go to the Third Round

Some people will analyze everything you do, including the good and bad things.This is why you need to be careful with what you do. Not only on Periscope, but in all social networks.

What I mean by “don’t go to the third round” is that if someone starts to post negative comments on your videos, don’t fight with them.

You can reply once, but if that person replies back, no matter how much you want to tell them how wrong he or she is, just don’t do it. Ignore that person. If people see that you offend your audience, they won’t follow you.

4) Be Constant

People like to follow people who constantly shares new stuff. If you’re expecting that people follow you because you published a video 3 months ago, you’ll not see the results that you want.

The best you can do is creating a publishing schedule. This way, you and your team can develop ideas and keep your calendar full.

You can schedule a 20-30 minute meeting each week or month to do this.

How to Increase Your Reach

1) Leverage the Power of Brand Evangelists

It doesn’t matter how small your follower base is, you’ll always have a small group of people who always are sharing, commenting and linking to your content.

These are your “brand evangelists”.

Most people make the mistake of trying to connect and engage with every one of their followers. It’s much more effective to focus on creating strong relationships with your evangelists and then let them introduce you to their own audiences.

Focus your energy on the few and you’ll get the most out of the masses. It’s a smarter approach to social media.

2) Find Your Best Time To Go Live

As with anything in social media, there are better times to publish your content than others. For example, Buffer found that on average, tweeting at 5 PM can increase your chances to get noticed.

It doesn’t mean you should share your videos at that time, but it definitely means that you can increase your reach by finding the exact hour where most of your audience is online, so you can share your content at that time.

There are no tools to do this with Periscope yet. However, since Twitter owns this app, a huge percentage of your Periscope followers are already on Twitter (if not all of them), which is very useful.

You can use tools like FollowerWonk or Hootsuite to find your best time to publish content on social media. In addition, this guide from Hubspot will guide you step-by-step through an effective process.

3) Create Co-Branded Content

One of the best ways to grow your audience is by creating relationships with people who have an established audience in your industry, but who aren’t your competitors. This way you can collaborate to create content that both of you can use.

For example, Noah Kagan recently launched a co-branded free training course where he and other industry experts collaborate to help you get your first 1 million visitors. They created special deals, so people who subscribe to the course can get products they own at special prices.

It’s a win-win.

You can look for relevant people in your industry who are doing it well on Periscope, and then create co-branded live video streaming, so both of you can get introduced to a different audience, and therefore, grow yours.

How to Hack the Advanced Twitter Search to Evangelize Your Videos

One of the best things about Twitter is that you can easily find people who might be interested in your content. Just need to type a keyword in the search bar and Twitter will show you all the people who have shared content on that specific topic.

And when someone shares something on Twitter you know two things:

1. That person is interested in your topic
2. That person likes to share content related to that topic

That is very useful because now all you need to do is put your content in front of them.

Here’s how:

Step 1: Go to Twitter and type in a keyword that describes your main topic. For example, if I was going to share a video related to greenhouses, I could look for “gardening”.

Another option is to look for a specific name. If you know that one of your competitors is doing it well with Periscope, you can search for their name.

Step 2: Click on “more options” and select “Advanced Search”.

Step 3: Fill the form as you need, just make sure to add #Periscope in the section called “these hashtags”. This way, Twitter will show you only tweets that have that specific hasthag.

Remember, we want to find people who might be interested in attending your live video streaming, so is highly important that you follow this step.

Step 4: Make a list of all the people who appear in the results and let them know about your upcoming event. Since they’ve seen and shared similar content before, they’re very likely to attend to your streaming, too.

You can use the following script:

Hi NAME,

NAME

Note: For this strategy to work, I recommend that you create a list of at least 50 people. Also, If you’re wondering how to find a person’s email, you can read this post.

How to Get Tangible Results

One of the biggest problems people have with live video streaming is they don’t know how to achieve results. I’ve found that the reason for it is they simply don’t know how to connect it with business objectives.

We talked about setting your goals earlier in this guide for that simple reason. When your goals are clear, everything is much simpler.

Here are 4 ways to connect the dots between Periscope and your core marketing goals, so you can see tangible results. Choose those ones that better fit your business objectives.

1) Humanize Your Brand

One of your main goals as a brand is to build strong relationships with your audience, and Periscope helps you do that in a very unique way – you can basically open the gate and give to people an inside-look to your company.

