Demand and Lead Generation Archives - Act-On

73 Advertising Terms and Jargon Every Marketer Should Know

Act-On — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 20:10:58 +0000

Getting started with advertising can be downright overwhelming. The industry has its own special lingo and a library of acronyms, with new tactics and technologies emerging constantly. That’s why we created this glossary of advertising terms to help newcomers learn the lay of the digital land.

The following (relatively) jargon-free explanations of the most common advertising terms will help you navigate the world of online advertising.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is a method used to determine which version of an ad or landing page performs better. A/B tests involve running two versions simultaneously while changing only one element at a time to pinpoint the key variable that drives audience response. Once a winner is identified, it becomes the next control and is compared with another version for further testing and optimization.

Above the Fold

Above the fold is a term originating in print advertising that refers to the top half of a newspaper where the most prominent headlines were placed. In a digital context, it describes the part of a web or landing page that’s visible without scrolling down. To maximize conversions, landing page best practices suggest placing your most important message and CTA above the fold. Keep in mind there’s no standard pixel size for the fold, as it depends on the user’s screen size and resolution.

Account-Based Advertising

Account-based advertising is a tactic used in account-based marketing. Account-based advertising displays ads exclusively to specific job titles at your target accounts. For instance, if you want to market a new food packaging product to General Mills, you can target individuals with titles such as Senior Product Manager, Senior Product Marketer, or VP of Product Marketing. This ensures that your ads are only visible to the relevant people at General Mills.

Ad Audience

Ad audience describes the overall number of individuals who have either already seen or could potentially see an ad during a specific time period.

Ad Click

Ad click describes the action a user takes when they interact with an ad by either clicking on it with their mouse, tapping it on a touchscreen, or pressing enter on their keyboard.

Ad Exchange

Ad exchange is an online marketplace that enables publishers and advertisers to buy and sell advertising inventory in real-time auctions. Unlike historical methods of buying ad inventory that involved price negotiations for ad placements on specific websites, ad exchanges enable instantaneous bidding for ad space available across the internet.

Ad ID (Advertising ID)

An ad ID comprises a unique string of letters and numbers assigned to a mobile device by its operating system (like Android or iOS). Ad IDs allow advertisers to track and target mobile users with personalized ads based on their behavior and interests while allowing users to limit ad tracking and protect their privacy. Users can choose to reset or disable their advertising ID at any time.

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Ad Impressions

Ad impressions are a performance metric used in advertising. Each time an ad has been served, regardless of whether the user has actually seen or interacted with the ad in any way, counts as one impression.

Ad Inventory

Ad inventory measures the total amount of advertising space or impressions a digital publisher has available to sell. For example, if The Gotham Times averages 1,000 visits to their homepage in any given week, and they have space for two display ads on their homepage, then their potential ad inventory is 2,000 impressions per week.

Ad Network

Ad networks connect advertisers to publishers, typically by aggregating ad inventory across multiple publishers and offering it to advertisers as a single point of contact.

Ad Serving

An ad serving means the delivery of a single ad from a web server to the end user’s device. Every time the ad is displayed on a browser or application, it has been “served” once.

Ad Targeting

Ad targeting describes the process of displaying ads to a specific group of people based on demographic, geographical, psychographic, behavioral, or other data. Advertisers “target” their ads based on who they want to reach and who they consider part of their audience or ideal customer profile.

Ad Units

Ad units describe the specific, standardized spaces on a website or app where ads can be placed. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a trade association promoting digital ad standards and practices, maintains a set of guidelines for sizing and formatting different types of ad units.

Addressable

In advertising, the addressable refers to the ability to target individual users or devices based on demographic or behavioral data with relevant and personalized ads. In other words, can the advertiser address a certain type of user or customer with an ad campaign?

^{Understanding digital advertising terms just makes things feel better somehow.}

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing. Advertisers pay promotional partners to drive a certain amount of traffic to their pages or other owned channels. The commission is usually based on the amount of clicks and/or leads delivered.

Attribution

Attribution describes the process of identifying which specific marketing efforts led to a conversion. Marketers use different attribution models to assign value to different touch points and calculate ROI. Popular attribution methods include first touch, last touch, and multi-touch.

Banner Ad

A banner ad is one of the most common forms of digital advertising. These ad units can include static graphics, videos, and/or interactive rich media, to display long “banners” on web pages or in applications.

Bidding Strategy

In advertising, bidding strategy means the approach an ad buyer takes when deciding how much to pay for ad placements in an auction. Google search ad placements, among others, require a careful bidding strategy. For example, an advertiser could choose to bid a flat rate, bid based on the expected clickthrough rate, or use past performance data. A successful bidding strategy wins the ad placement while optimizing the return on investment for the buyer.

Blocklist

A blocklist is a list of websites where an advertiser does not want their ads to appear. Often, brands use blockslists to avoid association with controversial or inappropriate content. Blocklists can also include keywords or products to exclude from campaigns.

Bounce Rate

The percentage of website visitors that only look at one page before navigating away from a website is that site or page’s bounce rate. High bounce rates often indicate that visitors aren’t finding what they’re looking for, or that the site or landing page has poor design or usability.

Brand Awareness

Brand awareness means the percentage of customers who recognize a particular brand or product by name. Increased brand awareness is a frequent goal and success metric for marketing campaigns, specifically “awareness campaigns.” Brands with high awareness are often more likely to be trusted by customers.

Call to Action

Call to action or CTA refers to the part of the ad or landing page that asks the user to do something. It calls them to act in a certain way. The CTA can be almost anything, but commonly used calls to action include Buy Now, Sign Up, Download, Get Started, and Read More.

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is a law that imposes certain obligations around privacy and security on companies that collect personal information from California residents. The law grants California residents the right to know what personal information is being collected, the right to request its deletion, and the right to opt-out of the sale of their personal information.

Channel

In digital advertising, channels are specific platforms businesses use to reach their target audience. Digital ad channels include display ads, social media, email, and mobile in-app advertising.

Click-Through-Rate

The CTR or Click-through Rate measures how often people who are served an ad actually click on it. An ad’s CTR is calculated by dividing the number of clicks an ad received by the number of times it’s been served (i.e., clicks over impressions). For example, if an ad received 5 clicks and was shown 1000 times, the CTR is 0.5%. The higher the CTR on an ad, the better it’s performing.

Publishers use consent management platforms or CMPs to request, manage, store, and update users’ consent for data processing and privacy purposes. For users, CMPs usually include an easy interface to control how their data is collected, used, and shared. For publishers, CMPs enable compliance with privacy regulations and laws, and build trust with the audience.

Conversion

Any action that advertisers want their audience to take can be considered a conversion. The total number of conversions measures the success of a campaign or ad. Common examples of conversions include making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or requesting a demo.

Conversion Pixel

Advertisers use conversion pixels, tiny 1×1 images invisible to users to embed code that triggers whenever a conversion takes place on a certain web page.

^{Make sure you have a full understanding of digital advertising terminology before trying your next campaign.}

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is an advertising metric equal to the percentage of users who convert. Conversion rates are calculated by dividing the number of conversions (such as purchases or form fills) by the number of views or visits, then converting to a percentage.

Conversion Rate Optimization

When advertisers work to improve the percentage of website visitors who convert, they are practicing conversion rate optimization. Tactics such as A/B testing, messaging adjustments, user testing, updating graphics, and trying new CTAs are all examples of conversion rate optimization.

Conversion Tracking

Conversion tracking means monitoring how many conversions have occurred during any specific time period, and analyzing which ads converted most.

A cookie is a small script that advertisers use to track how visitors interact with a website and remember user behavior and preferences. (See also first-party cookies and third-party cookies.)

Cost Per Acquisition

Your cost per acquisition is how much it costs in advertising dollars to acquire a single customer. Marketers calculate CPA by dividing the total amount spent on an advertising campaign by the number of new customers acquired through that campaign.

Cost Per Click

CPC advertising, or cost per click, charges advertisers for each time a user clicks on a placed ad. The CPC rate is calculated by dividing the total amount spent on a campaign by the number of clicks generated.

Cost Per Completed View

Cost per completed view (CPCV) is a pricing model for video advertising that charges an advertiser only when a viewer watches the whole ad.

Cost Per Lead

CPL or cost per lead advertising is a pricing model for ads that charges advertisers only for the clicks that result in a conversion. CPL is calculated by dividing the total amount spent on a campaign by the number of leads generated.

Cost Per Mille

Cost per mille (aka Cost per thousand) is a pricing model based on charging for every 1,000 ad impressions. CPM is used as a standard measure for buying display ads. Mille comes from Latin, and means “thousand.”

Cross-Device Targeting

Cross-device targeting allows advertisers to reach the same buyer with targeted ads across multiple devices, i.e., from tablet to desktop to smartphone.

Contextual Targeting

Contextual targeting means ads are displayed to users based on the content of the webpages they view. For example, an airline placing an ad on a travel article or a software company advertising on a startup community’s website.

Demand-Side Platform

A demand-side platform (or DSP) is a platform that allows advertisers to buy ad space across multiple ad exchanges, ad networks, and other sources through a single interface. DSPs use automation to target specific users and optimize campaigns based on user data.

Direct Response

Direct response (DR) in digital advertising refers to campaigns or ads specifically created to encourage audiences to take immediate action. The term is often used in B2B, where marketing works with leads for a long period of time through a transaction.

Display

Display advertising means graphic ads shown on web pages. These types of ads originated in the newspaper industry, and are decreasingly popular due to the prevalence of ad blocking technology and consumers’ tendency to ignore them.

^{This group of coworkers is absolutely winning the game based on their understanding of digital advertising terms.}

Expandable Banner

An expandable banner is a banner ad that increases in size when a user hovers over it.

First-Party Cookies

First-party cookies are cookies placed and owned by the same website a user intentionally visits. They can be used to store user preferences, log-in status, and other settings, in addition to their use in ad targeting and marketing.

