While our 2022 B2B Marketing trends post below is still extremely relevant (we’ve made sure to update it as the year has progressed), 2022 is nearly over, and we’re looking ahead to next year. If you’d like to get ahead and set your sites forward, download the PDF version of our Marketing Trends 2023: The Year of Endurance blog by clicking below! If you’d like to stick to the 2022 B2B Trends article, just keep scrolling.

Intro to B2B Trends 2022

At the beginning of 2022, we published our predictions for B2B marketing trends in 2022. 

Now we’re looking at them again to see what’s changed.

Every trend we put out at the beginning of the year undergoes a change. 

As industries hop onto the bandwagon and pick up where the other company left off, changing the trend becomes a matter of business necessity – and very few trends survive as they are once they become a trend. Some never change (these would be megratrends, the overarching umbrella that other trends fall under) while others last just a season, or until a bigger trend comes along. 

Remember planking? 

That’s what we mean when we talk about trends that just disappear after a while.

Trends in business follow the same patterns. There’s always megatrends, and from these megatrends, smaller trends appear. 

All trends come from your consumers: what they like, what they don’t like, how they express themselves, what needs they want answered, what service will make their lives easier. 

B2B marketing is no different. Your clients are just bigger. And you have a lot more of those decision-makers to satisfy. 

Here’s what we predicted for 2022, and how it’s playing out so far. 

B2B Marketing Megatrends

1. Don’t Be a Dick

What we said: “Don’t underestimate the power of good. People are willing to forgive a lot if they can see that you’re genuinely trying to be nice. And people are willing to punish you if you go against their values. Over and above, it’s no longer cool to work yourself and your people down to the bone. Gone are the days where you could boast about 80-hour weeks. If you’re stuck in this rut, get out of it. Stop boasting about it and stop making the hustle your brand. Nobody likes it.”

Is it still relevant? 

Absolutely. 

‘Don’t be a dick’ isn’t just a B2B marketing mantra: it’s a mantra for every big business that has a customer-facing side (so, every big business), and it’s more than just something to tack onto your goals for the year. 

The psychological toll of the pandemic, the rising cost of living, the climate crisis: none of these problems have gone away, and in 2022, they’re more than just something to table until the next shareholder discussion – and people are feeling the pressure. From B2B to B2C, companies are being held accountable for what they do that isn’t in line with personal consumer values. 

Those values? Be a better person. Be a better company. Do better work. 

Companies that do get a much better reception than the companies that don’t. 

This trend, in practice:

NVIDIA’s family-first leadership practice has placed it at the top of Glassdoor’s ‘best place to work’ list last year, and this year looks to be shaping up for more of the same: employees are reportedly 95% more likely to recommend their place of work than 57% of employees, and best of all, it has a rare talent to be simultaneously at the heart of several problematic industries (tech, AI, robotics) without actually drawing online ire – more than a small feat for a company that’s been in business as long as NVIDIA has.

Case Study: Rethink in Canada puts their people first. “People, Projects, Profit” has been their mantra from day one and they stick to it obsessively. They have gone as far as giving their employees days off to protest, and their offices are all empty by 5pm: “When Chris Staples, Tom Shepansky and Ian Grais founded the company, they wanted Rethink to be an alternative to the typical wheel-spinning, stressful agency culture,” And if you think that all of this has made them soft, think again (or dare we say, rethink). They’ve gone from strength to strength, growing by leaps and bounds and earning widespread recognition in the process: “For the third time in just as many years, Rethink nabbed three 2021 Agency of the Year medals.”

2. Experimentation

What we said: This is the time to experiment with all the methods you had been looking at but never found the time (or courage) to try out. This is the time to speak to your audiences using methods that you’d never thought you’d try out for B2B communications. 

Is it still relevant?

B2C thrives off of experimentation: from strange collabs to even stranger marketing tactics, the world of B2C has never been more alive with sheer possibility – and B2B can take a lot of good pointers away from the B2C camp to grow the volume and value of its  connections. 

Experimentation is a lifeline right now. There are – and will always be – organisations that do the same thing that you do, with the same methods, and with the same or better results. The only way you are going to communicate above that, and reach your clients, is to figure out a way of communicating that’s better for your message. 

And to do that, you need to experiment: with how you talk, how you get people to listen, and what you do when they respond to you.

Don’t underestimate the value of what a good experiment can teach you. And if that doesn’t convince you, remember: we used to only talk to the people in our community.

Then technology and progress gave us wings. For corporations, it’s the same thing: they went from advertising on one level to one audience to breaking into markets that there were no playbooks for, not in their industry. 

Now, we have the benefit of hindsight – but hindsight still doesn’t prepare you to speak to niche audiences on the other side of the globe. Think Starbucks trying to appeal to audiences in China or Africa. 

You need to experiment to know what to say. 

And how to say it.

Other companies have experienced the same two years that you have. All that’s left to see is who’s managed to build something better out of the pandemic, and who’s tried to turn back the clock. 

This trend, in practice:

Vaseline is 150 years old, and you have heard more about it now than you’ve had in your life. 

The reason? People are using it for skincare, and they’re showing the results on TikTok. 

Unilever reached out to influencer marketing agency Team Epiphany about getting on board with Tiktok, and what Team Epiphany delivered was a helpful boost to something that had actually been around since 2014, on a subreddit called SkincareAddiction. With Unilever amplifying the content, and Tiktok creators happy to hop onto another bandwagon, the results wrote themselves: a 357% increase in social media mentions, and over 300 million views on Tiktok for ‘slugging’.

Case study: 3300% increase in ROI in 6 weeks

This performance marketing case study might not be a B2B example, but it shows how, by setting a series of hypotheses out and testing them aggressively we got our client’s return on investment from €1.30 in return for every Euro spent to €44 for every Euro spent, all in the space of a few weeks. Testing like this takes courage, and we outlined the methods we used to get to the results we needed.

3. First-Party Data

What we said: As it becomes harder and harder to track your audiences, the one consistent piece of gold that you can own is your audience’s data. While it is critical that you should be extremely respectful of this data, you should also see it as one of the major goals for next year.

Is it still relevant?

Earlier this year, Europe went after Google and Google’s third-party data habits. The results have yet to be fully estimated, however one thing is already very clear: GDPR is a much bigger force to be reckoned with than many brands are prepared to handle. One way around the GDPR violations of third-party data is to move exclusively to first-party data, but that’s not just why we recommend first party data. 

First party data is data tailored to what you need. With third-party data, you run the risk of getting so much data that you can’t really make any proper use out of it: there’s just too much of it to go through, too much of it to think about, and too much of it to properly protect. First-party data, on the other hand, is data that you own, and that people are happy for you to own. 

Third-party data is going nowhere yet. But the cost of using it is rising, and leaving it until the last minute to change over to first-party data is just going to make it harder to adapt once you have to make the change – and that change is coming. 

People are still angry about Cambridge Analytica. The most recent GDPR problems are the cherry on top of something that has been on its way for years. 

This trend, in practice: 

Our Beewits mailer goes out to 40,000 people and counting, and we’ve been curating it for years. Everything that goes out from us through to the Beewits mailer is content that has value: blogs we’ve written that we worked hard on, content that we think is worth sharing. Through it, we get traffic to the website, Beewits’ reputation for good content is maintained, and we also get a decent bump in high-quality traffic. Everyone wins. 

B2B Marketing Trends To Watch

1. Human-first marketing

What we said: While it is critical for your brand to have a unified tone of voice, the people working for your brand should be encouraged to show up when speaking on behalf of your brand, to infuse your brand voice with their personality while respecting its core tenets.

Is it still relevant?

The way you communicate as a brand has never been so fundamentally important. Tying in to the first overarching trend we mentioned, this isn’t just a case of hyping up your products and putting your best foot forward in the face of a potential client meeting; it goes deeper than that. It’s about building a base communication practice that keeps your reputation going: through the big decision makers you speak through all the way down to their employees to the people who those big decision makers recommend you to. 

The people you’re speaking to in B2B are human. It’s time to make that the underlying principle of all your B2B communication.

Your brand, as our Head of Brand likes to say, is more than a logo. Your brand is your principles: your brand is how you treat people, your brand is whether your employees are happy, your brand is how you talk to clients and competitors. When you relegate your B2B contacts to automated responses, you’re not doing justice by your brand.

This is not a trend. This is how you need to be moving forward. The world, and the businesses in it, is getting smaller and smaller. 

The least you can do for your brand is talk to your clients like people. 

This trend, in practice: 

SEMRush’s 2017 Easter Egg hunt is an early, but excellent, example of what you can reap when you talk to people on their level – and in this case, that level was explaining their product through gamification. The campaign saw over 9000 users taking part, an engagement increase of 25% and a total conversion of 71 new users. 

2. The Great Resignation/Reshuffle

What we said: All your marketing efforts reflect who you are, the way you talk about your team reflects who you are, the way you deal with your public reflects who you are. And who you are defines what talent you can recruit and retain.

Is it relevant?

The ongoing unionisation efforts in the United States alone show that this trend is still gaining momentum, and is poised to be one of those things that just keeps going. Similar to what we’ve said before, the theme for 2022 is to do better – and this has ramifications client-side, too. 

Your B2B buyers are in the same situations as you were: overworked, overtired, underpaid. The things you worry about are the same things your clients worry about, and what it means is that you’re not going to be able to hold any lasting conversations with them without keeping that in mind. 

You need to build lasting relationships. Part of it is knowing how to communicate. 

Part of it is understanding that B2B business is changing, and that you’ll need to put in a greater amount of effort into creating the kind of brand that people want to work with; the kind of brand that’s active on socials, the kind of brand that shares its knowledge free of charge, the kind of brand that understands. The kind of brand that makes things easier, not harder, on your client to do what they want. 

You will lose your first point of contact. The trick is to build the same great relationship with the person that replaces them. 

You can read more about this trend in The Great Resignation and You: How To Retain your employees.