Think about it: What better way to humanize your brand than sharing what you do in a common day?

Reality TV is so popular because people love to connect with other human beings. If you share behind-the-scenes content to your audience, they’ll feel more connected with you, and therefore they will trust you more.

2) Product Demos

What better way to offer proof than showing your audience a live product demonstration? This way, they can see in real time how your product actually works and the results they can achieve if they decide to buy it.

3) Customer and Audience Research

Audience research is one of the hardest things when it comes to online marketing (especially when you don’t know where to look). However, once you get it done, you’ll an unfair advantage over your competition.

Periscope gives you the opportunity to learn what your audience really wants, in real-time. You can conduct live Q & A to see what specific questions they ask, you can study comments people are making to find patterns on the way they think, and you can even find untapped keywords they’re using to describe their problems.

This information will help you develop better strategies and help your audience in unique ways.

4) Create Exclusive Content For Your Subscribers

You can create a private group for your blog subscribers and share content that only people who are in your private community can see. This will create an athmosphere of exclusiviness, which people love so much.

Over to You

Periscope is new and fresh. If you think it’s right for your business and goals, then take a dive and start a broadcast using the guidelines we discussed.

Hopefully this guide has shown you that Periscope is a powerful social media tool to grow your brand.

What other tips, techniques and insights do you have about Periscope?

About the Author: Josue Valles is a content marketing evangelist, strategist and die-hard entrepreneur. He constantly blogs about Inbound Marketing, SEO and Social Media Marketing at Engagebit. You can also follow him on Twitter.

Source: KISS

In today’s world, you don’t have to go to Hollywood to be a star. All you need is a YouTube account, and of course, something interesting to share.

You don’t need to be a director to make a movie. You don’t need to be a newscaster to deliver news. And you don’t need to be a stock broker to trade on the stock market.

With today’s technology, anyone can do anything, and that includes online advertising. What used to be the exclusive purview of advertising companies can now be done by anyone. You simply decide what platform you want to use, and then sign up. More and more businesses are going it alone in what seems to be an under-the-radar trend.

But the tools making the world more accessible are also making it more dangerous. If you play the stock market without knowing what you’re doing, you could end up broke. Online advertising is definitely something you don’t want to do on a whim.

Here are five simple mistakes that can cause big problems:

1. Not Understanding or Noticing Location Options

If you have ever seen an ad on Google that had nothing to do with your location, it was probably a result of the campaign manager not using targeted location.

When setting location in AdWords, there is a small + tab that opens up the advanced options settings. The default setting is “People in, or who show interest in my targeted location.” This means that if you place ads for a pizzeria, and a searcher is looking for “American Pizza,” they will see your ads even if they are located in Africa. To avoid this, always choose “People in my targeted location.”

2. Placing Ads on Your Own Selling Websites

Ad placement such as AdSense is an easy way for websites to fill their ad inventory and make some extra money. This is usually a great fix for large news websites, blogs, and other sites that don’t sell online.

However, often, you can find these ads on sites belonging to SMB’s that don’t understand the ads do more harm than good. For example, you won’t see AdSense on the Kissmetrics site because it degrades the user experience and takes attention away from the messaging.

Having ads on a selling site usually does not generate a lot of revenue, and worse still, it takes customers off your site. Additionally, it opens an option for competitors to promote their products on your site.

3. Being an Advertising Yes-Man

Many advertising platforms, such as AdWords, highlight certain features that sound great but don’t always work to your benefit. For example, when choosing your bid strategy on AdWords, you are offered an option to use “Enhanced CPC”. What this actually does (if you look at the fine print) is allow AdWords to raise your bids by 30% in order to get you better placement.

While it may do just that, if you set a certain budget and forget about this setting, then every time you raise the budget, you will essentially be increasing the 30% allowance.

4. Not Understanding the Platform’s Algorithms

You don’t need to be an engineer, but you should have a general grasp of how the platform you choose to advertise on works. It can make a huge difference. For example, AdWords Search is highly based on relevance (Quality Score). The more relevant your keywords, ads, and landing page, the higher your quality score and the less you will pay per click.