First-Touch Attribution

First-touch describes an attribution model that gives 100% of the credit for a conversion to the first marketing touchpoint in a user’s journey.

Frequency Capping

Frequency capping is the practice of setting a limit on the number of times an ad can be shown to a consumer within a specific timeframe (e.g., a week or month).

Geographic Targeting

Geographic targeting involves selecting an audience for a campaign based on geographic filters like zip codes, designated marketing areas (DMA), cities, states, and countries.

In 2018, the European Union adopted the General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR, a landmark privacy act that regulates how companies may collect and process customers’ personal data. Since it can apply to companies that aren’t based in the EU, its impact on advertising has been extensive. Among other things, it governs the use of web cookies and email marketing.

Identity Graph

An identity graph or ID Graph connects different signals associated with a single user or device across multiple platforms, including cookies, device IDs, social media accounts, and email addresses.

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In-Stream Ads

In-stream ads are any video ads that play before, during, or after online streaming video content.

Interstitial Ads

Interstitial ads appear when a user navigates between two different web pages, usually displayed as a full-screen pop-up ad. For example, when a user navigates to a mobile website, that brand might offer an interstitial ad for their mobile app.

Keyword

A keyword is a specific word or phrase that advertisers in paid search or contextual ads use for targeting. Users who search a specific keyword will see ads before their organic search results that pertain to the specific keyword. In search advertising, advertisers bid against each other to get top position for coveted keyword placements.

Landing Page

A landing page is any standalone web page that users reach after clicking an ad. The goal of the landing page is to persuade the user to convert via the CTA, i.e., take the advertisers’ desired action.

Last Touch Attribution

The last-touch or last click attribution model gives 100% of the credit for a conversion to the last touchpoint in a user’s journey.

Lead

A lead is simply a potential customer. In digital advertising, a lead is an individual who gives you their contact information. Examples include: signing up for a newsletter, filling out a form, or being served a tracking cookie.

Lookalike Audience

A lookalike audience describes a target audience that shares demographics, interests, behaviors, or other attributes with your existing customer base. Advertisers can target lookalike audiences on digital advertising platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Lookback Window

The lookback window is the specific timeframe advertisers set to attribute conversions or other reporting back to a campaign. The window can be expressed in hours, days, weeks, or months.

Mobile Advertiser ID

A mobile advertiser ID or MAID is a unique identifier assigned to a mobile device by its operating system (like Android or iOS). Advertisers use MAIDs to track and target mobile users with personalized ads. Users can choose to reset and clear their mobile advertising data at any time.

Multi-Channel or Multi-Touch Attribution

Multi-touch attribution is an attribution model that weighs each touchpoint along a buyer’s journey, across channels and devices. Often, these models assign various weights to certain actions within the buyer’s journey.

Native Advertising

Native advertising refers to a paid ad designed to appear indistinguishable from other content in the advertising channel. Advertisers try to match the form and user experience of content on the website or channel. Examples include a sponsored magazine article or a paid social media post. Native ads are intended to feel seamless and valuable, rather than sticking out as a blatant advertisement. However, in many cases, advertisers are required to include language within the native ad that specifies the content is for advertising purposes.

Overlay in Advertising

An is a decreasingly utilized digital ad format that “floats” over a webpage, video, or app content.

Paid Search

Paid search is an ad format where ads appear within search engine results pages (SERPs) based on targeted keywords included in the search queries. These ads are designed to look similar to organic search results.

Pay-Per-Click

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is an advertising pricing model. Advertisers pay vendors or publishers based on the number of clicks received on each ad. PPC is the most common model of paid search advertising, largely due to its widespread use by Google.

Personally Identifiable Information

In privacy terms, personally identifiable information or PII is a legal term describing any personal data that can be used to distinguish the real-world identity of an online user. PII can include names, addresses, ID numbers, phone numbers, and birthdates, among other data.

Pop-Up Ad

A pop-up ad is any ad that opens in a new browser window. Pop-up ads are typically viewed as annoying and a poor user experience. More widespread in the early days of digital advertising, today many browsers block pop-ups by default.

Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising is a method of buying ad space that uses automation and AI. It allows marketers to target an audience, set a budget, place real-time bids, and purchase advertising from a publisher. It uses data to make decisions about which ads to buy in real-time. The goal is to improve the efficiency of the ad buying process and the effectiveness of the ads themselves.

Reach

Reach is the total number of people who see your ad.

Real-Time Bidding

Real-time bidding (or RTB) is an ad sales method that involves purchasing ad impressions in real-time auctions through programmatic platforms. RTB takes place in milliseconds, on an impression-by-impression basis, with the goal of increasing ad buying efficiency and using real-time data to decide which ad to show to which user.

Retargeting

Retargeting, sometimes remarketing, is the process of serving ads to people who have previously interacted with your content but not made a purchase.

Rich Media Advertising

Rich media advertising incorporates interactive features such as video, audio, or interactive quizzes and games. The goal is to improve engagement and provide an immersive experience, all in hopes of getting users to click.

Third-Party Cookies

Third-party cookies are set up on a website or other channel that track back to a different owner than the owner of the website hosting the cookie. For instance, when you are logged into a social networking site and visit another website, the social networking site may be placing third-party cookies on the site. Often used for advertising purposes, third-party cookies are being increasingly restricted by government regulations and tech platforms to protect user privacy.

View-Through Rate

View-through rate is an attribution metric used to measure the number of times a user who later converts views an ad without clicking. View-throughs are a way to track the effectiveness of an ad that may have influenced a customer’s decision, even if they didn’t directly interact with it. View-through windows typically define the number of days after viewing an ad that the viewer took action attributed to the ad.

Walled Garden

In advertising, walled garden describes a platform that collects and controls user data and keeps it hidden from third parties. Examples of walled gardens in advertising include Facebook, Amazon, and Google. For advertisers, walled gardens offer the ability to target users based on the platform’s proprietary data. However, they provide limited visibility into the results of specific ads and campaigns.

Use This List of Advertising Terms to Improve Your Campaigns

Hopefully this glossary of digital advertising terms cuts through the jargon and provides useful definitions of common concepts to help you plan, build, and execute your demand generation campaigns.

Curious how you can drive more engagement from your prospects and customers using marketing automation? Check out our ebook for a step-by-step guide.

7 Tactics to Improve Your Demand Generation Strategy

Act-On — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 16:23:52 +0000

Demand generation strategy, aka demand gen, isn’t only about generating a ton of leads. Nope. It’s also about the quality of those leads — because it’s totally possible to generate huge lead volumes and still come up empty-handed.

Why?

When there’s a mismatch between lead quantity and lead quality, it hampers your sales efforts, leaving your sales team spinning their wheels, working bad leads.

At the same time, marketers face increased pressure from executives to tie marketing efforts to revenue. And that’s where solid demand generation strategies come into play.

What is a demand generation strategy?

A demand-generation strategy creates interest or awareness about your products or services. It includes a variety of efforts, such as content marketing, social media, and more. The goal is to attract prospects, drive awareness, and convert leads.

Successful demand generation strategies are measured by:

The quality of your leads.
What you’re able to convert to revenue.
The ability to prove your contribution to your company’s bottom line.

Demand generation is powerful because it can help shorten the sales cycle and produce more revenue, which is directly attributed to specific actions. But, of course, it starts with figuring out how to best reach and help your target audience.

Demand gen vs. lead gen

Demand generation is focused on creating awareness and interest in your products and services. Lead generation is focused on collecting information from potential customers who have shown interest. In other words, demand gen lays the foundation for generating interest, and lead generation focuses on converting that interest to potential leads.

The two work hand in hand, which is why you need solid B2B demand generation strategies to get the best results.

7 Tactics to improve your demand generation strategy

Getting a prospect to take action. That’s what you want, right? Yeah, us too. But that won’t happen unless you can walk with them along their journey from awareness to consideration to finally making that purchase.

But first, you must be found. And then, you need to know exactly where your customer is every step of the way, so you can give them what they need. Easy, right?

Maybe, when you know exactly what to do. Here are seven strategies to help you get there.

1. Optimize your website for SEO

When a prospect has a pain point, they search for a solution. And when they do this, you want them to find you. Of course, that’s what SEO and picking the right keywords are all about — getting found. Today, improving your SEO is one of the most essential demand generation tactics. But if you’re a marketer, you probably know that already, right?

However, when using SEO for your website, it’s also critical to consider the search intent of keywords. A person searching “best email marketing platform” will bring you far more targeted traffic than a person searching “best email.”

So make sure your website is full of the right keywords, free of HTTP error codes, and structured in a way that helps you stay on the good side of search engines.

2. Gate your best content

It takes moments for a visitor to close their browser. But before they do, you want to earn the chance to engage with them again. A great way to do this is by creating high-value gated content.

Are you already doing it? Great. But it’s still worth taking a fresh look at two areas.

Relevance. Is the gated content still relevant to your target audience? Does it still speak to their most important pain points? Is there something that would work better?
Personalization. Once a prospect hands you their email, do you have a personalized nurturing sequence to keep them engaged?

For example, as part of our demand generation strategy, we created an in-depth eBook about how B2B marketers can attract more high-quality leads. We include our favorite insider tips and offer the download in related blogs to help our audience improve their results.

^{Demand generation tip: We gate content to continue providing our audience with resources and value in the future.}

3. Use website personalization

Personalized experiences. Customers don’t just want them … they demand them. And if you don’t deliver, it’s hard to create that connection that keeps people engaged and coming back for more. A demand generation tactic that helps you get there faster is website personalization.

And yes, it’s true: Website personalization has been around for years, but previously it was complicated, expensive, and out of reach for many B2B marketers (especially if you worked for a smaller company). That’s all changed though.

Website personalization provides intelligent content recommendations to engage various audience segments. It uses AI and machine learning to deliver a customized journey that helps prospects move through the sales cycle faster.

