Marketing 322

Marketing Blog for Davenport University Marketing 322

[davidjblanzy]

For my infographic, I chose to combine my workplace, Biggby Coffee, with a start-up reusable straw company Savetheturtles.ca who looks to raise proceeds to protect ocean life, clean the ocean and protect turtles and ocean life. 

For this infographic, I used Venngage as well as pictures, selected text and information from both the Biggby website and Save the Turtles website. 

Apart from posting this on Tumblr, to make this go viral and start some buzz I can post it on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram using the hashtags provided and adding a couple more. This is a great example of two companies benefitting from a partnership to better the earth. Both these companies get a promotion, sales gain and provide help to the Sea Turtle fund, protecting the ocean and ocean life. 

This infographic provides customers a call to action with multiple options to help give the customers different ways to raise money and awareness. 

[manderson120-blog]

Anderson Article Analysis

 Hello everyone,

For this week’s analysis session, I will be talking about a specific facet of marketing; Search engine marketing. According to our textbook, search engine marketing (SEM), “Drives more new website traffic than any other online advertising method and no other advertising method enables a more precise targeting of ready-to-go customers” (Larson,2019). 

To further research this topic that caught my interest, I found an article posted on Berytech.org. This article is based on search engine marketing and elaborates on the top 10 benefits of using this technique. These benefits are listed as the following: The ability to reach clients instantly, the ability to increase brand awareness, create ads based on geographical location, implement and manage ads quickly and effectively, the ability to target the right audience, pay for advertising only when a user takes action, appear on competitors keywords, and the ability to test and measure the companies performance (2019). 

One of the more appealing benefits in my opinion would be the fact that the company is not charged unless a user takes action. Our textbook uses a great example involving a paddle board shop. The example stated that, if you search paddle boards on Google his came up fourth, however, his ad included a $40 gift card towards the purchase. Because no other company was offering this and the ad is shown under the link before you even click on it, the owner hoped it would create more traffic.The Beautiful this method is you are only charged for people who take actions and could be possible leads. On the contrary, a magazine advertisement, for example, reaches thousands of people who will not even give the ad the time of day. Unfortunately, whether the user takes action or not, the advertiser still needs to pay. 

Furthermore, I found perhaps the most effective and useful benefit to be the ability to target audiences based on their geographical location. Jackie Graziano, a writer for Mediamaxnetwork.com, describes some of the benefits associated with a company using geo targeted ads. These include: Increased engagement, making the business locally relevant, helps spread local offers and discounts for specific geographical items, and helps businesses promote local marketing events (Graziano, 2018). The company that first came to my mind when thinking about geo advertising was Coca-Cola. Although the drink is made of the same ingredients, the company has different ad campaigns and personalized cans/bottles for any region they cater to. This also creates person-ability between the consumers and company.

Thanks for reading!

Marc Anderson 

References 

Larson, J., & Draper, S. (2019). Digital marketing essentials. Rexburg: Edify.

Top 10 Benefits Of Search Engine Marketing – SEM. (2019). Retrieved January 22, 2020, from https://berytech.org/top-10-benefits-of-search-engine-marketing-sem/

Graziano , J. (2018, November 26). What are the Advantages of Geo-Targeted Advertising? – MediaMax Network. Retrieved January 22, 2020, from https://mediamaxnetwork.com/blog/what-are-the-advantages-of-geo-targeted-advertising/

[davidjblanzy]

Great post this week Marc both in how it's organized and how you have related to the class setting. The benefits of SEM are perfectly fitted for how marketing and technology are growing in the digital marketing world. The paddleboard shop example the book gave is a great example of the customer taking action and being rewarded for this. Its $40 that the company is bating the customer in, but it's $40 dollars to get them into their company to put towards some of their own product or service. I did my first expert analysis on GEO targeting, and Coke is a great example of smart marketing to other countries, something as simple as putting Coke in different languages on their bottles, cans, and products really make the product feel more personal from country to country. Great post this week Marc, if you get a chance take a look at mine for the week and let me know your thoughts! 

[davidjblanzy]

Article Analysis Blog: What is Ad Rank and How to Improve by Andrew Raso

 What is Ad Rank and How to Improve it?