On Facebook, each user has an actual value based on how active they are on the site. A user who spends money on Facebook has a higher value than one who doesn’t. Why is that important? Well, if you have an audience of 100k users and the suggested bid is $2, but you decide to place a bid of $0.50, you are in fact telling the algorithm that you want to show only for users who have a value of $0.50.

If $0.50-value users make up 10% of your total audience, your true audience in this case would be 10k users, not 100k. Your budget, set to reach 100k, will show the ads only to the 10k $0.50-value users in your audience over and over again. Eventually, your frequency will get too high, and you will be spamming that audience, which will in turn make your cost higher. And the worst part is that you will never even reach the value audience you really wanted to reach in the first place.

5. Being Your Own Competition

When it comes to bidding, it’s easy to get carried away with your bids. And most platforms make it easy for you to overspend by suggesting what you should pay in order to beat your competition.

If you underpay, your ads might not appear as often. However, this doesn’t mean you should overpay.

You should bid according to your ROI, not your ego. Overpaying puts all your competitors into overdrive and raises bids for everyone. On most major platforms, there are enough impressions to go around.

On AdWords, some advertisers even overbid on their own brand keywords. This makes no sense at all since usually you are the only one buying your brand keywords. Essentially, raising bids on branded keywords simply lets the algorithm know you are willing to pay more, and so you will.

There are cases where your competition might be buying your keywords. Remember, you should always have a higher quality score than they do, and you can beat them that way.

So, should you tackle online advertising on your own?

At the end of the day, it depends on the scope of your business, the results you expect to gain from your campaigns, the budget you plan to spend, and your willingness to learn a new trade. There are many plusses to running your own campaigns, such as full transparency and the ability to monitor your spending and branding. After all, no one knows your business as well as you do.

It is possible to do your own online marketing, but be aware that the endeavor will require the same amount of preparation as doing your own taxes, representing yourself in court, or flying your own plane. You will need to do some homework, understand the inner workings of the platform, and choose settings carefully. If you don’t know what something means, look it up. That’s what Google is for.

Everyone makes mistakes, even the pro’s. Learning to spot the mistakes is key. If something seems off, if you aren’t getting the results you believe you should be, then investigate, go over your settings, and make sure you’re not committing any major advertising no-no’s.

About the Author: Daniel Rosenfeld is a Digital Marketing Professional, always looking for the smallest details which have the largest impact.

Source: KISS

If you’ve spent any time learning about marketing analytics, you’ve probably come across the term “funnels.” If you’re curious about what they are and how they can help, this post is for you.

What Are Funnels?

You undoubtedly want visitors on your website to take certain actions. Maybe you want them to make a purchase, sign up, or fill out a form. When someone does something you want them to do, it’s known as a conversion. The visitor converts from browsing to taking the action you want them to take.

A funnel is the set of steps a visitor needs to go through before they can reach the conversion.

Think about the Amazon purchase funnel. There are a few steps a visitor has to go through before they can purchase a product. Here’s how it looks:

• They have to visit Amazon.com
• They have to view a product
• They have to add a product to the cart
• They have to purchase

There are additional steps/actions that can be taken in between each of these steps, but they do not matter in the purchase funnel. For example, a visitor may view Amazon’s About page, Contact page, and Careers page, but we don’t need to count these in the funnel because they aren’t necessary steps.

Why is the set of steps to conversion called a “funnel”? Because at the beginning of the process, there are a lot of people who take the first step. Then, as the people continue along and take the next steps, some of them drop out, and the size of the crowd thins or narrows. (And even further along in the process, your sales team gets involved to help close the deal.)

The top of the funnel is where everyone goes in (visiting your site). Only the most interested buyers will move further down your funnel.

So when you hear people say “widen the funnel,” you now know what they are referring to. They want to cast a larger net by advertising to new audiences, increasing their brand awareness, adding inbound marketing, etc. in order to drive more people to their site, thus widening their funnel. The more people there are in a funnel, the wider it is.

You aren’t limited to using your funnel strictly for signing up and/or purchasing. You can put funnels all over your website to see how visitors move through a specific website flow.

You may want to track newsletter signup (Viewing newsletter signup form > Submitting form > Confirming email) or a simple page conversion (Viewing a signup page > Submitting signup). Figure out what your goals are and what you want visitors to do on your site, and you can create a funnel for it.