4. Engage in the right places

Are you serving customers in the B2B space? If so, you want to hang out in the same places they are to boost your lead gen efforts. A great starting point is LinkedIn, since over 90% of B2B content marketers report LinkedIn as an effective distribution channel.

Here at Act-On, we know our target audience (B2B marketers) spends a decent amount of time on LinkedIn, so we often use it to promote content that will help them with their challenges (like this recent post we did to promote a Demand Gen webinar).

A social media tool such as Act-On’s Advanced Social Media Module can also help you reach your customers by scheduling posts in advance, monitoring mentions, and helping you respond. You can even create advocacy boards to motivate staff to help spread the word about what you’re doing.

And remember, the most successful demand generation tactics are less about promoting and more about giving your audience the information they need to make smart choices.

5. Leverage account-based marketing

Gridlock. That’s what it feels like with an increasing number of decision-makers in the buying process, which slows down sales cycles. According to Gartner, the typical buying group for a B2B solution involves six to 10 decision-makers. A solution that helps you manage this growing challenge is account-based marketing (ABM).

ABM can help improve the odds of winning over multiple stakeholders. It complements demand generation by targeting high-value accounts to help optimize resources and personalize engagement.

For example, a salesperson can personalize messages and marketing to accounts, based on the combined needs and pain points of all stakeholders. ABM also helps nurture connections and supports upselling, to create even more potential opportunities.

6. Use lead scoring

The purpose of lead gen is to attract new leads but also to make sure those leads are high quality. Lead scoring is a great way to do that.

Lead scoring evaluates a prospect’s past behavior — viewing web pages that signal purchase intent, interest in a product demo, and other actions. It uses this data to determine whether the lead is ready for the sales team. And if so, they can take action faster.

7. Utilize marketing automation in your demand generation strategy

As you select the best demand-generation strategies, marketing automation can help support your efforts. The right tool can help you attract and nurture prospects throughout every stage in the funnel, from awareness to purchase.

As a result, you can shorten the sales cycle and more effectively link your efforts to specific results. Plus, as marketing teams struggle to do more with less, leveraging marketing automation helps you scale demand generation strategy while easing the burden on your staff.

Do you need help attracting more prospects? If so, we can help! Download our eBook and we’ll give our favorite tips for attracting new high-quality leads.

Improve Landing Page Conversation Rates by Focusing on Google PPC Quality Score

Act-On — Mon, 01 May 2023 13:00:00 +0000

Landing page conversion rates are crucial to Google’s pay-per-click quality score, or the numerical value between 1 and 10 that Google assigns to individual keywords. In 2022, Google made $224.7 billion in revenue from its advertising platform, Google Ads. This figure represents 80% of their total earnings, making them far and away the largest online advertising platform in the world.

Since Google Ads is the preferred advertising platform for most companies in the United States and around the globe, most marketers accept that leveraging their ad exchange is part of the cost of doing business. What we shouldn’t accept, though, is the misguided belief that we have to spend a ton of money on Google Ads to see any tangible ROI.

Instead of throwing good money at poor performance, keep reading to learn how you can build better landing pages and improve landing page conversion rates by focusing on increasing the PPC quality score.

What Do PPC Quality Scores Have to do With Landing Page Conversion Rates?

The pay-per-click quality score is the numerical value Google assigns each keyword. This score determines your ad rank and the amount of money you must spend to achieve your desired position on a search engine results page (SERP). Ironically, it’s also far and away the most overlooked and underrated paid search campaign metric.

PPC quality scores are based on several elements that are factored into Google Ads’ algorithm, including:

Previous account performance
Click-through-rate (CTR)
Keyword relevance within an ad group
Ad copy relevance within an ad group
The quality and relevance of your landing pages

Notice a trend?

Relevance is critical to achieving higher PPC quality scores. And when your quality scores are higher, you’re bound to drive more traffic. When that happens, you want to make absolutely sure that your PPC landing pages are optimized to generate as many conversions as possible.

Here’s why.

Why PPC Landing Page Conversion Rates Are So Important

The first and most obvious reason that PPC landing page conversion rates are so important is that they enter new contacts into your sales funnel. This begins the customer journey and empowers you to deliver personalized content and campaigns to nurture them throughout the entire experience. Tracking their interests and understanding their motivations helps you deliver against their unique needs and creates opportunities that build pipeline for your organization.

There’s another, less obvious reason these conversions are so vital: they improve your PPC quality scores. While most advertising platforms (including Google Ads) keep their algorithms under lock and key, we know that engagement plays a major role in keeping quality scores high and cost-per-click low. So if you’re able to create landing pages that drive traffic and conversions, you’ll get more out of digital advertising with less spend and maximum performance.

Improve Your Landing Pages; Improve Your Quality Scores

We know from experience that if you follow the tips below to create better landing pages, you will:

Improve your PPC quality scores
Generate more conversions
Increase paid marketing efficiencies

All of these factors impact Marketing’s contribution to your organization’s growth, so read the tips below closely and reach out if you have any questions.

https://act-on.com/learn/e-books-guides/building-better-landing-pages/

Use Consistent Keywords Throughout the Experience

Earlier, we talked a bit about the importance of relevance throughout the paid search continuum, but this topic deserves more detail. In fact, relevance is such an essential part of successful paid digital advertising that certain ad platforms actually refer to quality score as “Ad Relevance.” So, what is it?

Put simply, ad relevance is the degree of consistency in your ad campaigns — from keyword through conversion. This means that every progressive stage of these campaigns must use similar messaging throughout the entire program to ensure a high quality score.

For example, if your goal is to drive conversions related to “Financial Planning,” you’ll want to include that phrase in your list of keywords, in your advertisement, on your landing page, and even on your “Thank You” page following a form submission. In addition, you should add similar keywords to each ad group and also use those terms in your ad and on your landing page.

In this case, you might consider phrases like:

Wealth management planning
Financial investment advice
Financial risk management
Managing investment assets

Notice how each keyphrase is closely related to the primary (“Root”) keyword, “Financial Planning.” Adding these additional terms will help you cast a wider net while still remaining highly relevant to your target audiences.

Once those potential prospects type their search for “Financial Planning,” they’ll expect to see that and other related phrases in the ads that greet them at the top of the SERP. And the same goes for once they click through the ad to the landing page, which is where you can go a little further in depth to educate and inform your audience with enriching content.

Add Content to Enrich the Landing Page

Now that you’ve chosen your keywords and dedicated yourself to a consistent experience throughout each ad group’s digital advertising journey, it’s time to beef up the content of your landing page(s). Doing so will help you expand on what you’re promoting — creating a more thorough experience for the user, driving more pipeline via conversions, and significantly increasing your quality score (thus improving ad rank and decreasing ad spend).

Before you go writing the great American novel on your PPC landing page, take a step back. The goal isn’t to bloat your word count and stuff keywords; the goal is to enrich the content on the page to make it as relevant as possible for your potential customers.

That said, you should keep your most pertinent messaging above the fold, including:

Primary header, which should include your primary keyword
Subheader and/or brief intro. copy that includes either your primary or secondary keywords
A list of bullet points with copy relevant to your offering
A video or image of the asset, product, or service you’re promoting
A concise form with brief explanatory copy above the fields and a prominent CTA below them

Placing these elements above the fold is paramount because most users have short attention spans and are looking for only the most important content to encourage them to submit their contact info.

But to further improve the user experience and better promote your gated offer, you need to add additional content below the fold of your landing page. Using the primary and secondary key phrases in your respective add groups, write copy that details specific aspects of your gated offer. Not only does this improve your users’ understanding of what they’ll receive in exchange for their contact information, but it also gives you a golden opportunity to seamlessly place highly relevant keywords throughout your site, which will boost your quality score.

Another proven tactic is to add anchor links in your above-the-fold bullet points that move users down the page to the relevant content block when they click. This creates a super convenient and intuitive user experience that gets your potential leads exactly where they want to be without distraction or hassle. It also further cements the relationship between the keywords in your bullet points and the corresponding keywords in your below-the-fold content blocks.

https://act-on.com/learn/e-books-guides/building-better-landing-pages/

Eliminate Navigation and Simplify the Conversion Process

Surprisingly, there’s still some debate about whether or not you should include navigation elements in your PPC landing page, so let’s put that to rest. Other than highly specific, extremely rare circumstances, you should not include navigation elements on PPC landing pages.

The reasoning is pretty simple:

The goal of a PPC landing page is to generate a conversion
Adding navigation elements encourage visitors to move away from the page
Using paid advertising budget to drive clicks to your website (rather than conversions) is a colossal waste of money

Including a link to your homepage in your logo above the fold is fine to avoid making your visitors feel trapped on your landing page. But including traditional navigation elements will defeat the purpose of the page — and the entire campaign — which is to grow your marketing lists via form submissions.

Speaking of which, you’ll also want to keep your web forms brief and direct. Use as few form fields as necessary. In most cases, a first name and email address should be enough to get the ball rolling with your subsequent nurturing campaigns. If you are willing to trade volume for value, you can include additional fields to learn more about these contacts — such as phone number, industry, income, or whatever you deem most helpful or relevant.

One more note on form fields: The number of fields you use can be directly associated with the funnel stage you’re targeting. For example, for top of funnel leads, you should try to use fewer fields. With bottom of funnel leads, however, you can use additional fields to help qualify the leads and provide Sales with prospects who are primed to buy.

Create Better Landing Pages With Act-On

Now that we understand why landing pages are so important and how to optimize them for conversions and better quality scores, you need to decide which platform you want to use to bring these assets to life.

As an integral part of our best-in-class growth marketing automation platform, Act-On’s Landing Page Composer helps marketers of all skill sets and experience levels design, build, test, and launch engaging landing pages quickly and easily. Features include:

Dozens of stock templates
Simple HTML design options
Drag-and-drop content blocks
Branded asset storage for later use
Sticky navigation bars
Mobile optimization with responsive design

Use these landing pages to generate paid advertising conversions, promote your product, services, and content on your website, or even create customer surveys to get great feedback directly from the source. To learn more about the Act-On Landing Page Composer, please click here to schedule your free demo.

