marketingwithkiana

[marketingwithkiana]

4/20/23 Jaguars through Hertz? Is Facebook dead?

Today we started class talking about Paid Social. The question stands: what's the best social media to utilize for your brand? Three-fourths of all marketers run paid social campaigns. It's about "when", not "if" at this point.

What is the audience profile and what social media networks are they gathered around? The answer to that will shape your social campaign. Social media is a very effective tool for brand awareness.

Paid and organic social media coexists; they supplement each other when it comes to social campaigns. Paid campaigns can support your organic social media efforts.

Paid social gives your business guaranteed reach. Important! Every social media network has its own algorithm and it is important to keep up with the trends. Paid social also ensures that your campaigns get seen - the audience WILL see your campaign.

Paid social allows you to target your most relevant customers. Also important! You can tailor these campaigns to reach certain audiences. You benefit when your ads are directed toward those most likely to interact with them. It also saves you more money to do so.

Paid social also teaches you a lot about your target audience. You get the opportunity to see what sort of audience your existing campaigns bring in - analyzing your results is an effective way to further narrow down your game plan.

When to start using paid social? Yesterday. It is a critical form of marketing. There's no right answer to what kind of budget you need to have - it is up to circumstance and utilizing what you've got at your disposal. A question to ask yourself: how long and how often are you running the campaign for? That will help you plan your budget during the campaign. Figure out your starting point and understand what you have control over, and who you ultimately plan to reach. That is the best way to determine your budget situation.

Keys to running a successful paid social campaign:

Pick the social platform(s) you're going to prioritize. Don't try to cover too much at once; focus on the targeting that is appropriate to your purpose.

Establish goals and desired outcomes for your paid campaigns. You've got to figure out what you want to get out of your social ads before running them.

Look for inspiration from successful campaigns. We've all seen the good and the bad - learn from it.

Research appropriate creatives, copy, and targeting. Be consistent with your brand and be on point.

Track your paid efforts with analytics. Analytics will be the map to your success.

At this point we split up into our groups to work on our final projects. Until next time!

-Kiana

[marketingwithkiana]

4/13/23 Dry Shampoo for Dogs? Denim Pants?

We started off the day by learning about the IAB, the Internet Advertising Bureau. I had no idea it existed, but here we are. They establish standards and guidelines for advertising on the internet. They even provide guidelines for ad sizes, right down to the pixel.

Banner advertising is great for an awareness campaign. Programmatic buying is when you partner with an agency; you aren't doing any of it yourself, the agency does it for you.

Rich media is a banner ad that does some more complicated stuff. It can drop down, expand, or interact with the user. Banner advertising is sold on a CPM basis - cost per mille (thousand). This is the cost per thousand impressions. Advertisers can now view from a viewability rate; the number of times the ad was viewed/the amount of times it was served.

Native advertising requires more effort; you need the resources to create the content. It's content that you create as a marketer/advertiser that you put on another website to get in front of their audience.

Having the right keywords are the pillars to successful advertising. If you don't pay close attention to your keywords, you may trigger a lot of irrelevant impressions and clicks. This concept is called keyword match types. You have to choose relevant keywords and keyword phrases. Use keyword match types effectively with your Google ad campaigns.

Broad match: The default keyword match type. Least restrictive; least amount of control. It doesn't filter out some of the more targeted traffic you intend to reach.

Phrase Match: sticks to queries that contain phrase. All about the word order; will show to people that search for the phrase included in the keyword, in that exact order. Less impressions, but better visitor quality.

Exact Match: most restrictive; most control. Your exact match ad will only show in Google Paid Search results if what the person types in is exact.

Negative keyword match types go hand in hand with keyword match types. It will eliminate your ad from showing up for searches related to the negative keyword.

Negative Broad Match: most restrictive option for negative keywords; casts the widest net possible for negative keywords.

Negative Phrase Match: opposite of how it works for the positive phrase match. It won't trigger your ads for searchers if they search for terms that include exact phrases of your keyword in the same order.

Negative Exact Match: Eliminates only the search queries that contain the exact phrase, in the same order, and without any extra words.