Once you have the data, you’ll be able to see where roadblocks are and optimize your funnel. Let’s dig a little deeper into that.

Why Funnels Are Beneficial

With a funnel report, you can see where you are losing customers.

Let’s take your average SaaS business as an example. Here’s how a funnel may look for them:

• Visited site
• Signed up for a trial
• Used product
• Upgraded to paying

Do people have to use the product before paying? They don’t, but it’s a good idea to track it so you can see if it’s a roadblock for them.

Here’s how that funnel would look in the Kissmetrics Funnel Report:

In this example, the business manages to get 165 people to use the product, but only 13 people convert to Billed. There are opportunities for improvement at every step of the funnel, but it’s important to first work on the areas that need the most attention. The more people they can convert to Billed, the more revenue they’ll have. This should be the first area of the funnel to optimize.

A Funnel in Real Life

Funnels occur everyday with consumers. Let’s look at the funnel process for a retail store and see the corresponding steps in an ecommerce store. We’ll be tracking a purchase funnel.

The Ecommerce store has the fortune of being able to see a funnel. If they use Kissmetrics, they’ll see the exact number of people that move through the funnel, and where and when they drop off in the purchase process.

Okay, so now we have an understanding of what a funnel is and why it helps. Let’s take a look at two products that offer funnels – Google Analytics and Kissmetrics.

How Google Analytics Funnels Work

Google Analytics offers funnels, and we’ve written extensively about it in the past. There are a few things you’ll need to know when creating funnels in Google Analytics:

• It’s a pretty basic funnel. If you don’t want to dive deep into the data and optimize, you can go with this.
• You cannot go back and retroactively view data. Once you create your funnel, you’ll only be able to the funnel going forward as the data comes in.

Click here to learn how to set up a conversion funnel in Google Analytics.

How Kissmetrics Funnels Work

Kissmetrics funnels, on the other hand, are simpler. You just create your events and then set up the report. Events are various actions people take on your website. These may include signing up, downloading something, clicking on something, viewing a page, using a feature, etc. Once you have these set up, you can create funnels. There are a few benefits to Kissmetrics funnels:

• You can go back and retroactively view data. Want to create a funnel that views your performance 3 months ago? No problem. As long as you were tracking data during that time, you can go back and view your performance. If you weren’t tracking data during that time, there are ways to import data into Kissmetrics.
• It doesn’t matter if people leave your funnel and then return to it and convert. In other words, they don’t have to follow a strict path. In the example funnel above, a visitor can go on other pages of your site before signing up. They don’t have to go to your homepage and then straight to signing up. If they go to your homepage, then your About page, your Contact page, and your Pricing page, and then enter signup, they’ll still be counted.
• It doesn’t matter if the conversion takes a long time to happen. As long as it’s within your date range, you can track it. Do you have people who visit your site one day and sign up 20 days later? If it’s within your date range, Kissmetrics will register the signup conversion.
• You can segment your traffic to see your most valuable segments. This can come in especially useful if you’re tracking traffic or UTM segments. Tracking these can help you find your highest converting sources. Once you know what they are, you can put more effort into getting more traffic from those sources. We covered this in this blog post on increasing conversions.
• We don’t track pageviews. Our technology tracks every person on your site. This means you can see each person in every step of your funnel. Take, for instance, the example funnel above. With the Kissmetrics funnel, you can see the people who did not convert to “Billed.” You can then email them to gather feedback and find out why they decided not to convert to paying. You can then take this information back into your product development and marketing.

Recap

We’ve gone through a fair amount, here’s a recap:

• When someone on your website does something you want them to do (i.e., sign up, make a purchase, fill out a form, etc.), it is known as a conversion.
• A funnel is used to track the steps that lead up to that conversion. For example, Ecommerce companies want people to purchase products on their website. Their funnel may have these steps – visited site > viewed product > placed product in cart > purchased.
• Using a funnel report you can see where people are dropping off in the path to conversion.
• Both Google Analytics and Kissmetrics provide funnels. Each have their unique use cases. Kissmetrics provides additional reports in addition to the Funnel Report.

Video Explanation

Want to know more about the Kissmetrics Funnel Report? Just click play below.

Ready to see how the Funnel Report and other Kissmetrics reports can be used to grow your business? Then request a personal demo today.

About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is a Content Writer for Kissmetrics.

Source: KISS