3 Tactics to Transform Your Financial Advisor Marketing Strategy

Act-On — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Traditionally, financial advisory marketing strategies were built around local reputations and word-of-mouth referrals, but a wave of new investors is bringing a new set of needs and behaviors to the table. Your financial advisor marketing strategy must address these new expectations.

As recent McKinley research describes, this audience is largely made up of women, young active traders, and affluent investors using a hybrid of traditional and self-directed accounts. Alongside the pandemic-triggered acceleration of digital banking adoption, their arrival means higher standards for personalization, bigger appetites for financial literacy content, and increased expectations for an omni-channel presence.

That’s a tall order, and it takes time to achieve financial services marketing maturity. But there are a few specific tactics that you can focus on right now to help you find, attract, and engage these new audiences.

1. Attract New Leads Across Multiple Channels

Meet your future clients where they are: online, researching investment options.

One study from Google found that 86% of potential investors spend more than an hour researching on the web, and over half of online investors don’t have a brand or institution in mind when they begin seeking out financial resources. This is the perfect moment to connect with new clients by sharing educational content, answering questions, and building up your reputation as a trusted expert.

Adopting a multi-channel approach to online marketing improves your odds of connecting with the right prospects. Use what you already know about your target audience to narrow down your efforts to the channels where they’re most likely to be spending time while conducting online research.

Organic Search (SEO)

Organic search and search engine optimization (SEO) is an important channel, but it takes time to build up your website’s authority and start to rank on Google and other search engines for the terms your clients are researching. Start by conducting keyword research in your SEO tool of choice and gathering input from your internal team to identify the questions new investors tend to ask during the early stages of their research. Create high-quality articles and posts that answer these questions, and over time, you should see organic traffic coming to your site and engaging with your content. In the meantime, you can use the assets you create to support your marketing efforts on other channels, as we’ll describe below.

Pro tip: Don’t be afraid to target long-tail keywords, which are more likely to attract the right potential clients and more likely to rank in search results.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

If you don’t want to wait for organic search traffic to grow, you can pay to see results faster. Creating search, display, and re-marketing pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns can put your website in front of potential customers at the precise moment they’re looking for financial advice.

Pro tip: Make the most of your ad dollars by pairing your PPC efforts with content. Send traffic to dedicated landing pages with adaptive forms that you can use to collect your prospects’ contact information in exchange for an in-depth guide or ebook.

Social Media Platforms

Let’s be honest: social media can be a time-suck for marketers. But since 72% of American adults use some form of social media every day, it’s a safe bet your audience is already spending time there. The key to being effective at social media marketing is zeroing in on the specific channels where your ideal prospects are spending time. Going after Millennial retail investors? Time to build out an Instagram strategy. Looking to connect with female Boomers? Facebook it is. Targeting high-earning hybrid investors? LinkedIn may be your best bet.

Once you have your target channels identified, focus on sharing relevant, helpful content that answers questions your prospects care about, and experiment to see which formats perform best (like videos, infographics, or links to long-form articles). You can always build community by sharing content created by your partners, or other industry leaders.

Pro tip: Build trust by getting real humans involved. Put advisors in front of the camera to share quick tips, publish posts that highlight your company values, showcase customer testimonials, and be patient. Social media is all about relationship-building over time.

Interactive Digital Events and Webinars

Online events and webinars are a proven channel for financial advisors and wealth managers to introduce their services to new prospects and re-engage with existing clients. Repurpose content from your blog or eBooks to build a presentation deck, promote the webinar across your social media and email channels, and consider partnering with a complementary firm or organization to expand your reach to a new audience.

Pro tip: Once the webinar or event is over, the real marketing magic begins. Plan to follow up with attendees and registrants through automated nurture campaigns with relevant content that keeps them engaged with your brand.

Event-Based Emails

Once you have your prospects’ contact info, keep a meaningful conversation going with event-based emails. These messages are automatically triggered whenever a known contact completes a significant action such as visiting a webpage, filling out a form, or purchasing a product or service. These automated communications allow you to immediately follow up with warm leads as you guide them through the customer journey.

Pro tip: Stay compliant with financial industry regulations by using an email service provider with a BCC archiving solution that easily stores emails as you send them.

The 4 Main Challenges Facing Financial Advisors

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2. Use Segmentation and Personalization to Nurture Your Prospects

Generating leads and collecting contact information is only the first step in customer acquisition. Next, you want to segment, personalize, and nurture your prospects to turn leads into clients.

Create Segments

Building advanced customer segments starts with collecting data. This includes both demographic data (like gender, location, or income) as well as behavioral data (like when a lead visits a landing page or clicks a link in an email). These data points will give you a sense of where your prospects are in their buyer’s journey, and what types of content or topics are grabbing your user’s attention.

Then, you can use this information to create segments within your marketing list.

Pro tip: Consider building out a lead scoring system, which automates the process of moving a prospect from the marketing and nurturing stage to being contacted by a sales team member or individual advisor.

Personalize Experiences

Personalizing the content you share with your audience is essential to converting leads to clients for your financial services business. As mentioned before, today’s consumers expect brands to deliver personalized experiences (in one survey of banking customers, only 8% said it wasn’t important at all).

Inserting a first name in an email simply doesn’t cut it any more. True personalization means sharing relevant content with the right prospect at the right time. This means adopting a customer journey-driven approach to your content and campaigns, and apply marketing automation to make it all work.

So instead of simply sending a generic newsletter to everyone on your list, you might send different variations of an email to different segments, each filled with information and articles that are tailored to that segment’s interests and needs. For example, a new subscriber who signed up after reading your article on “Investing 101” may be ready for more educational content, while a longtime lead who just attended an in-depth webinar, and may be ready to read your case studies, or schedule a discovery call.

Automate Nurture Campaigns

Of course, this kind of segmentation and personalization can’t happen at scale without some supporting technology. You’ll need to automate time-consuming manual tasks and processes to execute your financial advisor marketing strategy.

Financial services marketers use automation to streamline processes and improve customer experiences. You can build campaigns that nurture your prospects along different stages of their journey with specific support for your buyer personas. Then, your programs will automatically enroll the right contacts in the right campaigns at the right time.

As a bonus for financial advisory marketers, automating communications simplifies compliance efforts compared to wrangling one-off approvals for ad-hoc messages.

Case Study: Madrona Financial Services

When done right, this combination of segmentation, personalization, and automated nurturing drives meaningful outcomes. For example, full-service advisory firm Madrona Financial Services started using marketing automation to track website visitors, build out reporting, implement lead scoring, and send targeted email campaigns. They saw double-digit increases in email open and click through rates as a result, along with a 1,000% increase in sales over five years.

3. Apply Data to Improve Your Content Strategy

In addition to collecting and segmenting customer data to improve personalization, you can apply marketing data to build a more successful content strategy. By examining your analytics to learn what’s working in one area, you can see which assets have the potential to drive results on another channel. Here are a few specific ways to get started:

Analyze Organic Traffic Data to Find High Performers to Include in Nurture Campaigns

Look in your Google Analytics or other content analytics tools for web pages with high organic traffic metrics (pageviews and organic entrances) and low exit and bounce rates. These are pages that you already know attract and keep your audience’s attention. Make the most of these articles by promoting these high performers in your nurture campaigns for relevant audience segments. When targeted correctly, you should see strong open and click through rates for these assets.

Use Engagement Data to Inform Your Content Calendar

Similarly, you can analyze your email and social engagement data to determine what articles are most compelling with your existing audience based on open rates, clickthrough rates, likes, and shares. Once you’ve identified your high performers, you have several opportunities to expand, refresh, or repurpose this valuable content.

For example, look for opportunities to create new, deeper content on related topics, and update older articles with fresh insights, statistics, or examples. And always make sure these high-performing articles have plenty of internal links and clear CTAs to guide readers down the path to becoming clients.

You can also repurpose high-performing articles for different audiences or customer journey stages, such as taking a blog post written for beginners and expanding it into a more in-depth version for seasoned investors.

Finally, pay attention to which general types of content tend to see more engagement. If your audience typically loves checklists and ignores how-to guides, create more checklists and fewer how-to guides.

Power Your Financial Advisor Marketing Strategy With Automation

Adopting a multi-channel approach, personalizing customer experiences, and using data to refine your content will help you meet the higher expectations of new audiences and attract more clients to your financial advisor business. But you’ll need the right technology partner to help you automate and execute against this kind of sophisticated marketing strategy.
Act-On works with financial advisory firms to transform their financial advisor marketing and grow their assets under management through marketing automation. If you’d like to learn more, download our ebook about wealth management marketing challenges or schedule a demo with one of our automation experts.

The 4 Main Challenges Facing Financial Advisors

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Marketing Strategies to Help B2C Companies Attract New Customers

Act-On — Thu, 09 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When I first realized the importance of B2C content marketing, it changed everything I thought I knew about running a successful business.

I was working for an e-Commerce company that boasted over 600 items in our online store and more than 100 items for wholesale customers. I received a new lead, and when I visited his website I was floored. Where we offered 600 items, he barely had 20. But that wasn’t the most surprising thing.

What blew me away was the amount of content on his site.

We only wrote long descriptions for the top 10 products on our site; my new friend had grouped his items into product families. Then he had written thousands of words about the products in each group. How to use these products, their benefits, customer testimonials, how to spot copycat products… You name it; he had it.

He believed in these products so deeply that he had transformed his website into a library filled with recommendations and education.

That was his B2C lead generation strategy: Become the ultimate authority on these products by sharing everything you might ever want to know.

The results?

When I first spoke to him, he had 5 full-time employees and over $30K in revenue every month. That was almost 10 years ago. Since then, he has more than doubled his revenue with the same 5 employees.

This is the power of B2C content marketing. Done the right way, it can act as a lead magnet for years to come.

