5 “Must Have” Tactics For Your 2016 Digital Marketing Plan

5 “Must Have” Tactics For Your 2016 Digital Marketing Plan What the experts are saying

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Dear Reader: Digital Marketers can have a great year in 2016…IF they do their homework first.

Our WBW newsletter carefully monitored the activity on digital marketing blogs throughout 2015 in order to keep our readers up to date with leading edge information and preparation for the trends and opportunities that emerged throughout the year, along with their expected impact on 2016.

Key trends became apparent in the coverage of top blogs. Users (and revenues) were going mobile. Facebook had done some exciting things with its advertising program. Content marketing was moving from buzzword to essential strategy.

Listed in this EBook are five “must-have” tactics that surfaced continually in the writings of industry experts, along with links to some of their most useful posts on the subject.

Hopefully you will find this useful as a checklist for your 2016 digital marketing.

You are, of course, welcome to join the 20,000 marketing professionals who will use the WBW newsletter to continue to optimize their efforts in 2016 and beyond.

Keep your marketing fully up to date with a free subscription.

Jeff Ente Director Who’s Blogging What

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#1 - Facebook Advertising Why this is a 2016 “Must Have”: Facebook has built, quite arguably, the largest media audience ever. It has coupled it with a remarkable targeting system , creating options that allow marketers to precisely locate their targets within that massive universe.

Facebook is now presenting marketers with a phenomenon that they have not seen in the half century since the Mad Men days, when broadcast television provided a massive audience that included, essentially, everyone. That television audience has, of course, since been cut down, first by the advent of cable and now by streamed content and binge watching.

The “tonnage” that it once provided has reemerged as Facebook, and with a vengeance. 2016 technology and innovation allows it to be finely targeted in a way that makes the old broadcast television version look absolutely medieval. Sophisticated tools allow almost every marketer to reach prospects and customers through Facebook; the challenge is to identify the proper marketing objective, target it accurately support it with the best

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possible creatives to find and engage.

Paid advertising on Facebook is something of a bittersweet exercise for many digital marketers. Back in 2011 free business Pages with high follower totals were highly coveted. Facebook has since upended that objective by severely throttling organic reach to those hard earned followers. The social analytical firm Locowise measured organic reach in May 2015 at 8.34% (of total Page Likes). That figure dropped to 7.25% by October).

So the bad news is that, for 2016, Facebook is clearly pay-to-play. The good news is that the paid programs can effectively reach not only followers, but also other likeminded prospects.

Resource: What advertising objectives can I choose from?

(Facebook)

The basic strategy for effective Facebook Marketing in 2016: Select an objective: The Facebook advertising program begins by asking for a predefined objective to best reach the goal of boosting revenue (or at least awareness).

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Objectives include Website Clicks, App Installs, Video Views and more.

Resources: What is a Custom Audience?

(Facebook) Facebook Website Custom Audiences: A Definitive Guide for Remarketing (Jon Loomer)

Resources: What are Lookalike Audiences?

(Facebook) How to Boost Facebook Ad Relevance with Lookalike Custom Audiences (Social Times)

Choose a targeting option carefully.

Finding the right target market within Facebook would be a classic needle-inhaystack problem, IF Facebook didn’t make available several powerful (and creative) tools: Custom audiences: Lists of phone numbers or email addresses can be uploaded and matched against Facebook’s user data. Websites that have integrated the Facebook Pixel can create a custom list of people who have visited (specific pages) on their website. Custom audiences can also be created around people who have downloaded a mobile app.

A very important variation on the Custom Audience is the Lookalike Audience. Facebook can analyze the characteristics of an advertiser supplied list and create an audience of users with similar characteristics. It is an important way to extend reach over Facebook.

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Resources:

Dig Deeper With Facebook Demographic Targeting (3Q Digital)

Resources: Further Lessons In Facebook Carousel Link Ad Creative (Nanigans) Facebook's carousel ads are 10 times better than its regular ads (Digiday)

Demographics/Interests: Advertisers can go beyond the standard set of profile entries. Data from 3rd party syndicated data bases are used to supplement Facebook data. Physical location can also be finely targeted, along with, of course, interests gleaned from user activities on Facebook.