This trend, in practice: 

SketchUp led their latest campaign after an extensive research period. Using segmented data and audience analysis on their social platforms, they built a persona that guided their social ads to providing the right content at the right time. By personalising their approach, and allowing the people they were communicating with a say in what they could see, SketchUp saw a 7% conversion rate and a 366% increase in signup to trial and purchases.

3. High Quality Content

What we said: From fantastic explainer videos to resource centres, reports, guides and in-depth blogs, B2B customers are going to be spending much more of their time (and money) with businesses that offer them excellent content marketing.

Is it relevant?

Content has always been gold. What has changed now is how important it is to get that kind of content right. 

First of all, you’re not going to get the first party data you need to market, putting you in violation of the third overarching megatrend. Secondly, you’re not going to get the right kind of background information on your client that will help you market to them in a way that appears, violating overarching trend number one. And lastly, you can’t really experiment with content without knowing what’s working for you, putting you in violation of trend number 3. 

So, yes. Good content is key. Good content has always been the bricks on which a solid brand is build, and if you’re skimping on the content for yourself – blogs that aren’t SEO optimised, own-brand campaigns that just slide short of being good, lazy design – then you’re not really putting content out there that people want to see, and you’re not really giving them a reason to go with your brand over another. 

Create good content. Create good content for free, because it pays off in the long run. Create excellent content that is designed to teach people. 

Content is an investment. If you don’t really buy into it, wholesale, you’re not going to get the same results that a brand that goes full-throttle on their content will. And there are those brands that will put out excellent, free content knowing that it’s going to pay off in the long run. 

Be like them. 

This trend, in practice:

Another excellent win for audience segmentation, and another old case that is still reaping benefits today, Stanley Black & Decker’s 2018 campaign to reduce its sales cycle was so popular that it boosted follow-up by 34% and increased Stanley Black & Decker’s market share. By tailoring their content, training their sales staff on where to communicate with potential clients, and increasing sales effectiveness by sending customer-focused content to prospective clients, Stanley Black & Decker managed to achieve their goal of minimising the sales cycle length – by 30%!

Case Study: Omnipresent’s resource centre puts them at the forefront of their industry by offering all the guides you might need when hiring someone in another country. They took the time to research the subject in most countries and they present the data in ways that makes it a breeze to find and understand. The subject matter is incredibly complicated, so in seeing the work they did you can’t help but think that you can trust these guys implicitly. If they took all this time to put all this data out there publicly, can you just imagine how much knowledge there is in the company itself?

4. Snackable Content

What we said: If you want to stand out you have to fit in. That might sound counterintuitive, but it’s just how it is. To stand out in the B2B area, you need to fit in with how other brands are talking to your audiences.

Is it relevant?

Yes. 

But also, no. 

You do need to make content that stands out. You do need to talk to your audience in the same way that they’re talking to you. 

But you also need to keep in mind that the audiences you are communicating with have the same problems, and the same time-constraints, you have. It isn’t just a case of making excellent content: it’s making sure that the content you make can be distilled into three main points, and consumed in as short a time as possible.

That said, longform content has a value that’s hard to replace with snackable content. Our advice? A blend of both will serve your purposes: you’ll respect your audience’s time with short content, but for those among them who can take the time to read a longer article, they’ll find some value in the longform content you write along the way. 

Do that, and you’re golden – and hey, you can drop the formalities too. 

5. SEO

What we said: 2022 is the year in which SEO will become more important than ever, purely because it is going to become so much harder to rank as Google updates its algorithms to kill off the hard work that SEO experts have been putting into their sites over the past few years.

Is it relevant?

Yes – though it depends on how you think SEO works. 

SEO that is written for humans, but designed to work for a machine, is absolutely necessary. Google is changing its algorithm, and the way it parses results is far, far different from when it started, to the point where we can now do away with some of the older, more annoying parts of writing for SEO, such as making sure every paragraph has a few mentions of the main keyword, just in case. Writing SEO content that is readable, shareable, and sounds like something a human being would write is in. 

Writing any other kind of content for SEO is out because it just isn’t enjoyable to read for anyone, except the code behind Google’s search engine rankings. And it definitely isn’t enjoyable for your audience.

This trend, in practice: 

Ranking second for ‘SEO agency’ isn’t an easy feat, and especially now that SEO is rising in popularity again – but Session Media managed to push their website into the second position of AhRefs by writing their SEO content for humans, which is working wonders on Google’s algorithm.

Case Study: Another one of ours here, with the results just coming in so we don’t have a case study up yet. We put some effort into SEO for switch.com.mt over 2021, but it was never the primary focus of our work. We planned content around good SEO practice, and we created quality content around subjects that we excel at (like this piece, incidentally). 

In the space of a year we dominated local SEO traffic, basically climbing up over 50 positions in our most valuable keywords, all without putting too much effort into the SEO side of things. All our effort went into creating high quality content on a regular basis, and this kept being picked up by search engines (and third parties, including Hubspot’s blog at one point). By the end of the year, monthly SEO traffic had increased by 419%.

B2B Marketing: How is it going to change

The good thing is B2B marketing hasn’t changed. 

Much. 

The bad thing is, if you haven’t started putting some of these trends into practice already, where were you this time last year?

Your brand needs help. The way you do business needs to change. 

And how you talk to, and market, your own brand is a big part of it. How your brand communicates with its clients is a part of it. 

How you see your brand is a part of it. 

Your brand is adaptable, and your consumers are forgiving, especially after the pandemic, which really puts into perspective the kind of environment that we’re living in. Kindness, empathy, and making a better community for yourself and for others aren’t new ways of doing business, but they’re fast becoming the only ways of doing business. 

Look after your employees. Talk about your brand on social media. Create amazing content for yourself, for your clients, and just because. 

And don’t be a dick. 

Let’s do this. 

Want to read more marketing trends for 2022?

Here are a few more resources we’ve put together, with more on the way:

Marketing Trends 2022: The Year of Conflict

Brand Trends 2022

SEO Trends 2022: More Human

Web Design Trends 2022

Social Media Trends 2022: The Year of More

Seven Regional Marketing Trends We Want To See More Of

The post B2B Marketing Trends 2022 appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Click below for a free PDF version of our overall 2022 marketing trends report.

Intro to SEO Trends 2022

The practice of SEO has been the equivalent of a cat-and-mouse game for years now. SEO experts are basically just trying to keep up with Google’s latest updates, and always trying to figure out how to stay ahead of the algorithm game. 

That was true for 2021, and will continue to be true into 2022. 

But the direction Google has been steering its ship towards for many years now is clear – make search more helpful to humans through AI. Here’s a list of SEO trends that you’ll definitely need to be aware of if you want your business to make the most out of SEO in 2022.

Not an SEO practitioner? Read this first

We’ll be getting into a few technical details throughout the article, so here’s a very short Cliffs Notes version of what you can expect in the rest of this article. If you want to get straight into the nitty-gritty, skip this part.

1. Familiarise yourself with Google I/O – it’s a yearly event where Google announces changes to the way search works. This year’s edition reinforces what we already know – content that follows EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) will continue to win.
2. Write content that answers questions, so it has a good chance of appearing on Featured Snippets in search result pages. Quick, snappy, clear answers to common questions.
3. Look up what Google Shopping is if you sell things online. Thank us later.
4.  Get in touch with your Web Developers and ask them how your website’s Core Web Vitals are doing and make sure your website works well on mobile.
5. Create lots and lots of good video content that your audience will find useful, and make sure you clip-mark it.
6. Wean yourself off of third-party cookies for advertising purposes. Start finding ways to build your own first-party data using SEO.

Trend 1: Google is working on understanding context across data formats

The way someone asks a question and the way they type a query into the Google Search bar have always been a little different. Ever since the introduction of voice assistants though, Google has understood that their definition of a search term needed to broaden. 

Over the past few years, they’ve developed their AI to understand longer and more complex searches that come from voice users. 

They’re now taking that to the next level with something called the Multitask United Model, which they showed off during Google I/O 2021. In more understandable terms, MUM is an AI model that focuses on natural language analysis – it basically tries to understand the meaning and intent of human language beyond face value, and provides contextually accurate results based on that analysis.

It’s also capable of generating responses while drawing information from multiple sources and formats of information, even across different languages. What we’re trying to say here is that Google is attempting to consolidate all the data it already has, and make complex search terms that seem more conversational in nature possible to search.

Imagine asking Google whether your hiking boots are good enough for taking on Mount Fuji by snapping a photo of them and just asking. Google would then take the data from the photo, and give you a definitive yes or no answer, along with information about the best hiking gear for Mount Fuji. That’s the level of helpfulness Google is trying to reach using MUM.

So what does MUM mean for SEO practitioners? 

Will it be a game changer? Not necessarily. The exact way MUM will be drawing information from the internet is yet to be determined, but if it’s anything similar to previous AI models, there will be a continued emphasis on EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). 

So keep creating content that other humans will find genuinely helpful. Use visuals, videos, long-form content if you want to rank well, and make sure your website is technically up to Google’s standards – more on that later.

All this was announced at Google I/O 2021 – a yearly event where the company shows off its latest developments across their products – including Search. Taking a look at the developments that Google announces is essential for any SEO practitioner to stay updated with what’s coming. And it is genuinely insightful.

We’ll be discussing more of what was announced at Google I/O 2021 later in this article.

Here’s a compressed version of the event if you’re interested:

Trend 2: Featured Snippets & Passages

As part of Google’s shift towards answer-based search results, featured snippets and excerpts are being rolled out globally. In Google’s ideal world, every search term has a definitive answer that it can provide with confidence – that’s what the featured snippet tries to accomplish.

As an SEO practitioner, you might find it difficult to rank your page for a highly competitive, broad keyword, but through well-written, answer-based content, an excerpt of your page could be used to answer a long-tail search term – essentially leapfrogging higher ranking and more authoritative pages. 

So make sure that you’re using your titles and headings in a way that allows Google to easily understand the content of your page, and easily lift passages to answer commonly asked questions. 