In this article, we’ll share the key benefits of B2C content marketing: what it is, why it matters, and how to design a strategy that works for you.

Why Is Great Content So Important for Your B2C Business?

Great B2C content marketing transforms your customers’ needs into wants. And it does it all within the framework of an exciting story in which your customer is the hero.

Sound like a tall order? It’s actually easier than you think. And it all starts to click when you understand one fundamental aspect of human psychology:

People make decisions with their emotions. They only justify those decisions with logic after the fact.

How should this affect your B2C content marketing strategy?

Simple.

Whenever you create new content, don’t just describe what something is. Talk about what it does. Remember my friend from the introduction? This is the approach he took, and that’s how he left his competition in the dust.

Let’s say you sell wellness products on your website. Whenever someone comes to your site, they’re probably asking themselves one or more of these questions:

What will this do for me?
How will this make me feel?
What do I get for the price?

And these all boil down to the biggest question of them all… What’s in it for me?

If you want to answer this question for your potential customers, you have to understand the goals, needs, and desires of everyone in your community.

How to Find Your B2C Leads’ Burning Questions

If you want to attract new B2C leads, you need to anticipate their questions and answer them point by point. For every new question someone has about your products or services, you can answer their query with a new piece of content on your site.

How to Anticipate Questions From Potential B2C Leads

Research the influencers who are already talking about the types of products and services you offer. Find them in Facebook groups, by reviewing similar products on YouTube, and by searching hashtags on Twitter and Instagram.
Someone replying to an email or completing a handraiser form is a goldmine. Take this opportunity to engage them in a conversation — this could be your next blog or podcast episode.
If you have live chat, even better! If they’re looking for one of your products, tell them how to find it, but also ask them why they’re interested. This is your chance to clear up any possible misconceptions they might have and build more trust.
Who are your competitors? Read customer reviews on their site, Amazon, and anywhere else they sell their products. These reviews can be a rich source of material that you can adopt for your own site.
If you have a retail presence, leverage reviews from Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and similar sites.
Quora and Reddit are great ways to learn what people are talking about. Search these sites for keywords that you find through…
Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends. Use these tools to take the pulse of the internet. Whatever you find here can help you verify or disprove any assumptions you might have about what you think people are searching for.

Once you start looking for questions to repurpose into new content, you’ll start getting ideas everywhere.

What Does Great B2C Content Look Like?

Email Nurture Campaigns Any emails you send to customers or potential leads should read like they’re coming from a trusted friend. People don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy — and they’d much rather buy from people they know, like, and trust.

How to Attract More Prospects

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What kinds of emails are appropriate for your customers and leads?

Newsletters are a great way to educate your community and remind them of your value. Remember, your goal is to educate your community and give them an easy way to find you when they’re ready to make their first purchase (or their tenth).

Automated programs are triggered when a site visitor requests more information through a form. Once they complete the form and you have their email address, you can use a marketing automation platform like Act-On to send them nurture emails. These emails should complement what they received from completing the form on your site. Anytime someone signs up for your newsletter or completes one of your forms, immediately send them a confirmation email. These emails have a ridiculously high open rate because this is one of the few times people expect you to email them. Include a link to the ebook (if that’s what you promised), a related blog, or a video (more on this below). This is some of the most valuable real estate you own. Don’t waste it.

Abandoned cart emails are usually thought of as a way to recover lost revenue, but if you stop there, you’re missing a golden opportunity to build trust. If a potential customer abandoned their cart with product XYZ, you should send them a link to recover their cart. But you should also include a link to a blog about how to prepare XYZ, or surprising benefits of XYZ, etc. The whole point is to go beyond the transaction to build an authentic connection with your community through valuable content.

One final note about incorporating emails into your B2C content marketing strategy: If you really want to wow your leads and customers, reply personally every time someone responds to one of your emails. This is one of the best ways to engage with your audience and keep your brand top of mind.

B2C Remarketing This is a great way to transform site visitors into members of your growing community. Remarketing ads on Google, Bing, LinkedIn, and other search engines and social platforms are only shown to people who have already visited specific pages on your site. For example, if they visited one of your product pages, you can show them an ad that offers a promotional code and points them to a blog about that product. Writing a good B2C remarketing ad is similar to writing a good email: be concise, be direct, and answer the question, “What’s in it for me?”

YouTube Videos Can you create an animated video showing how your products are made? What about a how-to video? You can even record video interviews with influencers who use your products. The possibilities are endless, and you can always use a tool like vidIQ to find out who’s watching what. Tools like this can help you get more subscribers, which is another great B2C lead generation channel.

Social Posts Any of these sections could be an entire article in its own right. But social media is changing so rapidly, it’s worth considering some of the fundamental guidelines that transcend any platform:

Let your personality shine through. Your brand has a unique voice. Own it.
Start a conversation. Social media is one of the best places to connect with your community. Run a contest, create a poll, share a recipe, or reprint a customer testimonial. The possibilities are endless. And whatever you publish on social media should make your readers’ lives better — whether it’s a quick laugh or a lifestyle tip.
Share your story and be yourself. The only way that anyone in your community will become a customer is if they know, like, and trust you. Not just your business, but you personally. Show them who you are. People want to support individuals who are just like them. If you can make an authentic connection based on shared values, you’re off to a great start.

Podcasts People like to consume content in different ways, and podcasts are rapidly growing in popularity. Podcasts aren’t right for every type of business, but they can do wonders for B2C lead nurturing in certain niches.

Blogs The grandaddy of all forms of B2C content marketing. Blogs are easy to create, easy to publish, and, if you do it right, they can be one of your best sources of B2C lead generation. Adding new content to your site on a regular basis shows Google that your site is still relevant. And one of the easiest ways to do that is with a blog.

Here are some tips to make your blog stand out:

Be Consistent. Pick a specific day or days of the week and stick to that schedule.
Explore Related Keywords. Find new keywords with tools like Act-On’s SEO Audit Tool to complement Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends.
Cross-Promote Your Other Channels. Promote new blog articles on your social media pages. If you publish a new video, create a blog from the video transcript, embed the video in the blog, and link back to the video on YouTube. And when you email leads and customers, point them back to your blog as a way to learn more.
Write Like You Talk. When you email leads and customers, it’s best to keep your copy simple, direct, and conversational. These same rules apply when you write a blog, though you have much more flexibility here. In a blog, you can include a video or an animated GIF to prove your point. Your readers will also be much more willing to read long lists in one of your blogs vs in an email. And remember, if you’re going to talk about one of your products, focus on what it does instead of what it is.

How To Succeed With B2C Content Marketing

How do you write content that will always be relevant? Consider this quote from the owner of another ecommerce site:

“I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two – because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time… When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”

You may not have heard this quote before, but you know the author. It’s Jeff Bezos talking about Amazon.

Keep this in mind as you build your B2C content marketing strategy. Focus on evergreen content that will be relevant forever. For example, if you’re running a promotion for the 4th of July, that’s a great subject for an email, but it’s terrible for a blog.

Why?

Because no one will search for that content after the promotion is over. If you want to offer a promotional code in an email, that’s fine, but be sure to link back to some evergreen content:

“How To Use XYZ For ABC”
“Top 5 Reasons XYZ Is The Best Way To ____”
“Quick and Easy Summer Recipes For XYZ”

Remember the golden rules of B2C Lead Generation:

People visit your site because you have something they want.
If you can’t answer their questions, they’ll bounce and go to your competitors instead.
If you can exceed their expectations, they’ll be more likely to purchase, come back to your site the next time they have a question, and tell their friends.

Execute Brilliant B2C Marketing Campaigns With Act-On

As you plan your B2C content marketing strategy, look for a consumer marketing platform that can help you multitask and perform well under pressure. Act-On gives you all the tools you need to create forms, build landing pages, construct email nurture campaigns, and publish posts on social media. You can also use Act-On to manage digital assets like eBooks.

With one do-it-all platform, it’s easy to measure the impact of your content. Because when you’re exploring marketing strategies to attract new customers, that’s the only thing that matters.

How to Attract More Prospects

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Tips for Creating a Landing Page That Generates Conversions

Act-On — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

If demand and lead generation is a top priority for your organization, you know that capturing critical contact information is key to making sure your leads don’t slip away. Knowing who your contacts are, what industry they work in, and what is driving them to explore your solution empowers you to continue to engage with them through personalized marketing efforts. After all, the point of having a robust demand generation program is to attract leads that you can nurture and convert into customers down the road.

Making sure that your messaging and content are right on target will help you build credibility with these leads, keep them moving through the sales funnel, and convince them to choose you over your competitors.

But you’re probably wondering how to go about collecting key information, especially when it’s challenging enough to even get people on your website.

In some cases, landing pages allow you to kill two birds with one stone. The right landing page will help drive people to your site by offering original content and information and offer these individuals valuable content gated behind forms to entice them to hand over their information. However, if your goal is to generate conversions, you can use dedicated landing pages without any extra navigation to focus on the goal at hand.

The information you collect using landing pages allows you to build a thorough customer profile to help you determine the best marketing strategy to keep each customer interested. As you uncover more information about who your customers are, you can segment them into the appropriate campaigns and send them the right content and information to help them inch closer toward making a decision.

It’s important to keep in mind, however, that not all landing pages are created equal. Having a well-designed landing page can help you stand out from the competition and generate conversions. Today, we’re outlining a few best practices to help you make sure you’re creating landing pages that are visually appealing, easy to read, and motivate your customers to complete your call to action.

1. Make Sure Your Headline Is Clear and Catchy

Your headline is the first thing that people see when visiting your landing page. Many times, that’s all they need to decide if they want to continue to engage. It can also be extremely disappointing for visitors to visit a webpage that doesn’t offer what it said it would. So, it’s extremely important for your headlines to not only be catchy, but also clearly state what you have to offer.