We spent the rest of class within our final groups to work on our projects. Until next time!

-Kiana

[marketingwithkiana]

4/6/23 Ulta? ChatGPT?

Time for another week of Digital Marketing with Kiana! Today, we started off by discussing segmentation. Segmentation is being able to group sets of users into naturally related attributes. Segmentation can include:

Customer Type

Interest in certain topics or products

Location

Level of engagement

Email is a one-to-one relationship. Personalization is key to making that a successful relationship. Understand your customer; engage in specific and meaningful ways that will get them to take the action we want them to take.

Some email best practice includes powerful subject lines and a body that lives up to the subject line. Keep subject lines to 60-70 characters. Body copy needs to be crafted to get read - keep your subscriber engaged. Be concise and on brand. Have a deliberate hierarchy of content in your email; put the important info first and expand upon it within the rest of your body. Have one CTA per email and really convince your subscriber to act upon it - use action oriented verbs that create urgency, but never "Click here." Use a noticeable button image. Format correctly and don't be afraid to use images. They can increase loading time so you want to keep your images under 1 mb. Remember to use alt text in the same way as we've previously discussed in SEO best practice; be user friendly and accessible.

Measuring email performance is next. Open Rate, Bounce Rate, Click Through Rate, and Opt Out Rate are important to track. Hard bounces are when there is a permanent issue with an email like it being incorrectly entered; a soft bounce is a temporary issue like a full inbox. This distinction is important when it comes to efforts to reestablish contact. If an opt-out rate is high, then there are issues you need to address about your email system.

Utilizing email receipts and shipping messages to your advantage. Lead in emails like "You may also like..." can be effective in helping expand sales after a sale has already taken place; it can remind someone of something they still want or need.

Make your emails personal. Call them by name; give a personalized hello in every email you send. Don't say things like "customer" or "user". That makes you sound like a robot. Remember, however, to exercise restraint when sending emails; don't be aggressive and annoying and test out emails in batches to figure out what works best. Remember to brand your emails accurately, using familiar fonts, colors, logos, and language. Give yourself an identity that people can recognize. Email automation can be tailored around a user's behavior; you can determine when people receive emails, at what rate, and when.

We ended early at this point to discuss our final group project, which is really exciting and a little scary.

Til next time, yours truly,

-Kiana

[marketingwithkiana]

3/30/23 - Louboutins? Healthy snacks? "Click here" is a no-no?

We started off class reviewing header tags - they provide structure to a page. H1 tags introduce the page; H2 are like book chapters and H3 and so forth are subheaders as you continue down the structure.

Social signals - they aren't a direct ranking factor, but the more an article is shared, the more likely it is to earn backlinks. These are ranking factors - like we talked about before, they contribute to 40% of where you rank in search results.

Introduce the context of your page via your H1 tag. Google uses header tags to gather text context. Be thoughtful about it and avoid being spammy with keywords in header tags. You want to achieve readability! Don't use multiple H1 tags - it isn't hurtful for SEO per se, but can contribute to a negative user experience.

Snippets are seen by search engines and displayed immediately as a result of a search; it's the heading that you see when googling. They can also be lists, not just sentences or phrases.

Keep your header tags consistent! In fact, be consistent about everything you do in digital marketing. Aim to impress!

A rule of thumb about headers - keep them to 70 characters or less. Make them interesting, make them stand out - remember, you want to get attention in a positive and meaningful way. Always review and revise headers prior to publishing so that things remain clean, correct, and digestible. H1 is pretty important - that's usually going to determine whether or not a consumer consumes your content.

Now we dive into REDIRECTS. Yay! They are pretty self-explanatory - they redirect users to a new URL if content has moved. 301 redirects are a permanent redirect from a page that no longer exists. It can happen for a variety of reasons but ultimately you want to give the user something to land on, URL-wise. 301 redirects also help boost SEO performance as well. Usually the development team handles the redirect stuff so breathe a sigh of relief if you are a marketer worried about having to deal with them on a constant basis.