In the above screenshot, the website that provided information in a clear, simple, step-by-step format that directly answered the question posed by the search term was placed in the featured snippet. The website itself didn’t even rank in the first page of results for the search term!

As a bonus, featured snippets are also the answers that Google Assistant provides users who are using Voice Search.

Google has said that 7% of all search terms will include a featured snippet once it rolls out globally, so this is definitely something to keep in mind when creating your content. 

Trend 3: Google Shopping: Real-time Product Data

The evolution of online shopping was given the equivalent of a can of Popeye’s spinach during the pandemic, and Google has taken note, and adapted. Thanks to their existing infrastructure, Google is capable of drawing data from across the web to provide extremely accurate recommendations based on search terms.

Using partnerships with global eCommerce providers such as Shopify, along with a huge amount of data straight from retailers, Google Shopping offers product results based on a number of different factors such as availability, reviews, loyalty schemes, and prices. They also removed the fees and commissions that previously existed to use their platform to make it more accessible to smaller businesses.

They call the underlying AI model Google Shopping Graph.

Google is in a unique position in terms of eCommerce. If its shopping platform truly takes off, it could even pose a threat to some of the online retail giants that don’t want to play ball with them. If the item you’re searching for on Google shows up on the search results page with the best available deal from across the internet, why would you bother going to Amazon?

If it’s not present already, make sure you’re looking into the Google Shopping platform for your eCommerce site, otherwise you could be seriously missing out in 2022. 

Trend 4: Core Web Vitals & UX Optimisation

As the pool of data and websites has become richer over time, Google Search has become pickier. For example, if your website has excellent content, but loads very slowly on mobile, you’re likely to get shunned by the search engine. 

In order to judge your website from a technical point of view, Google is adding something they call ‘Page Experience’ to the list of factors that can have an impact on whether or not your website ranks well on search result pages.

Google defines ‘Page Experience’ as: 

“a set of signals that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page beyond its pure information value.”

What are these signals you ask? Well, there are 4.

Core Web Vitals

The most important is Core Web Vitals, which measures 3 main metrics on your website. These are:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures loading performance. Google recommends aiming for an LCP under 2.5 seconds after a page starts to load.
• First Input Delay (FID): Measures interactivity. Google recommends an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability. Google recommends a CLS score of less than 0.1.

The above may or may not sound like technical jargon to you, but in plain English, Google is measuring:

• How fast your website loads
• How quickly it responds to input by the user
• How stable your website’s visuals are (in other words, it measures whether elements on screen are moving around way more than they should)

If you’re not entirely sure how your website is performing on these fronts, you can follow Google’s own instructions (warning, more technical jargon incoming) or ask your web developer to look into it. The scores you’ll want for each of these metrics are as follows:

If you want a quick idea of your website’s technical health from Google’s perspective, you can also run a quick PageSpeed Insights report. 

Mobile Friendly

This isn’t exactly 2022-worthy news, but it bears repeating. Your website needs to work well on mobile, otherwise it’s useless to a huge percentage of your potential traffic. Google knows this, and will penalise your website severely in its search rankings if you ignore it.

Not sure whether your website is really mobile friendly or not? Fear not, Google has another test you can run that you can show to your web developer.

HTTPS

The third factor that makes up Google’s Page Experience rating is security. You need to make sure your website has a security certificate. In plain English, just make sure your website has that little security lock next to the URL on Chrome.

This one.

If that little lock isn’t there, you need to give an earful to your web developer, cos this is pretty basic.

Intrusive Interstitials

The last element that affects your website’s Page Experience is ‘No Intrusive Interstitials’. Google loves its jargon doesn’t it?

Don’t you hate it when you load a website that seems to have the exact information you need, but as soon as you enter the site, a bunch of pop-ups and banners appear trying to get you to sign up to their newsletter? 

Well, it turns out that Google doesn’t like that either. So make sure your content isn’t getting hidden behind a bunch of annoying crap as soon as the website loads. This applies for desktop, but especially for mobile, where the lack of screen real estate makes these issues more obvious.

That said, your page won’t be penalised for pop-ups that are legally required, such as cookie usage notices or age verification notices.

Don’t do this.

Trend 5: Suggested Clips & Key Moments

You have most likely noticed recently that video results are turning up more and more often at the top of search results over the past few months. That’s because Google understands that sometimes, the answer people are looking for is best explained visually, using a relevant video.

For example, let’s say I’m an aspiring musician, and I want to quickly get an example of how to pluck a cello. More than likely, I’d take that exact term: ‘how to pluck a cello’ and run it through Google search. Just a few months ago, I would have been given a set of search results, and maybe some video options as well.

Now, though, Google takes it a step further through ‘Clip Suggestions’. Not only does a video appear at the top of my search result page, but a particular clip is selected, showing me exactly what I’m looking for. See for yourself:

If I click on that option, I’m taken to the video itself (not YouTube, just the video), and the suggested clip begins playing.

In the past, this YouTube channel would have likely never really been close to ranking this high up on a search result page. But Google is flexing its video muscles by including more search functionality into its YouTube infrastructure. By analysing the video visuals and audio, Google is able to understand what exactly is happening in the video, and whether it would be valuable to someone who is searching.

A while ago, a feature was added to YouTube videos called ‘Key Moments’, where video creators could essentially bookmark, or segment, their videos. This way, just by mousing over the video, you could get a quick idea of what’s in the video itself.

Extremely useful for those who like to watch YouTube videos, right? Not only. Google is using this extra data gathered from the video creators to provide even more detailed, and specific information on Google Search results.

The screenshot above is from a video review of the latest Apple laptop. Most likely, this video is the absolute best way of getting a quick but in-depth understanding of this product. So if I search for ‘m1 max macbook pro review’ on Google, this is what shows up:

Not only does the video itself show up first, but Google also provides me with a breakdown of exactly what’s in the video, using the Key Moments feature mentioned earlier.

So what’s the lesson for SEO practitioners? Well, thus far, video has mostly been a ‘nice-to-have’ in the SEO world. Now though, with Google giving more value to video results, video is going to be a ‘must-have’ sooner rather than later. Not only should you have videos that accompany your text content, but ideally you’re also creating high-quality, standalone videos that thoroughly answer the questions your audience is asking.

Trend 6: SEO will be essential for first-party data

With the slow, drawn out death of the third-party cookie, you could be forgiven for having a relatively lackadaisical approach to building your own audience database. After all, we’ve been successfully targeting new users through paid formats such as Google Display and Facebook Ads for years now.

The problem is that it’s not sustainable in today’s social climate. People are resisting having their personal data used for advertising purposes, and with good reason. While most advertisers are just trying to sell their products to people they hope might be interested in them, recent events have shown that ultra-targeted advertising can be weaponised for more nefarious purposes. Plus, a lot of people don’t like big tech companies they don’t trust holding so much of their data.

So, in a this-is-why-we-can’t-have-nice-things move, tech giants such as Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. are being forced into giving up some of their ability to sell their users’ data to advertisers.

This means that, as a (hopefully) non-malicious advertiser, you’re going to have to fend for yourself if you want to target new interested users and build conversions. 

SEO is definitely one of the best tools for that job. 

For example, by creating content that is genuinely useful and interesting to your target audience, you can generate a database of interested users through email sign-ups. 

Say you have an excellent piece of content about the Marketing Trends of 2022. You publish it online, but it’s a pretty long, but valuable piece, so you also offer an option to your audience to download a specifically designed PDF so they can read it at their own pace. In exchange for the PDF, you ask for an email address.

If your piece of content is good enough, and you’ve built a solid reputation with your audience, most people would gladly provide their email address because they know they won’t regret it later on as they’re emptying their spam folder. 

That’s the way you can leverage SEO to build a first-party database. But, doing that takes a lot of time and effort. And even though the death of the cookie is still a while away, you need to start building that database. Yesterday.

To Wrap Up

The evolution of Google Search, and by association, the SEO industry, has been slow, but steady. Every update seems to add a little bit more of what humans are looking for, rather than what an algorithm would. 

What’s great about this is that, even though there are less ‘hacks’ and quick wins to be had, it means that it should be easier than ever for genuinely good, human-focused content to rise to the top of search results. The difficulty lies in creating that content, rather than getting it to rank.

We hope these 2022 SEO trends help any practitioner on their way to creating genuinely useful content for their audiences. If you have any questions or would just like to have a chat about SEO, drop us a line.

In the meantime, happy ranking.

Want to read more marketing trends for 2022?

Here are a few more resources we’ve put together, with more on the way:

Web Design Trends 2022

Marketing Trends 2022: The Year of Conflict

Seven Regional Marketing Trends We Want To See More Of

Social Media Trends 2022: The Year of More

B2B Marketing Trends 2022

The post SEO Trends 2022: More Human appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

The good news is that there is a hell of a lot that we can learn (and teach) from the experiment, but we can’t promise that you’re going to get a 3,000% increase in ROI every time you use this method. Our client’s setup was so dire that they were only barely breaking even with their ad spend, so our starting point was so low that we could hardly have done any worse.

It got better. Much better:

And this is the story of how we did it.

Some Background: ROI / ROAS

Before heading any further, however, you need to be familiar with the concept of ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), which is the main component we include when calculating ROI. We will be referring to it as ROI because we tend to include other costs in our calculations (like our fees), but the basics are the same.

Some Background: Our Client

We can’t divulge who our client is, because we’d be giving too much away. We can’t even give the industry they work in, since we only work with one client in that industry, but what we can tell you is the following. 

Our Client:

• has attribution for digital sales is as close to watertight as possible (this made our life much easier, because we could see direct effects of our work)
• has three sales channels – an iOS app, an Android app and their website (which gave us more to test with)
• operates in a highly competitive market, with incredibly fierce competition (which means that, as the competition realised what we were doing, our life became harder)
• trusted us to do the right thing, because we set a target that they would be happy with and put 100% of our fees on the line if we didn’t reach it (this trust was critical for success, this method requires steady hands).