If the headline is the title of a content asset (such as an eBook), you should use titles that directly address the kind of information your visitors can expect to find. If you need a little more room to make your offer easy to understand, you can always use a subheadline to further explain the purpose of your landing page. In addition to providing your visitors a clear idea of the offer they can expect from your landing page, your headline also provides a great opportunity to use popular keywords that resonate with your audience and will drive more traffic to your landing pages.

2. Keep Your Copy Brief and to the Point

A landing page should serve as an introduction of what’s in store for your visitors if they decide to exchange their information. Having too much copy on a page can overwhelm the user and make them bounce from your landing page before filling out a form.

To avoid this scenario, keep your copy brief and to the point. A short paragraph and a few bullet points is all you need to provide your audience with a sneak peek of what they’ll get when they fill out a form and download your asset or sign up for an event.

Because you’re keeping your copy short, you need to ensure that your message is clear and resonates with the pain points and interests of your consumers. Using high-ranking keywords and language that pertains to your visitors industry, preferences, and stage in the sales funnel can help ensure that your prospects remain interested in what you have to say.

3. Always Include Important Information

If you’re using your landing page to promote a piece of content such as an eBook or video, you can get away with including a few bullet points describing what your visitors can expect. If you’re hosting an event or webinar, however, you should also include a date, time, location, and presenter information.

Doing this will help your leads remember to clear time on their schedule to attend, helping you reap the rewards of interacting with in real time.

4. Use Design Best Practices to Make Your Landing Page Visually Appealing

A landing page that is too busy and hard to read will hurt your conversion rate. If you want to prevent your audience from bouncing before converting, you need good and simple design as a foundation.

Keeping things simple doesn’t mean that your landing page should be plain. Using eye catching graphics and images that complement the purpose of the landing page and give more context to your copy are a great way to capture your audience’s attention.

Another good rule of thumb is to keep key information above the fold. While you can include information on your landing page that allows your visitors to learn more about your brand and what you have to offer, you don’t want to distract them from your call to action. Keeping elements such as summaries and CTA buttons at the top of the page will help your visitors know what to do to receive their offer and make it easy for them to do so.

You don’t have to be a graphic designer or know HTML to design a visually appealing landing page. A marketing automation platform with easy-to-use templates will have a variety of features to help you get started.

5. Make It Easy for Individuals to Sign Up

A form with too many fields will scare away potential leads. Using an adaptive form with minimal fields allows you to ask customers for only the information you need to continue to build their profile. So, for example, if you already have their email and name, you can ask them to indicate their industry and topic of interest. This helps you collect the information you need and eliminates your lead’s frustration of having to fill out the same information each and every time.

6. Include a Clear CTA That Is Easy to Find

For your landing page to generate conversions, you have to make sure that you have a clear call to action. Whether it’s downloading an eBook, registering for an event, or signing up to receive more information, your customers have to know what to do and how to do it. Placing a prominent button at the end of your form will indicate that you want your visitors to fill out a form — and what they’ll get if they do it.

7. Feature Key Customer Logos and Reviews

Many times, a prospective customer’s first impression of your brand is your landing page. So, you want to show your audience who you are (beyond an eBook or a webinar). An easy way to do that is by showcasing a few top customer reviews and notable logos at the bottom of your page. This will allow your prospects to gain a sense of the type of customers you serve and learn why they choose you over your competitors, while also helping you establish credibility and trust in what you do.

8. A/B Test Elements to Optimize Your Efforts

Even the best landing pages can use a refresh every now and then. That is why you should make A/B testing different elements of your page a priority. A good place to start is by testing different versions of your headline to see if it’s helping drive traffic to your page. Once that is optimized, you can venture on to test other elements — such as design, CTA placement, and so on.

Act-On Can Help You Build Engaging Landing Pages That Spark the Customer Journey

Landing pages are one of the most powerful tools at your disposal because they allow you to collect that information you need to deliver personalized marketing efforts. But creating compelling and effective landing pages shouldn’t require you to invest more time and resources. Act-On makes it easy to build engaging landing pages and adaptive forms that appeal to your audience and generate conversions.

Additionally, our platform can empower you to do so much more than build great landing pages. We give you the tools to launch innovative and personalized multi-channel campaigns that help you attract leads, convert customers, and improve retention. It’s your true one-stop shop for lifecycle marketing!

To learn how Act-On can help you transform your digital marketing strategy, please schedule a demo with one of our marketing automation experts. They’ll be thrilled to show you the many ways Act-On makes it easy to innovate your marketing strategy at scale.

Using Progressive Profiling for a Frictionless Customer Experience

Act-On — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

How do you convert qualified leads on your website?

The whole process used to be relatively straightforward:

Create a landing page with a compelling offer and a form
Ask site visitors to complete the form to receive the offer
Follow-up with them immediately

So what changed?

Everything.

For starters, the sheer number of choices has exploded. If you were evaluating MarTech companies in 2015, you would have had to sift through about 2000 different solutions. Five years later, there are more than 7000 options — and the list keeps growing.

In addition, it’s easier than ever to find answers without speaking with a sales rep. Research by Gartner has shown that B2B buyers only spend 17% of their time meeting with potential vendors.

And finally, the rise of the subscription economy has shifted the balance of power from companies to prospects and customers.

What does this mean for your lead gen strategy? You can’t add any forms to your site with a “set-it-and-forget-it” attitude. Your visitors are looking for a highly-personalized, low-friction experience. And if they can’t find it on your site, they’ll bounce and look somewhere else.

So, how do you give them what they want?

Progressive profiling with the use of adaptive forms.

What Is Progressive Profiling?

Simply put, progressive profiling is the practice of asking your site visitors for a little bit more information every time they complete one of your dynamic forms.

The whole point is to meet prospects where they are in their journey. In a world of thousands of alternatives, you need to make it as easy as possible for prospects to find the information they’re looking for. This is where the drawbacks of long forms can outweigh any potential benefits.

Pretend you just heard about a company. It’s going to be a while before you’re ready to speak with a sales rep. You’re visiting their site for the first time and looking for something to download so you can do some research on your own.

Which form would you rather complete during your first visit?

These two examples illustrate the genius of progressive profiling. The first time someone comes to your site, you might only ask them for their email. But every time they return to your site and complete a new form, you can ask them for more information about themselves and their business. You don’t have to sacrifice landing page conversion rates to gain valuable information. With each new form your visitors complete, you can be more confident that they value your content. And every time they come back, you can learn more about them.

Adaptive (Dynamic) Forms: How to Make Progressive Profiling Work for You

Progressive profiling and dynamic forms go hand in hand. Marketing automation platforms like Act-On allow you to create a single adaptive form that displays different fields depending on how many times someone has come to your site and which pages they’ve visited.

Which form fields should you ask visitors to complete on their first visit? On their second and third visits? Here are some examples:

Form 1, Version 1:

… that’s it! There are plenty of marketing tools out there that can spit out first name and last name if you know someone’s email, especially their work email. But if you don’t have one of those tools, then you can probably guess what comes next:

Form 1, Version 2:

First Name
Last Name
Email

What happens the second time this person visits your site? Because you cookied their previous session, this time you can ask them a bit more:

Form 2, Version 1:

Company
Job Title
Industry (Drop-Down Menu)

On their second visit, potential prospects only need to complete these new fields. Their previous information is already stored in the marketing automation platform (and potentially already passed to your sales team’s customer relationship management (CRM) tool).

When someone completes a form during their third visit, you can be pretty sure they’re interested in your solution:

Form 3, Version 1

Which use case are you most interested in? (Multi-picklist)
When are you looking to make a purchase? (Drop-Down Menu)

Or…

Form 3, Version 2

1. First Name
2. Last Name
3. Email

What is your role at your company (Drop-Down; I oversee projects, I manage the team, I lead strategy, etc)
Which of our partner solutions interests you the most? (Optional, Free text field)

There you have it! With adaptive forms, there’s no need to keep asking for the same information! Instead, you can deliver more value with each form submission while reducing friction and frustration.

How to Adapt Progressive Profiling to Your Buyer’s Journey

Let’s say your company provides video conferencing solutions for technology companies with at least 200 employees. Someone visits your site for the first time and submits a form embedded in one of your landing pages.

You might send them nurture emails with subject lines like:

“Why Video Conferencing Matters”
“How to improve productivity with real-time collaboration.”
“Easy ways to lead better sales discovery calls.”

Each of these emails is designed to educate your potential prospects and invite them back to your site where they can learn more. At this point, you only know their First Name, Last Name, Email, and maybe their company name if you have the right software in your tech stack. You know they’re interested, but you don’t know why they’re interested.

But everything changes once they return to your site and complete the second version of one of your adaptive forms. Now you can unenroll them from the first set of emails and add them to a campaign with more targeted content. This new series of emails can reference the information they shared in the second dynamic form as well as the pages they visited on their return visit:

Why {{ Industry }} leaders trust video conferencing solutions
5 reasons companies like {{ Company Name }} prefer real-time collaboration
Tips for deploying video conferencing solutions in large teams

These new emails would draw on information from their second form submission: Industry, Company Name, and the size of their team. This is the real power of progressive profiling. As you get more and more information from potential prospects, you can tailor your messaging based on details they’ve already shared with you.

And every time they submit a new form, you’ll be able to recommend even more valuable content based on where they are in the buyer’s journey. By the time they complete the third version of one of your dynamic forms, you’ll have a much better understanding of their willingness to purchase.

So, how does this strategy result in more qualified leads?

Let’s say you opt for a long, complex form instead of an adaptive form with progressive profiling. With a longer form, your conversion rate will be lower due to greater friction. But that’s okay because you have way more information, right?

So you send them emails like the ones above that reference Industry, Company Name, and Team Size… and nothing happens. Your click-through and open rates remain stagnant because most of the people who have completed these long forms are not ready for this kind of targeted content.

All they wanted was education. Treating everyone who completes one of these forms like they’re at the same stage of the buyer’s journey is misguided. If you ignore progressive profiling, you risk derailing the conversation before it even begins.