The article I chose to review and analyze is What is Ad rank and How to Improve by Andrew Raso. Ad Rank is

"Ad Rank is Google’s way of determining the ordering of competing ads on a search engine results page (SERP). It also determines whether your ads are eligible to show at all" (Raso, 2019). Ads that are ranked higher on your google search get the most exposure and are searched more than the ones below. Andrew provides a good example of this, "Let’s say the Ad Rank of three competing advertisers is 50, 15 and 5. If Google sets the minimum Ad Rank required to show above the search results as 20, only the first advertiser will show above the search results. If the minimum Ad Rank to show below the search results is 10, only the second advertiser will get the spot" (Raso, 2019). If the ad rank is below the threshold or Google standard for ad rank then the ad isn't displayed because it doesn't meet the requirements to be shown on an organic search. Ad rank is found by multiplying the CPC or Cost per Click by the Quality Score to get the best ad position. Add rank is based on 5 key factors:

1) Your maximum bid: When you set your maximum bid, you're telling Google Ads the most you're willing to pay for a single click on your ad. You’ll probably end up paying less than this, but the maximum bid matters to Ad Rank.  

2)Ad and landing page quality: Google Ads looks at the quality of your ads and the landing page it links to. How relevant and useful is your ad and landing page to the target audience?  This creates your Quality Score.

3)Ad Rank thresholds: Google sets minimum thresholds that your ad must achieve to be eligible to show.

4)Context of the user’s search: When calculating Ad Rank, Google pays attention to the search terms, time of the search, location at the time of the search, device type (e.g. mobile or desktop), the nature of the search terms, other ads, organic search results and more.

5)The expected impact from your ad extensions and ad formats: Adding additional information to your ad, like more links to specific pages on your site, is known as an ad extension. Google Ads projects how these extensions and other ad formats will impact your ad's performance.

Andrew Raso from Online Marketing Gurus provides some actionable strategies to help improve your ad rank. The first strategy is to create ads that are more relevant and useful, specifically make it relevant to the search. Make the extensions stand out, the "impact of extensions" determines the ad relevance. Make sure your landing pages to deliver exceptional user experience, making it relevant to the search terms. Creating specific ad groups, basically making sure you focus on a specific product or service with your ads. A very obvious and effective one is to use those key terms in the ad and title URL, putting the keyword right upfront will jump you right to the top of the searches if you meet the other standards. Needless to say, testing everything is such an important part of improving ad rank. Certain ads will perform better than others, to ensure efficiency test everything to see how it runs. Finally, optimizing your bidding strategy is important, make sure you weigh the cost versus the revenue.

This relates well with this week's core concept, based upon the strategies on how to improve Ad Rank, something we are learning currently. Digital marketing is all about being on top of social media, and marketing strategies to market efficiently. Learning more about Ad Rank can really boost your marketing ideas and helping your company and business grow.

References:

Raso, A. (2019, October 9). What is Ad Rank And How To Improve it? Retrieved February 5, 2020, from https://www.onlinemarketinggurus.com/blog/what-is-ad-rank

[davidjblanzy]

Expert Session Analysis Blog: Larry Kim - The New Email Marketing

 Larry Kim is the founder and CTO Wordstream, which is online advertising made easy. Larry touches on the new ways of email marketing, collect emails and run campaigns. 

Email marketing is the most popular marketing channel used by 87% of businesses, which is more than any other marketing campaign used by businesses. Businesses are finding their emails such as promotions and other ads in what Larry calls “email dungeons” such as unroll.me, promotions, social and updates tabs, with email effectiveness dropping every quarter. 

One new and effective way of E-mail marketing is called “Email-Based PPC Marketing with PPC standing for Pay-per-click. Which is more focused on custom audiences, such as audiences tailored to your market which you keep on lists or segments. People who give up their personal information, specifically in this case emails, such as sign-ups, downloads and consultations are the audiences you should be going for. 

Larry continues with a true story about a blog he wrote about Google+ and Gmail being separated instead of one entity. When he was done writing it he shared it through numerous social media outlets but only wanted to target specific influencers, journalists, people by promoting his post to his own curated list. His story took off and was picked 2 hours later by Marketing Land, Saturday 4 more major press pickups, finally on Sunday Larry’s article had been picked up by over 500 press websites. He had such a positive return for just $50 and it only took him 10 minutes to put this together and send his blog to a tailored audience.  

Larry Kim does a great job describing the new way to email the market with today's socials media. But there are many other ways to market through emails. The design of the campaign is so important from the icons, illustrations and button colors to make the visuals pop. More focus on mobile devices, since this is the main way people use email, communicate and they have them on them basically 24/7. More video content, which does back to the visuals of the campaign, people will retain the information better after watching a video. Interactive content and a personalized experience are more important than ever. Engagement is the name of the game with marketing now, and people want to be heard, seen and understood. Creating a personalized campaign for the consumer can really spearhead the campaign. Add in some dynamic interactive content and you have a great start to a successful campaign.