On Fundamentals

I’m going to talk about fundamentals throughout this post, so I’m going to spend a minute or so getting the definition out of the way. I’m not sure if this is the correct way to refer to it, or if the meaning is universally understood, but for you to understand this post we must be on the same page.

A fundamental is a single decision that our team agrees is the best way to do something to reach a specific goal for a specific ad account/ client.

An example fundamental discovery could be that (with all things being equal):

1. For conversions
2. For Client A
3. On Facebook ads
4. A video ad will give higher ROI than a static ad.

This is something that we would test again from time to time, and it’s not a rule that we can apply to all situations, which is why we make it a point to test fundamentals every time we start working with a new client or a new audience.

Our Method

Before diving into what we did to grow our client’s ROI, I’m going to give away the secret recipe. The rest of this post will be useful to help you get some context, but all you should need to do is follow this simple set of steps, steps we borrowed from the scientific method, and, to a certain extent, it’s just the basis of every A/B test in history, only more aggressive. 

The main difference to what we usually see with A/B testing is that we go all-in, heavily, with multiple tests that only test one fundamental question at a time.

Here are the steps (we’ll go into more detail further down):

1. Set your objectives and KPIs. This method only works if you have goals that you can measure objectively, ideally rapidly.
2. List a set of fundamental questions that you want to answer about your ads, your ad account, your audience, and/or your targeting methods.
3. Set up a calendar of fundamental tests that you want to run, and slot them into an order that is, based on gut feeling and experience, with the tests you expect to see the biggest differences in first.
4. Set up the test for your fundamental question.
5. Run the test. Aggressively. Put all your budget for the period (whatever makes sense for your cycle) into an A/B test for that question
6. Document learnings, shift the rest of your budget into the winning test & go back to step 4
7. Cycle steps 4-6 until you’ve tested all your fundamentals, then measure the performance of your new and improved ad account.

It seems simple, and when you get down to it, it is. That’s the beauty of it. This is a method that will yield incredible results as long as you can get good enough incremental gains that build on top of each other.

What happened before us

I’ve already admitted it, but what we found was a mess. The client had a single internal resource managing all their marketing and ads, and they were doing their best to hold onto their role by obfuscating their work. This meant that we could see the results of their work in ROI from Appsflyer (which was set up correctly by the client’s excellent tech team), but we could not learn anything from their previous spend.

The ROI of the client’s Facebook campaigns, however, was abysmal. For every €1 the client was spending, they were getting around €1.32 in revenue. We did not have insight into what the executive was thinking, but we could see that all their ads were optimised for engagement, when what they were measuring was revenue. 

They were running the same few creatives with an incredibly broad audience for a very long time, the calls to action were misleading (get your calls to action right by reading this post) and the ad set contained various ads that should have been running separately.

Step 1 – Setting your objectives and KPIs

It’s critical that you start off by choosing what your goals are and get complete buy in from all the stakeholders who could influence the progress of this experiment. You’ve read about SMART goals forever, but this is the time when you should really apply this reasoning. Unless you can measure the success of your tests, you’re going to be wasting time and money.

Your tests might be running on different metrics (you might be measuring click-throughs on one specific fundamental test, even if your final KPI is ROI), but you need to be absolutely certain that the metric you’re measuring has a direct impact on your final KPI.

In our campaign we were all working towards one KPI – we wanted to take our ROI from 1.3X ad spend to a minimum of 13X ad spend.

Step 2 – List a set of fundamentals

This is the critical part of the equation. Every business, and therefore every ad account, you work on will have a different set of fundamental tests to run. Take the time to choose the right set of tests, because every one of these tests is an expensive endeavour, and you want to run tests that leave no doubts. In our case we were testing quite a few fundamental hypotheses for the account, and I’m listing them here because they could serve for inspiration:

• Which Facebook goal works best?
  • Engagement ads vs Landing page views
  • Winner of the above vs Conversion
• Do ads work better if we split conversions by target platform (app conversions and web conversions instead of the generic conversions campaign setting)?
• Which bidding strategy works best? 
• Does automatic placement give you better results than manual placement?
• Does an app install campaign give you better LTV clients than a simple conversion campaign?
• Which CTAs work best with your audience?
• Do you sell more when you advertise a product or when you advertise categories?
• Does a specific price/discount work better than another?
• Does it make a difference to our campaign if we only run ads at specific times of the day (our client runs a 24/7 operation)?
• Specific manual placements vs the rest
• Specific audiences vs the rest
• We also tested some creative choices:
  • Which of the two main USPs gave us the highest ROI?
  • Do static ads work better than videos?

Whatever you do, don’t copy this list. Think long and hard about the tests that you should run for your business in your market, with your business goals.

Step 3 – Build a calendar of tests

Set your tests up in a calendar in the order in which you’re planning to test the fundamentals. This removes all the decision making from later in the process, you want to be absolutely focused on testing, and nothing else. 

Also take this time to set your thresholds for each test. How will you know when one of the options has won? This will allow you to skip to the next test as soon as you’re certain that one option is much better than the other 

Set a first-past-the-goalpost threshold with a percentage. If you’re going to measure on 200 conversions, for example, you can agree internally that if one of the variants hits 100 when the other is still below 60, then you can decide that the win is emphatic enough, there’s no need to see if the next 40 sales will change the course of the test. They won’t. 

Step 4 – Set up the test for your fundamental

Lights. Camera. Action! This is where the fun parts begin. Set up your campaigns as you would set up any other A/B test – create identical campaigns with only one difference, the one thing that you’re testing. 

Don’t call us luddites, but we like to test manually. Set up different campaigns and actually run them independently. We didn’t let Facebook run our tests for us, because we’re not always certain that there isn’t some other algorithm at play.

Step 5 – Run the tests aggressively

This is where client (or boss) buy-in becomes critical. It’s very easy to discuss this concept theoretically, but it’s much harder to do when you are spending actual money to run the tests. We were lucky enough that we were departing from a position that was abysmal, so when, after the first three days of testing we got 500% more ROI than we had started off from, it became much easier to convince our client to back our method.

The method requires aggression because it relies completely on a rapid succession of compounding returns. It might seem drastic, but the most you are risking is the value of half your budget for a period of time. 

Which brings us to the next question – how long is long enough to run a test? This will change from business to business, and it will probably depend most on the size of your budget. If I’m running a small B2B site whose goal is to generate 10 leads a month with a budget of $200 a month, then I’d say you would probably need a few months to be able to test each fundamental. Anything less than 50 results (whether they’re leads or sales) is going to be too little to draw a meaningful conclusion from.

If you’re running an account with a couple of thousand dollars a week for 500 sales a week, then you can probably run a test or two every week. Only you can really tell how much data you need for your test to be meaningful, but don’t skimp on this process because you’ll be reaping benefits in the long term that far outweigh the cost of running the test.

By putting all our budget behind these tests we were able to run the tests even more rapidly than we had anticipated, and over a period of 6 weeks we ran over 10 tests, usually running two tests in a week when we decided that we had enough data to move on to the next one.

Step 6 – Learning 

The key to running successful fundamental tests is that you learn from them. By having emphatic winners we can be absolutely certain that the decision was made on solid data, so we didn’t really have to go back to run a full test on that fundamental for quite a while.

Step 7 – Cycle steps 4-6

By building the fundamental learnings of the account into a playbook for the client, we got to a position where we took the account from 1.3X ROI to 44X ROI in just 4 weeks, an improvement of over 3,300%. By the end of a 6-week period of testing we were ready to ramp up the client’s budget, the final test to check whether the results are scalable, and that is where we settled on the perfect balance for the account, a return of around €37 for every €1 spent.

So we made a list of fundamental rules for the ad account that the team follows every time we need to set up a campaign. Nowadays we still run fundamental tests on a monthly basis, either to test new hypotheses or to confirm that the original test results are still valid. 

Over the next year or so the client was hit heavily by Covid, however, as we scaled back budgets, the fact that we had all our fundamentals sorted out in the original tests meant that we could scale back budgets in the areas in which we knew the client would suffer least. At no point in the pandemic did the client fall below a return of €15 for every Euro spent, and now they’re hovering happily at around €80 in revenue for every Euro spent on ads.

This is what the ad account looks now, with peaks and troughs affected by seasonality, but a healthy ROI throughout:

A note about cautious clients or bosses

Our client was super comfortable with taking rapid risks in succession. To be fair, the benefit was so great after just the first test that they had nothing to lose. Having said that, if you need to offer some stability, what I’d recommend is to run the tests at full budget for the period that you need but then allow the winning version to run for a few more weeks before testing again.

Richard Muscat Azzopardi is an experienced marketer and the CEO of Switch – Digital & Brand, a boutique brand and marketing agency that loves partnering up with clients who get it. He’s been working in digital marketing since the inception of the internet, even though he’s not as old as you’d think he is. He’d love to connect with you on LinkedIn!

The post How we increased our client’s Facebook advertising ROI by 3,300% in 6 weeks appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

As a nation, historically we’ve looked at global trends and decided they can wait a few years before we collectively relent and begrudgingly adopt it. This has happened with most major technologies, pop-culture fads, working techniques, and cultural norms. 

However, over the last few years, we seem to be a little quicker on our feet when it comes to adopting technological innovations. 

Just Google ‘the Blockchain island’ and you’ll get where I’m coming from.

Digital marketing has a similar story. Local marketers held off on adopting digital advertising for as long as possible. We were mostly comfortable with our traditional media and weren’t looking for an industry disrupter. 

The problem with disruptors is that they happen whether or not you want them to. 

That marketing disruptor in Malta? Social media. Maltese residents love social media. That’s forced marketing to evolve and evolve quickly into the digital-first landscape we have today. So here are 8 things you need to know as a business leader or marketer operating in Malta when it comes to digital marketing.

