818 Agency CEO Jed Wexler was recently invited to speak to members of the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce about building audiences and running paid social campaigns that actually convert. Here are nine highly digestible takeaways.
Consider 2018 the year of building audiences. Your own customer audiences.
According to a recent Content Marketing Institute survey, 92% of the top B2B marketing performers in the field are focused on just that.
How do you do it? By creating best-in-class editorial content that attracts warm customer audiences and running perfectly timed paid social advertising campaigns. Obvious at first glance, but not necessarily in practice.
I recently had the pleasure of sitting on a panel hosted by The Manhattan Chamber of Commerce and we outlined nine quick things to keep in mind (and that anyone can get started on right away).
Panel Takeaways: Speed Round
1. Have a specific, conversion-based end goal in mind before you start.
2. Clearly define your customer audience.
3. Rapid insights: Ask two current clients + one prospect, “What two digital channels do you check every day? What types of content will be most helpful to you AND give you the most buying confidence?”
4. Select only two paid/organic social channels at most to start with and effectively manage.
5. Plan + Create blog content, social content, and video content (a must). For small and larger companies it’s imperative to create a dedicated video bulletin, content site and/or online mag to pull in warm audiences at scale — instead of just blitzing cold audiences with ads.
5A. Less is More. Make sure what you create is top-level, i.e. Treat each piece of content like its own campaign.
6. Plan and create conversion-based paid social ads = deliver these to your existing “warm” audiences. Audit your landing pages first, though!
7. TEST, ITERATE, REPEAT. Test ads in a structured way, shut off what clearly isn’t working, scale what is. And once again, audit your landing pages — this might just be your fly in the funnel ointment.
8. Build External Audiences: Post organic (unpaid) content + pay to distribute key pieces of content to build qualified audiences and lower your CPA over time. Repeat #6 to these folks. Capture audiences to use later via Facebook’s amazing advertising tools.
Note: In my earlier piece, “The Rise of the Writer-Technologist,” I explain why you should always build audiences to achieve true ROI and fend off audience fatigue.
9. Measure your efforts + spend against your business objective only. See #1.
This might all sound like beginner stuff, but sometimes even the largest corporations skip some of these steps and are left wondering why their leads are not converting.
The advertising tech is now firmly in place to reward digital storytelling like never before.
So what are you waiting for?