By aligning your messaging with each person’s stage on the buyer’s journey, you can show potential leads you’re willing to meet them on their terms.

But this leads to an even bigger question. Let’s say you build out your content plan to address every stage of the buyer’s journey. Then you build landing pages with dynamic forms using a platform like Act-On. Finally, you design Google and LinkedIn Retargeting ads to re-engage people who have already visited your site.

What if they still don’t engage?

Then they’re not ready!

Many companies interpret a form submission as an indication of intention, or even attraction. But when someone completes one of your forms for the first time, all you’ve gained is their attention. That’s it.

Don’t treat everyone at the top of the funnel like they’re ready to buy. For every person who completes one of your dynamic forms but never engages with any of your content again, that’s one less poorly-qualified lead you don’t need to send to your sales team. That’s a win-win for everyone.

Use Progressive Profiling for Your Ideal Customer Profile

Progressive profiling can help you provide the right content to the right people at the right time. Anytime someone returns to your site and completes a new variation of a dynamic form, they’re moving from attention to intention.

But what happens when someone visits your site from one of your target accounts? What about someone who works for one of your existing customers?

This is where progressive profiling can give you a big advantage:

An individual from one of your target accounts visits your site for the first time. Once they complete a form on one of your pages, this can trigger a notification in your CRM for their account manager to engage with them on social media.
Now, let’s say they return to your site and complete a new version of one of your adaptive forms. This can automatically trigger a live chat session with their account manager, who can learn more about their business and schedule a demo on the spot.

Remember, the whole point of progressive profiling is to meet potential leads on their terms. No one likes to be called 2 minutes after downloading a whitepaper. Give individuals everything they need to research your solution, including time. This way, when you invite them to a chat or call them the next time they download one of your forms, they’ll be more ready to talk to you.

How Do I Add Progresive Profiling to the Forms on My Site?

You have a great story to share with everyone who comes to your site. So the last thing you want is to create obstacles for them.

With an automated marketing solution like Act-On, you can design everything from adaptive forms to landing pages and nurture emails in one central location. This all-in-one approach means syncing your data is easy and straightforward. And that makes it simple to launch your progressive profiling strategy across your entire site.

The right marketing tools will definitely make your job easier, but that’s just the beginning. When you implement progresive profiling within a comprehensive marketing automation platform like Act-On, you’ll create a better experience for everyone who visits your site.

Interested in learning more? We’d love the chance to discuss your strategy and how Act-On can help you take your marketing to the next level! Just click here to speak with one of our marketing automation experts.

How to Generate Demand and Win More Deals

Act-On — Thu, 05 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The ultimate goal for any business is to be profitable, and, as most of us know, the path to doing that is to generate demand and win more deals. Attracting, nurturing, and converting new customers, however, is not an easy thing to do — even for the most profitable and notable brands.

For some companies, the greatest challenge is getting in front of their target audience, so demand generation is the first obstacle they’ll want to tackle. Meanwhile, other companies might have a well-oiled demand generation machine and still struggle to seal the deal when the time comes to talk business. For these organizations, lead nurturing and sales enablement are probably the areas they want to focus on enhancing and refining.

Regardless of your challenge, optimizing your sales funnel is a crucial step toward streamlining the customer journey and getting more customers across the finish line. After all, you can’t win more deals if you have hiccups along the customer journey that prevent your target audience from learning more about your brand and why your solution stands out above the rest.

Today, we’ll walk you through how to empower your marketing and sales teams with the right tactics and tools to help them attract, engage, and convert more new customers. The following tips will help you ensure your customers have the resources they need to keep moving through the sales funnel with confidence to make informed buying decisions.

Sound good? Let’s get started!

The process of prepping your customers to convert begins far before they ever schedule a time to talk with one of your salespeople. When it comes to winning more deals, one of the most common challenges for new and well-established companies is simply attracting their target audience and generating pipeline.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

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Getting your prospects to notice you and hand over their information can be difficult, but if you have the right essentials in place, things become that much easier. Implementing and refining the following strategies can help you attract and capture more prospects that you can then nurture into customers:

Optimize Your Website for SEO

You can’t capture leads if your audience can’t find you in the first place. Ensuring that your website is packed with the right keywords, free of HTTP error codes, and structured in a way that is easy-to-follow can get you in the good graces of Google and help you appear high in the search rankings. This tactic increases your chance of getting your name and website in front of your audience without having to spend a fortune on paid ads.

Having solid personas and performing keyword research is the first step toward developing a website that resonates with your audience and is optimized for SEO. If you want even greater peace of mind, a tool such as Act-On’s SEO Checker can help ensure your pages are optimized with the right keywords and free of errors before you hit publish.

Gate Content Behind Landing Pages and Forms

Generating pipeline requires you to capture important contact information so you can continue to engage your target audience long after they leave your site. But there are very few customers that willingly hand over their information without some sort of incentive.

Gating valuable content that covers relevant topics (such as eBooks, webinars, and eCourses) behind adaptive forms on landing pages is a great way to encourage customers to submit their name, email, and other useful information. Landing pages are effective because they direct your contact to the exact information they’re looking for while minimizing distractions that might prevent them from taking your desired action.

You can count on a large portion of your audience to be active on social media, making it one of the best places to grab their attention. A social media tool such as Act-On’s Advanced Social Media Module can help you use this medium to its full potential by allowing you to schedule posts in advance, monitor mentions and promptly respond when needed, and even create advocacy boards to motivate your staff to spread the word about who you are and what you do.

These demand generation strategies will not only help you attract new leads but also give you a chance to make a great first impression. Starting the customer journey off on the right foot sets a good foundation for you to build a relationship with your target audience and keep them moving through the sales funnel.

Nurture, Engage, and Delight Your Customers Through Personalized Messaging and Content Recommendations

Most sales leaders would like to get a hold of new contacts as soon as they enter the pipeline, but that tactic seldom leads to more closed deals. Today’s consumers like to take their time doing their research and evaluating their options before making a final purchasing decision, and they also expect organizations to deliver the information and resources they need to get them there.

This consumer expectation requires modern marketers to move beyond batch-and-blast email to develop and deliver more targeted campaigns that speak to their consumers’ specific pain points, interests, and stages in the sales cycle. The best way to deliver the right message at the right time is to adopt the following strategies:

Segment Your Audience

If you take a close look at your contact lists, you’ll find that your leads all have different interests, pain points, work in different industries, and are probably at different stages of the sales cycle. Grouping your contacts into segments that reflect those commonalities can help you deliver more targeted and effective communication that will inspire them to engage.

Nurture Leads Through Automated Campaigns

Regardless of how long the sales cycle is, you have to stay on your leads’ radar if you want to remain an option when they’re ready to make a purchase. Automated nurturing campaigns allow you to continue to build a relationship with your prospects while directing them to valuable content and information.

If you’re used to using a basic email service provider (ESP), launching multiple campaigns might seem like a huge undertaking. A marketing automation platform, however, can eliminate most of the manual labor traditionally involved by allowing you to automate many of these processes. All you have to do is develop a campaign, choose a target segment, and your contacts will automatically get entered as they meet the specified criteria.

Deliver Personalized Content Recommendations

Content is the best way to provide your leads the information they need to learn more about your product and how you can solve their pain points. Your team should develop a variety of web pages, videos, eBooks, infographics, and other informative content pieces that your target audience can refer to as they progress through the buyer journey.

How you deliver this information depends on your target customer’s preferences and engagement history, so keep that in mind when developing your distribution strategy. A tool such as Act-On’s Website Prospector allows you to gain a sense of how specific customers interact with your website so you can identify trends in what they’re searching for and distribute your content accordingly.

Although many marketers are already familiar with the strategies listed above, the challenge in implementing them usually exists in the execution. Many of the tasks involved in delivering a personalized experience require a great amount of time and resources, especially for organizations using an ESP. Marketing automation platforms allow marketers to automate many of the processes mentioned above so they can focus their time and attention toward creating more creative and effective campaigns.

Leverage Account-Based Marketing to Target Better and Larger Opportunities

One of the main reasons that businesses (especially larger organizations) take such a long time to make final purchasing decisions is that there are usually numerous stakeholders involved in evaluating multiple options. This means sellers should engage, nurture, and guide several personas through the sales funnel. This can be quite an undertaking, but practicing account-based marketing can lessen the load and improve their ability to win the hearts of everybody involved.

Account-based marketing allows salespeople to deliver personalized messages and marketing to key accounts based on the collective needs and pain points of all stakeholders involved in the buying process. Because this approach improves marketers’ ability to get a “big picture” view of how their efforts are performing with an organization as a whole, they can easily tailor and adapt their strategy for maximum impact.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

In addition to opening the door to better marketing, account-based marketing can also help organizations:

Determine When an Organization Is Ready to Buy

It’s common for different stakeholders at an organization to be at different stages of the sales cycle. When combined with tactics like account-scoring, account-based marketing allows you to see when all key decision-makers are getting close to reaching the finish line so your sales team can reach out at the most appropriate time.

Nurture Detractors

Account-based marketing allows you to easily identify champions at an organization as well as contacts who will probably need more nurturing before they make their decision. This information allows you to continue to nurture contacts who are fans while giving those who are on the fence a little more marketing love.

Collect Valuable Insights for Sales

Marketing is not the only team that will have to engage with multiple stakeholders. Consolidating behavior and engagement insights in one place will empower your salespeople to understand who they’re talking to and come prepared to address the interests and questions of the entire buying team.

Although account-based marketing usually involves many moving pieces, implementing this strategy can be both simple and sustainable with the proper tools. A marketing automation platform like Act-On can equip you with the resources you need to develop and implement your strategy, consolidate insights, and measure your impact.

Implement Tactics That Bridge the Gap Between Marketing and Sales

A marketing and sales strategy designed to help your organization win more deals will only work if you are successful at targeting the right customers and guiding them through a seamless customer journey. For that to happen, however, you have to promote marketing and sales alignment to ensure that your strategy empowers everybody on your team to put their best foot forward.