Boosting Posts on Facebook is not enough

Disclaimer: Boosting posts on Facebook isn’t a bad thing. But most people tend to misuse it. Whenever you place ad spend behind a post on Facebook, you’re asked to choose what objective you have, such as engagement, reach, or website traffic. Each of these sound relatively good for any brand to gain, but they provide significantly different results. For example, boosting a post to gain post engagement will place your ad in front of people who tend to comment or like things often, and not necessarily the people you actually want to influence.

Placing ad spend behind social media content should be one of the last things you consider. Start with your brand, your audience, and the goal you want to achieve with the content you’re creating. There’s no one perfect way to spend money on Facebook. Spending money to get likes & comments might make it seem like you’re doing well, but you can likely do better with a more rounded approach.

Google Search is underused

A huge number of consumer journeys start with research. This is especially true for products that are either too expensive or complex for impulse buying to be common. The go-to platform for said research is Google Search. For most websites, in fact, traffic from Google is their most valuable source of traffic for a simple reason. Those who arrive at a website from a search engine have a very specific intent. They know exactly what they’re looking for and will know they’ve found it when they see it. 

Locally, it’s surprising to see just how many valuable search terms are non-competitive. When we say valuable, we mean that those using that search term are likely to be individuals who are looking to purchase something. When we say non-competitive, it means there are not a lot of brands vying for the top results for those search terms. 

If you’re not sure whether to delve into SEO (search engine optimisation), we wrote a quick guide to figure out whether it would be worth it to you or not. And here’s a useful tool you can use to figure out what kind of volume and competitiveness the search terms in your industry have. You might be surprised.

TikTok Ads are coming

If you’re over the age of 30, you’ve likely been trying to ignore TikTok and convince yourself that Instagram is still the trendy platform to be on. 

You might even think the word trendy is still used. 

Well, the reality is that TikTok is here to stay for the time being. Even some unexpected organisations are taking the leap. Whether it’s the right move or not, we’re not entirely sure.

Not too long ago, TikTok launched its ads platform, just like Facebook and Instagram did a few years back. However, it’s yet to reach Malta. For now. That doesn’t mean your brand shouldn’t already be there. If your audience is predominantly below the age of 25, it’s definitely worth taking a strong look at what content production capabilities you have, because one thing’s for sure – standard brand-focused content doesn’t fly on TikTok.

Once ads make their way to Malta, it will become the hottest platform in the local industry.

Don’t think of influencers as just celebrities

At Switch we’ve been working with influencers for years, and if there’s one thing they always are happy about when they work with us it’s this – we don’t use them as celebrities. 

Traditionally, getting a big name associated with your brand is seen as a clever tool to get fans of that celebrity aware of your brand. 

And that’s all well and good. 

But the influencer scene in Malta is a little different, purely because of the very first point I mentioned – there aren’t a lot of us on this island. 

That means that the same handful of big-name influencers have hugely overlapping local audiences and they tend to get overused by brands who want to reach that audience. That’s not the worst of it though – a lot of brands approach influencers with very little in the way of direction. They expect them to come up with the strategy, content, and execution on their own, which is especially egregious when they’re not given that much information to work with.

Before even making a list of influencers you want to work with, you need to:

• Pinpoint your audience.
• Analyse influencer collaborations in your industry.
• Make a list of both big-name influencers and micro-influencers.
• Write a detailed brief.
• Have a two-way conversation with potential influencers to figure out whether your brands are a match.

Only with all that done can you begin to discuss the actual content.

LinkedIn is not just for recruitment

If you’re a business that relies on B2B sales and word-of-mouth for business development, then LinkedIn is essential. For years, LinkedIn has been regarded as the platform to find a new job on. While it still fulfils that purpose, it has evolved into a space where professionals build their personal brands, and by extension, their company’s brand while widening their network.

While we definitely encourage brands to use it, don’t treat it like Facebook. The content that works on Facebook doesn’t have the same effect on LinkedIn. What works are thoughtful business-related posts that have humans in mind. Spend 5 minutes scrolling though – you’ll notice that the posts that do well are those coming from individuals talking about their experiences, not about companies talking about their products. 

YouTube is the new TV

As a kid, I grew up watching cartoons on a foreign TV station. I was subjected to countless ads for toys that were only available in strange, distant places. 

I probably saw thousands of life insurance and debt consolidation ads from UK companies that were meant for whichever adult was around me. 

This is probably a pretty relatable scenario those of us who grew up before the content on the internet had really caught up with TV.

A lot of time has passed since then. 

Kids who weren’t yet born when Ira Losco first stole our collective heart with “7th Wonder” are now driving around and going to university. That means these adults who are already making major purchase decisions were 5 years old when YouTube began, and have grown up finding most of their personal entertainment online and will likely continue to do so.

Setting up YouTube ads is more flexible than ever, with a variety of different goals and distribution techniques available. Make sure you have a strategy for it.

Your website is your most valuable asset

Going back to what I said at the beginning, targeting the right audience in Malta isn’t easy – we’re just too small. The targeting tools available to marketers on the ad platforms can help, but those have been designed for countries with tens of millions of residents, not a measly half million. That means that those who are interested enough in what you have to offer to visit your website after you communicate with them are extremely valuable. 

To do that, you need a website that’s configured and designed to drive as much traffic to it organically as possible, while also making it possible to retarget individuals who visit on digital ad platforms. If your website isn’t up to scratch, and not well-optimised for this, we guarantee you’re missing out on business.

Get inspiration from…Twitter?

That’s right. Twitter. While the relationship between Maltese residents and Twitter is usually limited to a screenshot of a politician’s statement being shared on Facebook, the platform is extremely useful for marketers. Brands that have been around on Twitter globally for a while have figured out that Twitter is the perfect place to have live conversations with their audience. 

Take a look at the interactions between big brands and individuals, and even between the brands themselves. Most of the time they’re informal, off-the-cuff conversations. The success of these interactions has now led to a lot of brands doing the same thing on other social media platforms as they’ve realised that people tend to respond more to content that isn’t corporate.

If you want to see where social media in Malta (and the world) is going over the next few years, take a look at what’s going on on Twitter. The first local brands that try to emulate the informal tone will be taking a risk, but they also stand the most to gain by being first-movers. 

Not sure about something in particular?

Obviously local digital marketing goes beyond the 8 points mentioned above, and each of them have more nuance than anything we could explain in a single article. So if you’re running a business (be it Malta, or anywhere else) and want to have a chat about something you’re unsure of, just drop us a line – no strings attached.

The post Digital Marketing in Malta: 8 Things You Need to Know appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

This means that most information you’ll want to commit to memory is absolutely ‘need-to-know’. 

We’re not saying that you need to understand every nuance behind digital marketing, but you’ll need just enough in order to fully understand where your marketing money is going and whether the business is benefiting. If you don’t understand the terminology, it’s unlikely that you’ll understand the value. 

And it’s a slippery slope from there for everyone involved.

To that end, here are 10 digital marketing terms that business leaders need to know in order to make sense of digital marketing reports and proposals, while also understanding whether their team is on the right track and empowering them to continue improving.

Brand

We’re not talking about your logo here. 

Your brand is what your company stands for at a fundamental level. It’s what allows you to answer the question “Why does this company exist?” without saying “to make a profit”. 

Profits are a result, not a reason to exist.

It’s a unifying set of principles that guides every single decision that the company makes. It’s what motivates those within it to wake up in the morning and go to work. We’re not saying your logo doesn’t matter, but your visual identity should be a reflection of your brand, not the other way around. 

Having a unilateral brand purpose and values will lead to a real understanding of who your audience is, and how to effectively communicate to that audience with purposeful messaging. A well-defined brand will provide you with all the resources you need to make a connection with those you want to speak to. 

If you want to read more about brand, Ed has the goods.

KPI (Key Performance Indicator)

Before deciding what to say and where to say it, it’s essential to know how exactly you’re going to measure your success. Marketing efforts without KPIs lead to communicating for the sake of it. 

How do you know whether you’re doing well or not? 

Looking at your bottom line definitely helps, but knowing what exactly is pushing your marketing efforts forward or holding them back is essential. 

The important thing to remember is that many-a-time, different marketing efforts require different KPIs. Measuring a campaign meant to build website traffic by counting likes & comments is like judging an elephant by its ability to climb a tree. Make sure it’s clear what the goal of the campaign you’re looking at is, and know what metric to look at. 

CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)

CPA is one of the most commonly used metrics in the business, and for good reason. Understanding how much a campaign is costing you to convert a new customer gives you a very clear picture of its success or failure. 

Over time, your team will be able to identify a target CPA that any campaign must fall under in order to be deemed useful. Knowing when to pull the plug on a campaign that’s generating expensive conversions is as important as the creative ideas themselves. 

When calculating the CPA, it’s important that all costs relating to the campaign are taken into account. If the campaign was set-up correctly, you’ll be able to incorporate campaign costs from across multiple channels to calculate a CPA that reflects the entire campaign concept.

Once you can reliably calculate campaign CPA, optimising the campaign in order to lower said CPA becomes the priority.

A/B Testing

Speaking of optimisation, A/B testing is definitely the way to go about it. If your marketing team decides on a particular creative direction and sticks to it from the very beginning, they may be missing key audience insights. 

Ideally, any campaign should begin with multiple versions of the same creative concept – this includes visuals, copywriting style, calls to action, etc. By simultaneously running ads with slight differences between them, you can begin to understand what creative style your audience responds to more by measuring the appropriate KPIs. 

Lead Generation

Lead generation is a fairly self-explanatory term. It’s the creation and locating of individuals interested in your product or service. 

In marketing terms, it’s generally used in B2B contexts slightly more often than B2C, mostly because many B2C digital marketing efforts measure conversions in terms of purchases rather than leads to be converted by an in-house sales team.

In most situations, leads come through contact-form fills, messages on social media, emails, and phone calls. If your digital marketing set-up allows for it, you can measure which campaign generated the most leads. That said, it’s not always possible to know whether someone who called you saw a particular ad campaign or not.