References: 

Gigante, M. D. (2019, December 12). 9 email marketing trends to watch in 2019. Retrieved February 5, 2020, from https://www.prdaily.com/9-email-marketing-trends-to-watch-in-2019/

(2016, January 27). Retrieved February 5, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g28xLMUuu3s

[davidjblanzy]

Search Engine Advertising, What is it, How Does it Work & the Main Benefits - Stephanie Mialki

Search engine advertising has recently become a major theme throughout the internet. When you visit Yahoo, Bing or Google usually you see ads surrounding the searches or in the searches, you recently looked at. But why do we see these and how do these work? Stephanie Mialki touches on what Seach Engine Adversiting is and how it works, including the main benefits. Stephanie starts by talking about what search engine ads are and the main difference between Bing and Yahoo vs Google going over the key elements of Search Engine Advertising which include a headline, display URL, description text, and ad extensions. Advertisers bid on keywords relevant to their service or product. Mac bid x Quality Score = Ad Rank > Position. The quality score is based on a number of factors such as click-through rate, landing page, historical performance, ad relevancy, keyword relevancy, and other relevancy factors to find the quality score so you can make the proper bid on the right keywords. Stephanie goes into detail about the benefits of having a detailed strategy for Search Engine Advertising. First, a quick and easy implementation, high user intent, fast results, greater brand awareness, measurability, and analysis; such as -Money spent vs Value generated-Total impressions-CTR and CPC-Average ad position-Conversion rate-Average time on page-What pages they visitedStephine includes some statistics to help convince the reader on adopting this strategy. She also includes the top 100 keywords on Google Adwords with a lot of legal and accident keywords which I found most interesting. Finally, she ended on some major trends that are on the upswing within Search Engine Advertising. Enhanced audience targeting is on, and one that is really hitting a lot of home, voice search with smart speakers. Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Siri are starting to pick up on what is being said around the home to the market to your search history.

Mialki, S. (2019, March 21). Search Engine Advertising: What is it, How Does it Work & the Main Benefits. Retrieved January 23, 2020, from https://instapage.com/blog/search-engine-advertising

[davidjblanzy]

EXPERT SESSION ANALYSIS BLOG - Week 1

The Basics if International SEO Expansion - Kate Morris Director of Client Strategies at OutSpoken MediaKate Morris, who is the Director of Client Strategies for OutSpoken Media talks about the basics of expanding your company internationally. With this expansion comes many hurdles that you need to clear before you can really expand the company to the fullest. Kate touches on these hurdles while provided tips and helpful guides to help your company. Once you get past these hurdles the company can be branded and start to expand much easier, but it is all about understanding how to do this, it all starts with understanding the languages in other countries. The main focus of her first point is understanding that "A language is not a country and a country is not a language" (Morris, 2015). Which is a broad point but a massive and important point she starts with? Once you understand this, expanding the company internationally becomes much easier. A lot of major countries are directly associated with a language but not all of them. Many countries have four or five major languages which are also broken down by regional differences, laws and rules, and even cultural differences. A good example of this is Christmas cards in the USA vs Australian, most people in the US picture Santa wearing his big red jumpsuit with snow, but in Australia, their Christmas is in the summer so it is directly related to the beach and summer themes. For digital marketing, a user's language online is based on what they use to browse which includes the browser settings and search terms they use. For those who are in other countries, most prefer to browse using their home country language so you cannot GeoTarget that way all the time, only on a few occasions. Kate explains the technical portion of expanding the company internationally and how you use the language to do this depending on the market. She starts very basic talking about the different ways to write and translate a language to other countries starting with the basic terminology of XML sitemap, a URL, Canonical Tag, and parameter. Using these terms shes goes over the basic URL structure for translating and GeoTargeting different countries, the different language options you have what a Subdirectory and Subdomain, with the positives and negatives of each. One major point is not to this too early on as you could put yourself in a bit of trouble in case you need to change your URL. Determining what strategy you use is another important aspect, but before you start you must make sure that the company you work for has the resources to expand and understand the market they want to expand to. If not. Kate provides a flow chart talking about what the needs of the company are and the proper steps to give the company a proper expansion to the right market, given that they are prepared. Great, advanced and well-explained interview with Kate. If you want to learn more see the full video with questions answered at the end of the interview with the link below

.​https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=935&v=vUWNaoSUxEQ&feature=emb_logo