Creatives - Single Images: Facebook ads fight for eyeballs mostly in the frenetic News Feed (or just to the right of it on desktop). They compete with shared pictures of Friends and other ads. Text is usually limited to a 25 character headline and a 90 character description. Facebook will reject images that they feel are overlaid with excessive text (dominating over 20% of the image).

“Carousel” ads: Most ad units allow for rotating “carousels” of up to 5 images with links for no extra charge. These are encouraged by Facebook and have been found to be very effective.

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#2 - Mobile Responsiveness Why this is a 2016 “Must Have”: Mobile users now make up, by almost all accounts, the majority of respondents to digital promotions.

Getting them to stop and provide information has remained a challenge and many web designs have not been sufficiently updated.

On April 28, 2015, comScore reported that the number of mobile-only adult internet users had exceeded the desktop variety for the first time.

Exactly one week later Google reported that “more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan”.

Digital marketers in 2016 – and beyond – must prepare for the fact that the majority of their digital contacts will occur on hand held devices. While most of their outgoing messages will be automatically mobile friendly (thanks to apps, mobile ad units and responsive emails), many landing pages remain an obstacle within the mobile buying process.

Steps for effective mobile landing pages: -Use images/icons to supplement text.

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Resources: Icon Pack: 375 RetinaDisplay-Ready Icons (Six Revisions) 3 Hacks to Dominate Your Mobile Conversion Rates (WordStream) 6 Out-of-the-Box Ideas To Increase Mobile Conversions (Invesp)

Icons can be used to direct their eyesight during the buying process.

-Mobile is all about interruptions and distractions, so test a ‘save’ option for mobile users. The ability to save searches and carts can be helpful for users doing research on their phone and who might complete the purchase later. It could also provide a justification to collect an email address.

-Don’t ask the mobile user for too much. Marketers naturally try to get as much information as possible but timing is everything. A mobile session might not be the best place to ask for secondary contact information or for demographics. Hopefully there will be time for that later. Similarly, the initial contact over mobile may be too important for an interruption telling the user about the brand’s mobile app.

-Use the HTML5 form input Types to control keyboards and aid in browser suggestions. “Forms” are the part of a web page that is designed to accept

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Resources: HTML5 forms input types (HTML5 Doctor)

data entered by the user. In the desktop era almost every field that accepted input was marked up as type=”text”. HTML5 provides new options that can significantly ease the input process for the mobile user: type=”email” presents a keypad with a prominent “@”. Will also provide basic validation on the format of the address entered.

type=”tel” presents a phone keypad type=”date” presents a mobile friendly, swipeable calendar for entering dates.

Other HTML5 types include search, url, range and color.

Proper use of the HTML form input Types can also help the mobile browsers to predict entry; e.g., to prepopulate an email field with an email address frequently entered in the browsing history.

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Some new ad formats are their own mobile landing pages.

Resources: Facebook Lead Ads: Everything You Need to Know To Increase Mobile Conversions (Single Grain)

Twitter has introduced Lead Gen Cards and Facebook has Lead Ads. Both services will pre-populate a form with data from the user’s social network profile which can be edited or submitted with a single tap. Test carefully against more traditional hosted landing pages.

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#3 - Re-marketing Why this is a 2016 “Must Have”: Customers and prospects are using multiple devices and multiple search and social platforms.

Remarketing technology allows marketing to an individual, not a device and marketers can focus their resources (including money) to follow prospects that have already entered the sales process.

Remarketing, which is the targeting of specific prospects across multiple platforms, is not new but its usage and infrastructure is growing rapidly as we head into 2016. Here is how Twitter illustrates one form of remarketing, based on a website visit:

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Resources: 5 Remarkable Remarketing Audiences Retailers MUST Target (WordStream)

Prospects can also be targeted via email addresses, phone numbers and mobile device IDs. Similar programs are available through Twitter Tailored Audiences, Facebook Custom Audiences and Google’s AdWords Customer Match.

Facebook and Twitter also offer the “look-alike” audiences in which they use their own data to find prospects similar to those on the advertisers lists.

For digital marketers, remarketing is very much a matter of efficiency, where money and other resources are devoted towards prospects who have already expressed an interest rather than starting from the cold.