In B2B contexts, lead generation is an extremely important measurement to have. Mostly because your team can pretty easily generate traffic going to your website and claim it a success. But in reality, traffic doesn’t generate business unless it’s the right traffic, and the on-site experience is well-designed. Lead generation can only happen if there is a synergy between advertising and website UI.

Call to Action

This one’s pretty simple – a call to action is the term used for a phrase in an ad that asks the audience to perform a particular behaviour. “Contact us”, “Learn More”, “Download Now”. Calls to action are a key part of defining a particular marketing message, and are directly tied to the key metric you’re measuring your campaign with.

If a campaign’s call to action is “Download the App”, but the success of that campaign is being measured by how many purchases were made, you’re not likely to gain any useful insights into your campaign or your audience.

Retargeting

Retargeting is an essential part of digital marketing, while also being one of the more controversial. 

When browsing online, there are countless ways which advertising platforms such as Facebook, Google, & Amazon, attempt to learn about your interests and behaviour. Based on the information learned, they will attempt to serve ads that are relevant to you. 

Retargeting is one of these techniques. Advertisers will essentially be able to tie your web behaviour to your social media. For example, if you’ve visited a clothing eCommerce site within the last 15 days, you’ll likely see ads from that particular site on your social media for a while. The ads themselves will often have the very products at which you were looking. This is retargeting.

Search Engine Marketing & Search Engine Optimisation (SEO & SEM)

We’ve been talking about SEO for the last few weeks on the Switch blog. 

We won’t go into too much detail here, but essentially, SEO is the practice of creating content and adjusting websites to organically rank as highly as possible on search engine results pages. The key word (no pun intended) being ‘organically’. If you want to learn more specifics on how SEO works, and whether you need it, take a look here.

SEM, on the other hand, normally refers to the practice of placing paid advertising on the very same search engine results pages. Normally these ads appear above and below the organic search results and look practically the same, save for the word ‘Ad’ that appears before the copy itself. 

These can be just as effective as organic results, however many users tend to favour organic results first, as many ads might not have exactly what they’re looking for. Which is why it’s extremely important to have a detailed keyword advertising plan that gives you the best value for your ad spend.

Conversion Funnel

You’ve heard of the sales funnel before. In marketing, the conversion funnel represents the topline view of your overall strategy. 

It begins with your efforts to generate brand/product awareness – drawing the attention of those who may be looking for what you offer, or who relate to your communication. General awareness and thought-leadership advertising falls under this category. 

The second stage of the funnel is consideration. At this point, users are aware of your brand, but are looking to learn a little more. They’ll visit your website, engage with your content, or perhaps even enquire about a particular product or service. Here, you’re pushing engagement and website traffic campaigns.

Finally, the conversion Here, you’ll be retargeting warm leads relatively aggressively with specific product information and offers. The success of conversion campaigns is measured by final purchases or qualified leads generated. 

ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)

Other than CPA, ROAS is one of the most widely used metrics to measure overall campaign success. As long as your digital marketing set-up allows for it, you can relatively accurately determine how much return was generated by a particular campaign in relation to how much advertising spend was used. 

The advantage that ROAS has over CPA is that not all acquisitions are created equal. If one channel is generating much higher-value leads than another, then CPA won’t register that distinction. ROAS gives you a clearer understanding of the quality and long-term value of particular channels, rather than the volume of leads generated. 

Conclusion

In order to effectively lead and give useful direction to a marketing team, the above terms are essential. That said, while you can find endless information and opinions on the above terms, understanding what exactly they mean to your particular business is different. We suggest spending a good amount of time with your team defining how success is going to be measured, and how exactly you plan on getting there.

If you need a helping hand to get your structure & strategy to that point, just give us a shout.

The post 10 Digital Marketing Terms for Business Leaders appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Sure, they used to think about what kind of advertising their audience might respond to and decide at what time the ads should air. But nothing compares to the proverbial tonne of data and tools that digital marketers today must sift through to try bring value to their brands.

Not to mention an audience that is growing sicker and sicker of advertising and the issues that come with it. Specifically, advertising that is too repetitive and brings no value to their lives. The days when interrupting people’s day with out-of-context commercials was considered the most effective technique are over. Now, people expect advertising to be more specific to their needs, but not too specific. 

This is where intent-based marketing comes into play. 

Interruption vs Relevance

There are essentially two types of relationships one can have with advertising. The first being what I alluded to earlier – ads that interrupt what you’re doing in order to pitch you something. These ads have been around for a long time and fundamentally have not changed much. YouTube Ads that stop your video mid-way through to show you an unskippable 8-second ad are not all that different to the commercial breaks on regular TV.

The problem with this kind of advertising is that it’s propositioning a very cold audience. An audience that mostly just wants to be left alone with their entertainment. This places a huge amount of pressure on the content of the ad to be effective and draw in consumers. So effective that the viewer would potentially refocus their attention on the ad versus their chosen piece of content. While not impossible, it’s not easy. Especially if the behaviour you’re asking your audience to undertake isn’t impulse-based or the product/service isn’t particularly visually provocative.

The second form of advertising that has risen, thanks to the internet, is one that provides significantly more value and relevance to the end-user. Not through any special form of expensive content-creation, but rather by placing the ad in front of individuals that would be much more receptive to product or brand information. The main proponent of this kind of advertising is search engine marketing. 

Individuals who are actively searching the internet for information, or, ‘high-intent individuals’ are significantly more receptive to relevant advertising than anyone else. If provided with information that can be useful to them in their search, the chances that they will perform an action you’re looking for are significantly higher. In fact, a recent study has shown that search engine advertising has a conversion rate that’s almost 5x more effective than display advertising.

This is not to say that intent-based advertising is limited to search engines. YouTube advertising can also be used for this purpose. Selecting particular channels or videos for your brand’s communication to feature on is a way of targeting high-intent individuals. For example, a tech-based product targeting YouTube channels that review tech products is an intent-based marketing technique.

Demographics vs Behaviour

Demographic behaviour has been an essential part of advertising since it began. Now, however, demographic data is becoming less important in comparison to behavioural data. Rather than focusing on the assumptions or information we have regarding particular cohorts based on age, gender, and location, marketers prefer to focus on specific behaviour – especially when it comes to intent-based marketing. 

This is usually done through the active input that consumers have in this process – search terms. Analysing what people are searching for reveals a lot about their intent. An in-depth keyword research exercise and on-going analysis can rival the most expensive piece of content in terms of advertising effectiveness at a fraction of the price. Once those keywords have been identified, writing the write copy based upon the intent behind the search terms is critical. If the user experience – starting with the initial search, and ending with a conversion on your website – is a fluid, cohesive one, it will become one of the most efficient sources of leads and purchases you have.

Where’s the data?

If your website has already been active and drawing traffic for a while, you already have a treasure trove of data at your fingertips. Delving deep into your website data will provide you with specific insight into what your users are searching for, and which pages provide them with the most value. Simply taking a look at the data for the most visited web pages within your website is a good starting point. Ideally, you would also filter out any traffic that isn’t organic. Then, ask yourself the following questions.

• What kind of pages are they? Product pages? Informational pages?
• How long do they spend on said pages?
• Which pages did they navigate before and after visiting this one?
• What’s the search terms they used that led them to this particular page?

By answering these questions, you can already surmise a great deal about the behaviour of your current users and their relationship to your content. You can see what type of content seems to be more in-demand. Or which search term seems to drive the most engaged users to your site. 

Get Granular

Using slightly more advanced marketing techniques, you can also identify which of your website’s visitors have shown interest in what you offer, but did not convert. You can then use this information to enhance your display advertising and targeting. Creating specific content for hot leads and retargeting them through other channels such as social media and Google Display advertising is also part of intent-based marketing, and will provide significantly higher conversion rates than other forms.

Our advice is to spend time with your Google Analytics account (or whichever analytics tools you have available) and understand where your high-value visitors are coming from and what they’re attracted to. Once you have that information, you can begin to expand your advertising and content-creation strategies to match what you already know works. Or, have a team of professionals who do this kinda stuff for a living do all of that for you.

The post Intent-Based Marketing: The Future of Digital Advertising appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Together, their combined spending power in the United States alone amounts to £264 billion. As a marketing agency, this is the kind of statistic that makes us happy: it shows where the money’s coming from, and if we know where the money’s coming from, then we can make better stories. Better stories mean more people listen to those stories. If more people listen, we get the opportunity to make more stories.

But there’s a caveat. To tell the stories that make a difference, you need to know what your audience is – and Gen Z and Millennials are not the kind of audience that’s easy to understand. 

Gen Z and Millennials: An Audience Profile

Here’s what we know: 

They’re fiercely dedicated to their causes: 72% of Gen Z will only buy from brands that support societal causes. 83% of millennials do the same. 

They’re sale-and-money conscious. These are people who grew up in the heart of multiple catastrophic events: 9/11, two recessions, unending war, climate change, and a global pandemic. Money has always been a problem, and it’s not a problem that’s going to end soon. 

They’re kind. Millennials and Gen Z especially know what it’s like to struggle to make rent, to pinch pennies to pay vet bills, and to face the uncertainty of living from paycheck to paycheck. GoFundMes, Kickstarters, and circulating payments are one of the cornerstones of their existence. 

They’re digital geniuses. The oldest millennial remembers the start of the internet age. The oldest Gen Zer doesn’t remember anything but. 

All those combined, and you have an audience that knows that your communication has a purpose, and that purpose is to sell them things they will not necessarily need. That makes them resistant to most forms of advertising that can’t stand up to fact-checking – and resistant to companies that have already had problems in their past with their message, or their values. 

Marketing to a millennial and Gen Z audience also isn’t something that can be avoided. With most of the purchasing power now firmly in the hands of both demographics, it isn’t a case of ‘well, we’ll talk to someone else’. 

There’s no-one else. It’s millennials and gen Z all the way down. 

Marketing to the Unmarketable

Here’s the thing: marketing to Gen Z and Millennials needs more finesse than regular marketing. It’s the difference between having a conversation with an expert in your field and getting into an argument with someone on Facebook: one is ultimately futile, and the other can open up connections and nuances that weren’t there before. 