A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect when a page has moved temporarily. You can usually place one of these on a page that is under construction. Once its live, you can remove the 302. 302 redirects no longer lose SEO after 2016. A 307 redirect is also a temporary redirect, but the difference is that with a 307, the http does not change.

Wildcard redirects are a bit of a wildcard (ha ha) that allow you to redirect all the URLs in a folder on your site to another with a single redirect rule.

301 redirect, or allow for a 404 Page Error to show up? There are certain things to take into consideration to answer this. Is there something else similar to your page that you can use instead? Then implement a 301. If there isn't, then it depends on why you are deleting that page at all. A 410 header tells the browser and SERPs that this page has been deleted. 410 status specifically states that a page has been deleted.

Now, we move on to SEM.

SEM, also known as Search Engine Marketing, is an important part of marketing as a whole. SEM is especially effective when it comes to complete a consumer transaction or purpose. It is paid search advertising that allows companies or brands to pay search engines to place ads higher on relevant search results pages. You aren't charged until someone actually clicks on your ad - which makes it an affordable method of advertisement.

Things that determine where your ad will land on Google SERPs:

Bidding

Ad extensions

Quality of ads and landing pages

Keywords

SEM works in conjunction with SEO so implement your best practices for both. Paid search campaigns help marketers target specific customers - bidding for relevant keywords are the best way to reach your targeted customer.

Pay-per-click is more cost effective and accurate than other traditional advertising methods so take it into consideration next time you choose between a billboard or a Google ad. Paid search marketing shows results quickly compared to the longer paced process of SEO building.

Now, emails. What kinds of emails are there?

Transactional emails

Promotional emails

Lifecycle emails

There are things that matter before even opening an email. Focusing on body content is a mistake; it is important, but you need to convince people to actually open the email. This can be boiled down into three things - the subject line and preheader text, when you send the email, and how you segment your subscriber list for target relevance. Many rules of SEO remain true to email marketing - consistency and appeal are everything to a successful email campaign.

Email best practice:

Body content needs to fulfill the expectations described by the email subject line. Make sure it is visually and verbally appealing and promotional of your brand. Calls to action matter here. Convince subscribers to act! Don't say "Click here" please, dear god. Use clear content hierarchy and don't be afraid to use formatting as long as it makes sense. Images should add value, and use alt text always. Mobile optimization is also key - since 2019 mobile format has dominated how users view emails. Always always always measure and track the performance of your emails - this is how you improve. Analytics you should track:

Open rate

Bounce rate

Click through rate

Opt-out rate

Emails to be continued next class. Til then, see you later! xo

-Kiana

[marketingwithkiana]

Snow Leopards? More whiskey? Henry VIII? 3/9/23

Today's class!

We did a brief summary on URLs - they need to be easy to red, because it is the first thing that is displayed to the consumer. Keywords matter and they should exist within URLs. Consistent application across a website is also important. Dynamic versus static URLs: try to go for a static when you csn. Minimize redirects on your domain and think ahead. Main content and supplementary content creates coverage for relevant topics. Search and analytics data supports your site structure. Lastly, create an XML sitemap containing the links you want to rank with SEO and submit to search engines.

SEO Friendliness: remember you are writing for people, not for search engines. Try to be interesting and informative; too much optimization can be a bad thing.

Remember the following techniques that make for good web writing.

Write relevant content: is the content relevant to the user or app? Inform, entertain, or educate.

Put conclusions at the beginning: Keywords should be denser at the top half of your article/page. Don't shorten until you get to the latter half of your site.

Use lists instead of paragraphs: Get SEO content without your repetition seeming strange. Lists are easily digestible.

Make your links part of the copy: Integrate your content as a link; in the case of a Snow Leopard website, link the words "Snow Leopard Trust" instead of "click here".

Include internal sub-headings and they should include your keyword phase: Use header tags, elements create logical headings within the document.

Proofread your pages: Come on now. Proofread. Grammar and spelling and syntax matter when it comes to public perception.

If someone can tell you what your keyword is without doing more than looking at the webpage, you're doing a good job. Images also add weight to a page. Keep your images at 200 KB. Make sure to consider image file name as well - its searchable. All lowercase, 3 to 4 words, and separate words with a hyphen.