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#4 - Content Marketing Why this is a 2016 “Must Have”: Brands are becoming publishers, providing the content that informs and impresses prospects. Images, videos, podcasts and text all play important roles to maintain engagement and loyalty. Success in 2016 depends on having a coordinated content marketing plan to support the business across multiple channels (email, social, search, etc…)

Content marketing may, in fact, predate digital marketing. Even in the 20th century smart brands would create magazine and newspaper inserts with interesting, helpful information for their audiences without an accompanying high power sell. For decades PR departments have been pitching to get their in house experts booked on TV. The digital revolution has brought content marketing to the masses, so that now all types of smaller and niche businesses can create a content infrastructure to represent their brand and act as a connective layer with their markets. For 2016 the key objective for most content marketers is coordination – creating the right content that interests their market and supports their products and providing the hooks that will make that content

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Resources: A Step-by-Step Guide to Generating Leads With Your Content Marketing (Unbounce)

socially vibrant, search engine optimized and intriguing when described via email. Brands are moving away from creating content for a specific channel; when done properly, content in 2016 should be basically agnostic in terms of how it is first discovered by the consumer.

Is Content Marketing A Strategy, A Tactic Or A Channel?

(Marketing Land)

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Resources: Content Marketing Tips: 11 Types of Content That People Love To Share (Jeff Bullas) 4 Key Content Tips To Maximize Social Media Results (Heidi Cohen)

Another objective for the content marketer is to balance and optimize the specific types of media used — text, video, images, podcasts all have their roles to play in attracting customers in 2016 (virtual reality will probably be next). With all of these opportunities, content marketers will be able to increase their efficiency by “repackaging” concepts across multiple channels. For example, the research behind a blog post can support a podcast or webinar to extend reach.

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#5 - Semantic Search Why this is a 2016 “Must Have”: Websites that rely on the careful use of “keywords” in order to gain organic favor with search engines will succumb to he semantic shift that is occurring. Led by projects like Google Hummingbird and RankBrain, properly written sites are gaining traffic and new opportunities are emerging.

The power of archaic keywords in search began a dramatical decline well before 2016. In September 2013 Google announced the Hummingbird algorithm which would attempt to analyze content holistically, reading entire phrases and understanding the context in which they appeared. This is the basis of the semantic search revolution, in which search becomes based on “things” and not “strings”.

In 2015 Google closed the loop by announcing RankBrain, which would semantically analyze queries before they are matched with results that had been analyzed by Hummingbird. Now, both queries and content are being evaluated for intent and context.

The impact for marketers is that the intent of their content must be clearly

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Resources: What Is RankBrain and How Does It Affect SEO? (Audience Bloom)

Resources: Understanding Schema for Search (SEM Rush) Schema.org Version 2.0 Released: Extensions Ahoy!

(SEO Skeptic)

written in language that is familiar and comfortable to their user base. Trying to “out think” Google is an increasingly ill advised strategy.

Schema.org provides “vocabularies” that can be used to markup content to make it much easier for search engines to understand. It is sponsored by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex. A simple markup example:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://datavocabulary.org/Person"> <span itemprop="name">Abraham Lincoln</span> was born on <span itemprop="birthDate">Feb. 12, 1809</span>. He became known as <span itemprop="nickname">Honest Abe</span> and later served as <span itemprop="jobTitle">President of the United States</span>. Tragically, he was assassinated and died on <span itemprop="deathDate">April 15, 1865</span>. </div>

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The movement towards semantic search is designed to benefit users with well written valuable content that delivers what they wanted to see, even if they phrased their query in an unconventional manner.

There is no “hack” to beat semantic search, the goal is to anticipate the needs and intent of users and to build it into content in a clear, conversational manner. Follow up with schema.org based structured markups that make certain that the major search engines will understand exactly what the content provides.

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…other things to watch in 2016 Programmatic advertising. The negotiations between advertisers (via demand side networks) and publishers (supply side) has become increasingly automated and, some say, much more efficient. Split second auctions decide which advertisement is optimal as the web or mobile page is created.

Off site commerce. Google, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are all developing “buy buttons”, enabling them to complete the sale on behalf of their advertisers.

Snapchat is set to boom, fueled by its own “Discover” content along with 3rd party and user Stories”. With mobile view counts that rival Facebook and a developing advertising technology, Snapchat is well positioned to become a key social channel in 2016.

20,000 digital marketing professionals will keep up to date in 2016 and beyond through a single weekly (Thursday) newsletter. The best insights from over 1,100 top blogs are provided. Get a free subscription or see sample issues here.

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