We’ll leave you to decide which one of those that is for you. 

For Gen Z and millennial marketing, there’s three important factors to remember. 

1. Social is key

When everything costs money and money is a premium product, you turn to the one thing that’s still free: social media. Gen Z and Millennials spend a combined total of five and a half hours a day on social media, though with the pandemic, that amount has skyrocketed up by about 36%. 

The takeaway: don’t spend time advertising on channels where your message isn’t going to be seen. We’ve been talking for a while about how digital is the way forward, but it’s especially crucial now when the people who you’re marketing to live, breathe, and play on digital. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok: social media has become the medium for the message.  

If that isn’t convincing enough, consider this: 75% of millennials are directly influenced by a brand’s social media when it comes to making purchasing decisions. 

2. Honesty is the best policy

Make sure your values are in line with your company’s promises because Gen Z and Millennials can, and will, find out. 

The backlash is never pretty. 

For millennials and Gen Z, supporting a brand is a moral choice, not just monetary; it’s a crucial aspect of making a decision to buy from that brand. If you have a message that supports an agenda, if your values are clearly communicated, then Gen Z and millennials will find a way to buy from that brand. Being honest about your limitations and flaws help. Social responsibility helps. 

The takeaway: build up your community responsibility measures. Find a way of having conversations online that matter. Support a cause. Stand by the cause you support. Be braver and take risks. Brands that stand by and pretend to be above the conversation going on are no longer the main conversationalists at the table. 

Brands that talk are. 

3. Create, and keep, loyalty.

What we said above, times ten. 

Look: part of the inherent risk that comes with supporting a new brand is that you don’t know if you’re going to enjoy whatever that brand puts out. If it’s a big purchase, it matters more; a small purchase of a few Euro off of Aliexpress doesn’t hold the same gravitas. 

However, Gen Z and Millennials count every purchase as a big purchase, and put thought behind it all. If a brand puts out a product they’d like to try, but it’s above a certain budget, it’s difficult to get them to buy in initially. Why would they? Lots of risk for a potentially low reward does not a happy shopper make.

Consider clothing stores. 

Retail stores took a big dip during the early days of the pandemic when people could no longer try on the clothes they were going to buy. Makeup retailers saw the same side-effect: once you remove the aspect of ‘try before you buy’, making a final decision becomes that much harder. 

Gen Z and Millennials won’t buy your product just because. If it’s on offer, if it’s part of a loyalty scheme, if you offer excellent after sales service: then it becomes easier. The risk is minimal. The cost pays for itself in peace of mind. 

The takeaway: surprising your audience does no-one any good. Offer a way into your world at a reduce cost – think long-term financial pay off instead of short-term. A buyer who’s happy with your service will keep you front-of-mind for subsequent purchases, and if they already have that experience, it’s easier to keep going back to the devil you know. 

A handful of ideas

Leverage your social media. 

Create a loyalty programme. 

Talk to your audiences.

Easier said than done? Maybe. But it’s not an impossible task for any brand. 

And it always goes back to brand. 

Gen Z and Millennials aren’t going to support a brand they don’t agree with, that’s dated, or that supports something they don’t support. However, before you go and throw the whole company away, think. 

Who do you want to be?

What do you support?

What do you think?

Brands are extensions of the people that work in them, the people that create them, and the decisions they make. 

Brands are also, fundamentally, inherently, and obviously, changeable. While changing a whole company to attract one audience isn’t going to make any sense, neither is holding onto a past no-one wants to relive. 

If you’ve tried all that, and it still isn’t working, you’ve missed something somewhere. 
Maybe it’s time to try something new.

The post Gen Z Marketing, Millennial Marketing, and You appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

#TAKEMETOMALTA

March was another busy month for Switch. After winning the pitch for Air Malta’s New Destinations Campaign, we got straight to work on both the advertising campaign and influencer campaign. A tight deadline loomed, but the excitement in the agency was palpable. This was going to be bigger than anything we’d worked on in a while.
The brief was straightforward: we needed to promote Air Malta’s new destinations outside of Malta. Locally, Air Malta is one of the top of mind brands when it comes to airlines, but it is still not that established abroad – especially in areas in which it hadn’t been operating.
The digital advertising campaign is vast, targeting 7 countries and the respective audiences within those regions. This gave us all the more reason for the ads to be as relatable, personalised and engaging as possible. If the message was going to be memorable, we needed to make it stand out among the noise.

Things didn’t stop there though. We were lucky to be working with a team at Air Malta that was open to fresh ideas, so we were thrilled when they agreed to work on something we truly believe in: Influencer Marketing. We’ve been proud advocates of Influencer Marketing from day one, and we’ve helped many brands expand their business through local collaborations – but Air Malta gave us the opportunity to take it one step further. We invited international influencers to Malta for a destination marketing campaign: #TAKEMETOMALTA.

THE SPONSORS

Between the 20th and 23rd April, we hosted 17 bloggers and influencers on our islands, on behalf of Air Malta. The goal was to show them the best that Malta has to offer through a destination marketing campaign.
Our work was cut out for us. Our target audiences in the 7 new destinations consider Malta to be a ‘party island’, a destination only ideal for students who wish to take a three-week booze-fuelled vacation away from their parents who think they’re ‘studying English’. We wanted to change that misconception; so we planned a three-day event to show the most Instagrammable places around the island. We wanted to ensure that the influencers (and their combined following of 5.2M) would see the gem we’re living in, and want to experience it themselves.
There was one restriction: we had to work within the initial budget allocated for the digital campaign. To work around this, Air Malta agreed to let us look for partners to help us make Malta’s biggest destination marketing campaign happen without breaking the bank.
The response was great – Corinthia Hotels were soon on board, providing accommodation through their three hotels (Corinthia Palace, Corinthia St George and Marina Hotel), and a delicious five-star welcome dinner at Villa Corinthia on the influencers’ first night.

A post shared by Vladisláv Karpyuk (@vladislavkarpyuk) on Apr 22, 2018 at 10:40am PDT

Ecabs also signed up as sponsors, providing transport throughout the duration of the event. From airport pickups, to drop-offs around the Island – the influencers were treated to first class transport.

A post shared by eCabs (@ecabsmalta) on May 5, 2018 at 2:54am PDT

Trabuxu, one of our favourite wine bars in Valletta, provided the perfect afternoon snack – a combination of excellent wine with cold cuts and cheeses, well needed after a stroll around the capital city.

One of our own clients, Danny’s, offered us a fantastic lunch after a long day of exploring the gems that the south of Malta has to offer (and yes, the influencers got to try their famous spicy beef cheek linguine, which they loved).

If there’s one thing we know, is that there can never be enough food. We were thrilled to collaborate with de Mondion from Xara Palace, who provided first-class service and food for the influencers‘ last dinner (and can we please talk about the view? ????)

A post shared by Xara Palace Relais & Chateaux (@thexarapalace) on Oct 9, 2017 at 8:57am PDT

THE INFLUENCERS

Finding the right people to work with for each new route took quite some time. We were after a balance of travel bloggers (people who are followed because of the blogs they write) and travel influencers (the ones who are known for their beautiful photos and short, yet useful, captions).
We opted for quality over quantity, as it was important for Air Malta to create meaningful conversations. Because of this, we chose to collaborate with ‘micro’ influencers over ‘macro’ influencers. This being said, there was nothing micro about the combined number of followers that our influencers had across their social media platforms: 5.2 million followers is no mean feat.
From Spain, we had:
Irene & David, from the Traga Viajes blog – a dynamic couple who are always on the go exploring and visiting new places.

A post shared by tragaviajes.com – Foto???? Vídeo???? (@tragaviajes) on Apr 23, 2018 at 11:59am PDT

Alii Moron, fashion and travel influencer – with over 160K followers on Instagram, Alii is known for promoting beautiful outfits in beautiful destinations.

A post shared by A L I I M O R Ó N (@aliimoron) on Apr 20, 2018 at 7:46am PDT

Dani Keral, blogger at Un Viaje Creativo – Dani travels the world with a camera in one hand, and a pen in the other.

A post shared by Un Viaje Creativo (@danikeral) on Apr 21, 2018 at 10:15am PDT

Nadia & Javi, the power couple from Travel the Life & Javi Cubo – this Spanish power couple have started travelling the world back in 2002. They’ve visited over 30 countries and launched their blog and social platforms in 2015.

A post shared by Javier Cubo (@javicubo) on Apr 27, 2018 at 12:41pm PDT

From Russia, we had:
Vladislav Karpyuk, the adventurous Instagrammer. Vlad has two obsessions: heights and puddles. If you scroll through his Instagram profile, you’ll see breathtaking views taken from the roofs of buildings, or stunning water reflections in puddles.

A post shared by Vladisláv Karpyuk (@vladislavkarpyuk) on Apr 25, 2018 at 10:45am PDT

Yulia Taskaeva, beauty and travel blogger – When she’s not travelling to Paris or Coachella for work and leisure, Yulia is either studying for her Uni exams or swatching lipsticks for her next blog.

A post shared by yulia taskaeva (@juliataskaeva) on May 2, 2018 at 1:00am PDT

Valeriya Kornacheva, traveller & photographer – Valeriya photoblogs her life, from places she’s seen (over 40 countries), to hotels she’s stayed at, to languages she’s learned and food she’s tasted.

A post shared by ????Traveler ????Photographer (@v_kornacheva) on Apr 20, 2018 at 3:39pm PDT

From Portugal, we had:
Susana Ribeiro, the solo traveller from Viaje Comigo – Susana started writing about her travels in 2013, and since then has won two awards for her blog. Her passion for discovering new places has taken her everywhere around the world!

A post shared by Viaje Comigo – Susana Ribeiro (@viajecomigo_susanaribeiro) on Apr 28, 2018 at 9:53am PDT

Carla & Rui, the travelling teachers from Viajar entre Viagens – when a geography and physics teacher decide to start a blog, no one can stop them. In between school holidays and days off, Carla & Rui have managed to tick off many countries from their list, and Malta was one of them!