Alt text is a description of the image - it should be exactly that. Screen readers matter and so should the wording of your alt text. Use proper grammar with alt text. It should read like a sentence. Yay ADA compliance! Also, avoid writing alt text longer than 100 characters. Try not to bake text into images - it isn't good for ADA compliance nor is it good for SEO.

Now... Format!

Lists instead of paragraphs!

Limit list items to 7 words

Write short sentences

And remember. Always remember. ALWAYS. Proofread your work!!

Now, onto Header Tags.

Header tags are the HTML tags that tell a browser what styling it should use to display a piece of text on a webpage. It is important to use organized header content that makes it logically consumable by end users. Key takeaways are everything!

Header tags also provide context for what you're about to read. They provide context, hierarchy, and an idea if what content they are about to consume. They help Google understand your content as well. Use header tags to provide structure. Include keywords in your header tags.

We also discussed UX today. UX means user experience. It is constituted by:

Information architecture. Again, logical organization that makes sense to the user.

Content strategy. What are you gonna have on your website? Video, image, copy = all content types. You define what you're going to have on your website and you're going to define how to organize that content for maximum user experience.

Today, we also covered meta descriptions. It simply describes what the page is about. It's displayed in the SERP beneath the page title. Google says that they do not help ranking; however, they exist for the end users and are beneficial to their consumption. They're important in that they:

Increase a site's click thru rate in the SERPs

Drive traffic

Increase potential conversions

Remember a search snippet is not the same as a meta description. Search snippets are made by SERPs; meta descriptions are made by us. Keep your meta descriptions at about 160-165 characters maximum. Or, as Professor Grace believes, 156-160 characters max.

This has been a thorough and informative class. But now it is time for spring break. Until next time!

-Kiana

[marketingwithkiana]

Ethics? Cowboys? Whiskey? 2/23/23

Today, we begin Marketing with Kiana: The Blog.

What does this entail, you ask? Well, this blog is a summary of my experiences in my Digital Marketing class every Thursday. So sit back, relax, grab a beer, and read my blog.

We begin with a reflection on off-page factors and backlinks. Off page factors occur off a website; they are when external websites bring a website SEO (or don't, in the case of duplicates, which we also discussed today). Backlinks are when a website posts a link to your website, which redirects a user to your website from the external source. Turns out backlinks drive 40% of your page rank. Crazy stuff.

Duplicates, which I mention earlier, are when two websites use the exact same elements; they are essentially carbon copy website links and thus no one gets SEO in these situations, save for when edits or summarizations are made on the page that leads to the other.

We discussed the journey of clicks - website navigation. This begins with the URL, and leads to the category, which then leads to the sub-category, to the product, and so on and so forth. This needs to be executed cleanly in order to achieve the best SEO results. By this, I mean that one must use keywords for clarity. An example we used in class was an ecommerce site selling whiskey/whisky (depends if you're Irish or Scottish, it turns out) and building its URL hierarchy. Categorizing the offering, in this case whiskey, needs to be clear, concise, and straight to the point. Nothing excessively wordy or repetitive. We discussed a few more consistency factors; this includes case sensitivity, hashes, word delimiters, and URL length.

Dynamic versus static URL strings were also discussed in class. Dynamic URLs are typically automated and populated with random letters, numbers, and symbols. They are definitely much less representative of what message you are trying to convey with your page. Static URLs are clear depictions of a page's purpose and are done with specificity; they are unchanging and non-random. Try to avoid dynamic URLs if you want a better SEO. You want your users to understand what you're getting at through a glance at the URL alone.

A canonical URL is a consolidation of your information that is ultimately the representational URL link you get on web engine searches, such as on Google. It goes into the code of the page itself. A canonical tag is especially useful for retail websites. An XML sitemap is ultimately what gets submitted to search engines. There are two primary reasons why an XML sitemap is important:

Search engines have an easier time of finding your site's pages.

An XML sitemap becomes a reference to search engines when choosing canonical URLs.

To summarize our class today, we focused on the specifics that lead to powerful SEO optimization for a site. I am excited to see what's next!

-Kiana