A post shared by Viajar entre Viagens (@viajar_entre_viagens) on May 1, 2018 at 10:03am PDT

From Italy, we had:
Nunzia Cillo, writer and photographer – Italy is her home, but her heart belongs to the world. Nunzia writes about beauty, fashion and lifestyle, all while visiting and exploring new places.

A post shared by Nunzia Cillo (@nunziacillo) on Apr 25, 2018 at 1:15pm PDT

From Israel, we had:
Ella, hilarious blogger from Ella Travels Word – Possibly one of the most dynamic and hilarious people we’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. She’s passionate about everything, and visits every place with an open mind, no expectations and curiosity to learn about everything.

A post shared by Ella (@ellatravelsworld) on Apr 25, 2018 at 11:16am PDT

From Morocco, we had:
Zeineb Laouni, beauty and travel vlogger – Zei is a famous radio host by day, but has grown her following due to her passion for all things beauty and her curiosity to visit new places.

A post shared by Zeineb Laouni (@zeibeauty) on Apr 21, 2018 at 11:52am PDT

THE AIM

We had one goal in mind for this destination marketing campaign: to promote Malta as a holiday destination by showing how easily accessible it is thanks to Air Malta’s new routes.
Every detail of the three-day event was strategically planned in order to encourage the influencers to promote the Island, the airline and the sponsors. We took them to Malta’s most Instagrammable spots. We planned each location stop at the right time of day to ensure the best lighting for photos and videos, and we ensured that each meal was worth photographing. In a nutshell, we made sure that wherever the influencers were, there was a good-looking story to tell.
We encouraged the use of the hashtag #TAKEMETOMALTA for every tweet, story, post, blog and vlog shared related to the Air Malta’s destination marketing campaign – which resulted in over 300 posts in just under a week.

A post shared by Nadia ???? Travel the Life (@travelthelife) on Apr 25, 2018 at 2:04pm PDT

THE ACHIEVEMENTS

It’s been almost three weeks since we hosted the influencers, and the results are still pouring in. To date, we’ve recorded over 1,150 posts, stories, tweets, blogs and vlogs that were shared in relation to the destination marketing campaign #TAKEMETOMALTA; not including the blogs and vlogs that are still yet to be published, and all the photos that haven’t yet been shared.
Considering the tight budget and limited timeframe we had to work with, we were (and still are) overwhelmed with the positive results. We’re still compiling reports (the numbers keep growing by the hour!) but we can proudly say that the campaign was a resounding success.

A post shared by Nunzia Cillo (@nunziacillo) on Apr 23, 2018 at 10:13am PDT

The next stage was just as fun. As all the influencers returned home and continued to promote Malta and Air Malta (along with Corinthia Hotels and our other partners), we started rolling out the digital ads – a mix of social, Google, Yandex and VK ads) to promote the direct flights to Malta in each new destination.
This is just the beginning. As more conversations happen online, our aim is to reinforce the message that Malta is now more accessible, thanks to Air Malta’s new direct routes.
Keep your eyes peeled for the final results – we’ll be sharing them on our page the minute we have them.

The post Destination Marketing | Air Malta's International Influencer Campaign appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Here’s the how and why:

Whenever a Page will make use of such spammy content, systematically and repeatedly, Facebook will start decreasing the reach of such posts. This will result in lower engagement and reach of the Page. Ultimately, using engagement bait content will be counterproductive. The reason for this fight against engagement bait is that Facebook wants to encourage authenticity and promote meaningful conversations on the platform through the use of relevant content.
We’ve all been guilty of using this ‘cheat’ at some point or another, but Facebook is finally drawing a line and no longer allowing over-use of this sort of content to increase engagement and reach.
We need to keep in mind that Facebook’s ultimate goal is for the consumer to remain on the platform, and unfortunately, due to the continuous spam content, people had begun to lose interest in Facebook’s newsfeed.
This isn’t the first time that Facebook has waged war on bait. Remember when all the articles shared on Facebook would have these kinds of titles “You won’t believe what happens next”? We do too. Well, Facebook has managed to find a way to reduce that sort of content, and they will be doing the same with spammy posts.
One month into 2018, we’ve already seen a difference in the content displayed on our newsfeed, and this is just the beginning.
So what does that mean for businesses on Facebook? It’s a great opportunity to start producing good quality content which is both interesting and engaging.
Remember to please tag your grandparents in the comments and share this article with your pet. Thanks. ????

The post Fighting engagement bait appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

No amount of paid media is going to turn bad creative into good content. – Gary Vaynerchuk

For my first Switchversary last year, I blogged about what Switch is, this year I want to write about the importance of producing good content.

In the past two years at Switch, I have had the opportunity to understand the difference between boosting a post and creating good, quality content. See, most people believe that allocating a boosting budget to a post is enough to reach the desired target audience and get them to engage. Excuse my French, but that is bullshit – you will reach your audience and force them to consume something that they might not be interested in seeing, but you can’t be certain that they will engage with your post.

Nowadays there are still so many people who would rather post a floating image of their product on Facebook and spend money boosting it than investing their money in good, relevant, content.

 Here’s why you need to start investing in quality content rather than boosted curated or low quality posts.

Good Content: Paid VS Organic Reach

If it were up to me, I would never boost any sort of content (sorry, Mark Zuckerberg) – this is because I truly believe in organic reach and engagement. The difference between Paid reach and Organic reach is in the word itself: with paid you are spending money in order to reach your audience, whereas with organic it’s the audience finding you thanks to Facebook’s algorithms and the engagement of their friends with the post.  

It’s quite simple when you think about it – if you create good content, your audience will want to engage with it and share it with friends. In this way, your post will grow in reach automatically. When you share a post just for the sake of putting content on your page and then boosting it, you are basically throwing your money away,

Why would you want to reach your audience but NOT get them to engage with your brand?

This is exactly what we did with Kinnie: we’ve worked on a strategy to produce content that was more relevant to a local audience and to the brand itself. We’ve identified different content streams, all of which had different objectives and target audiences. Some of the content streams were more relevant for an older audience, whereas others directly targeted people in their twenties. Some pieces of content were more informative, and others were simply used to reinforce the message that Kinnie is a great local drink.

Exhibit A: We produced a series of recipe videos to show creative ways through which people can consume Kinnie – this is because we like to think outside the box and believe that Kinnie could be showcased as more than just a drink, but as a delicious ingredient too.

Exhibit B: To reinforce the culture and origins of Kinnie, we’ve launched a series of streams that solely aimed at showcasing the beautiful islands. We did this by snapping images of Kinnie around popular locations, but also by producing short videos that showed in deeper details beautiful locations around Malta, Gozo and Comino. It’s a combination of consumables and wanderlust – and what could be more engaging than that?

Instead of using high budgets to boost posts, we invested the money into creating quality content. The result?  With more than half the number of posts and less  boosting budget than the previous year, we’ve increased the Page’s total reach by 80%, the average organic reach per post by 370% and the Page’s total engagement by 47% in just under a year.

Want to find out more about how we achieved these numbers? You can contact us here – the coffee’s on us.

Good Content: Aspirational VS Irrelevant

Let me use Max Factor Malta as an example. We’ve been working with this cosmetic brand since 2014, but we’ve always had one main problem: we wouldn’t have relevant content to work with. We’ve had to use the content produced by Max Factor International to promote products/events/promotions on the page, and although it is aesthetically beautiful, the content just did not make sense for the Maltese market.

Most of the visuals involve Victoria’s Secret models using the products – and it’s no news that using overly-photoshopped models to promote cosmetics doesn’t quite work anymore. This is why we have launched the Max Factor Squad – a six month campaign which features six Maltese influencers who promote the brand locally. This was one done by producing high-quality visuals in our studio – a variety of videos and images that are being shared on social media and used to reinforce the message at point of sale in stores.

https://www.facebook.com/406671259436256/photos/a.461503730619675.1073741828.406671259436256/1055886301181412/?type=3&theater

When comparing the figures from June to August 2016 (period without local campaign) to the June to August 2017 figures  (period with local campaign), we have noticed that the Max Factor Malta Facebook’s Page’s total reach increased by 226%, of which 285% was the organic reach increase, along as a 350% increase in Engagement.

Good Content: Virality VS Dormant

I think that every agency, marketing executive and freelancer has heard the sentence ‘I want this to go viral’ at least once in their career (I’ve heard it approximately 47 times in the past three years). If creating content that goes viral was so easy, we’d all have over 500K likes on our images/videos, but it’s not. Virality just happens, and most of the time it hits when you least expect it. One thing that we can certainly do is increase the chances of a post performing well – and how do we do that? That’s right, by creating good content.

Start by defining your story (be it emotional, funny, serious, interesting etc), see how you want to say that story, and then produce it. Always keep in mind your audience – who are they? What do they like to see? Will they understand the message behind your story? You should always make sure that:

1. Your story makes sense to your viewer
2. It triggers a feeling – this is how you’ll get your audience to engage with it

This always makes me think about this one great advert, from Christmas 2015 – and if you’ve already seen it, it’s worth watching it again:

Good Content: the key to success

I can’t emphasize this enough to our clients: create good content and you will see results.

It’s very difficult for us marketers to work with brands that resort to stock photography and images of floating products in order to communicate a message. We no longer live in the era where we need to fight over a magazine spot – the challenge now is to produce content that is better than what others are creating, and I am not only referring to your competitors. As consumers, we are constantly thrown some sort of advertisement our way (boosted posts, sponsored posts, Google ads, banner ads etc etc), that we now manage to filter it all and carefully choose the ones we want to look at.

So: do you want to stand out from the crowd with good content, or are you okay with being filtered out with your boosted post? It’s all about making the transition from simply having an online presence to leaving an impact on your audience. If you don’t know where to start, we can help. Get in touch today.

The post The power of good content appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.