Although promoting alignment between Marketing and Sales is a struggle for many organizations, it’s not impossible. Take the following steps to ensure both teams are working perfectly in sync.

Collaborate With Sales to Identify Their Ideal Lead

All the tactics mentioned above are only worthwhile if you’re attracting leads that are worth the time and effort of your sales team. Working with Sales to identify their ideal customer before launching your marketing efforts can help you embark on the path to success from the get-go.

Develop a Reliable Process for Transferring Leads

Letting your leads sit around for way too long opens the door for your competitors to step in and steal them away. That is why developing a reliable process for transferring and assigning qualified leads to Sales is crucial to keeping the momentum going. A marketing automation platform that integrates with your CRM of choice can enable you to set up alerts so that your salespeople are immediately notified when it’s time to make a move.

Provide Sales the Visibility They Need to Close a Deal

Every good salesperson knows that they can’t rely on the same talking points with every lead that comes their way. To make a convincing case, they have to be prepared to clearly address their lead’s pain points and interests. To do this, however, they must have knowledge about a lead’s previous engagement history, and it’s Marketing’s job to provide them with this crucial information.

Another benefit of choosing a marketing automation platform that integrates with your CRM is that it empowers your marketing team to easily transfer key lead information to members of your sales team. Sales can then leverage these insights to have more targeted conversations with leads, increasing their chance of success.

Leverage Marketing Automation to Make Managing the Customer Journey a Breeze

Attracting new leads that result in an increase in revenue requires your team to develop an enjoyable customer journey from the moment opportunities come in through the door to the point they’re ready to talk to Sales.

A demand generation solution such as Act-On can help you execute all the strategies listed above while enabling you to bridge the gap between Marketing and Sales. Our platform gives Marketing everything they need to attract and effectively and efficiently nurture customers throughout the sales funnel while providing Sales the visibility and insights they need to focus on better opportunities and win more deals.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

Prevent Bots, SPAM, and Data Garbage in Your Digital Marketing Forms

Act-On — Fri, 11 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As a modern digital marketer, you can relate. You set up an awesome campaign with solid assets and capture points that are compelling and relevant to your target audience. You then check to see how many leads you have captured, and surprise! The number is much larger than you expected, so you’re super excited. But when you click on the submit report, you see a ton of wonky submissions like “bob@mickeymouse.com” or “公司@12345.com.”

Unfortunately, you’re not alone. This is an extremely common occurrence in the digital marketing landscape.

How to Eliminate Bot and SPAM Submissions on Your Digital Marketing Forms

According to Distil Network’s 2019 Bad Bot Report, bots accounted for nearly 40% of all internet traffic in 2018. Now, not all bots are “bad.” Some are scrapers or crawlers for search engines or to find your best flight deals. There is, however, a percentage that act as “counter sellers.” These usually come in the form of submits on digital marketing forms that have comment sections, in which the bot will advertise some product or service.

Garbage data providers are another type of poor form submitter. Most of us don’t want to provide our primary contact information. And since most of us have been hounded and abused by aggressive SDR call campaigns at some point in our careers, that’s totally fair. That said, these “bob.smith@gmail.com” submitters actually do want the content or information you’ve gated behind a form, but how can you convince them to provide legitimate contact information or limit their ability to submit bad data?

Let’s walk through a few tips and tricks to cut down on these bot, SPAM, and garbage data form submissions.

Use a CAPTCHA

If you’ve had to interpret distorted letters, numbers, or sounds when submitting a form, you’ve come across a CAPTCHA. Deploying these on your forms is a fast and simple way to cut down on bot submits immediately. You can implement this protective step for free, as this service is provided by reCAPTCHA.

Use Double Opt-In Confirmation

As a good way to build a strong, accurate, and useful email list, you’ll want to use a double opt-in process for confirming form submissions. When someone enters an email address into your form, send them an automated trigger email with a confirmation link. The user will need to open the email and then click on the email to verify that their email is authentic. Bots are extremely unlikely to be able to complete this step, and any submissions that don’t complete the double opt-in should be scrubbed from your list to ensure good email deliverability.

Add a Test Question to Your Form

Many form-builders include several customizable options, including adding HTML that you can copy and paste on your webpage to ask an additional question on your form. You’ll want to frame a simple question that any adult human will be able to answer correctly, but that will be difficult for bots.

If the input is not the word in white, the program form will recognize that it’s a bot and prevent the submission. And remember to ask a very simple question to avoid frustrating your potential customers.

Create A Bot Honey-Pot

In terms of form submission, a honey pot consists of adding an additional field that only a bot will see and complete. It’s basically a behind-the-scenes trap that protects your forms without any additional steps for human users. You can implement this by adding HTML and styling it using CSS. Some sophisticated bots can now read CSS and Javascript, but this is still an effective method and worth considering if you’ve got some basic programming skills.

You get the idea, right? Just make sure that whatever field you’ve included as a honey pot is not visible to your actual users. If your data includes information gathered from a hidden field, you can immediately recognize that submission as a bot.

Use Email Validation to Eliminate Garbage Data Submissions

One of the new type attribute values in HTML5 is email. Using this new field (instead of the regular text field) can’t prevent a user from using a fake email address, but it does prevent typos or spaces, which helps ensure accurate submissions. Regardless of what the user submits, it will at least look like an email address.

Some browsers only look for the @, while other browsers look for the @ and at least one letter and a dot. As of now, this is not supported by Internet Explorer 9.0 (and previous versions) or the Android browser. So, in order to have valid email validation for these browsers, you must create a workaround.

Email Validation Using Pattern Matching

Another way to weed out some of the non-valid submissions is pattern matching. For example, if your company sells to other companies (B2B), you would recognize free email providers like Gmail and Yahoo as poor captures since most companies use company-based addresses. You can use pattern matching to prevent the submission of these email domains. All you need to do is use javascript to search for the patterns you would like to exclude. Determined garbage data submitters can circumnavigate some of these, but pattern matching should drastically reduce bad data in your form reports.

Act-On’s Built-In Form Validation Can Help Prevent Fake or Inauthentic Form Submissions

I hope you found this blog helpful in explaining a few tips and tricks you and your marketing team can deploy to prevent bad data submissions. Unfortunately, bots, spammers, and garbage data submitters aren’t going away, but hopefully, some of the tactics outlined above can help clean up your email marketing contacts.

Additionally, Act-On’s Adaptive Forms have built-in validation tools that you might find helpful. If you’d like to learn more, please schedule a demo today!

What Is the Google Search Console?

Act-On — Thu, 19 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

While many of us wish we could have a direct line to Google to learn how to make our website better and identify any issues, that’s not really an option. The next best thing, however, is the Google Search Console. This free web tool allows you to check the status of your website in Google, analyze data to help optimize your search performance (visibility of a website), and fix any problem areas.

Whether you’re a marketer or your organization’s webmaster, you’re probably heavily invested in your website’s performance. After all, it is one of the most important tools your company has at its disposal to help attract and nurture prospects and customers alike.

When you’re website is performing at it’s best, it helps you rank high in Google search — which allows new leads to find you easily, empowers you to nurture them through the customer journey, and helps you gain valuable insights to close the deal. But for your website to do all this, it’s essential that you continuously optimize it and fix any issues preventing you from achieving the results you want.

Google Search Console offers you reports and data about technical aspects of your site, messages from Google, and graphs to track your site’s performance in search. These insights and reports are extremely useful when you know what to do with them. But we completely understand that, despite the wealth of information and resources available within this tool, navigating Search Console can be pretty intimidating if you’re new to the world of website optimization.

That’s why we’re on a mission today to help you demystify this tool so you can better understand and leverage it. Keep reading to learn more.

Before You Start, Make Sure to Validate Ownership of Your Site

If you’re new to Google Search Console, you’ll need to validate the ownership of your site before you start using it. After logging in with a Google account to Google Search Console, you’ll see a button that says “Add Property.” Click the button to start your authorization process for each version of your site (http, https, www, and non-www versions). Once you’ve validated all versions of your website, you can then authorize other users at your organization to be added to your account.

Website access to execute authentication may vary depending on your role at your organization. That’s why Google gives you five handy ways to work around any possible access or knowledge gaps that might exist. You can authenticate your site for Search Console by:

Uploading an HTML file to your site (the Google recommended path)
Adding a meta tag to your site’s homepage
Logging into your domain name provider
Using Google Analytics (if you’re using the right code)
Using Google Tag Manager (if you have Tag Manager installed and in the right place).

Navigating Your Website’s Dashboard on Search Console

Once you’ve authenticated your website, you’ll be able to access your site’s dashboard by logging into Google Search Console’s homepage. Below are some key features you should pay extra attention to.

Recent Messages: This leads you to an inbox where you can find all messages that are directly from Google. These messages include suggestions on how to improve your website’s performance and notifications about spam or malicious activity found on your site. Keeping on top of these suggestions and notifications will ensure peak site performance.
Manage Property: This section allows you to add/remove users or delete a property. Website owners or admins can provide access to others on a full or restricted basis. Restricted will allow for read-only access, while full allows you to submit and make changes on the website owner’s behalf.
Website URL: Clicking on the URL links will take you to the dashboard where your data is for that particular website property. You should pay extra attention to the areas below when you navigate to this section of Google Search Console.
- New and important: This will show you any new messages you receive from Google.
- Crawl Errors: Clicking on “Crawl Errors” will show you a list of any pages on your website where an error occurred while Google tried to crawl it.
- Search Analytics: This section will show you the number of clicks and visits to your website during the past 28 days. You can play around with dates to view and compare your website performance over time.

Key Google Search Console Data to Help You Leverage Your Website

There are a lot of data and resources available within Search Console to help you optimize your website, so it can be hard to know where to start if you’re new to the platform. Thankfully, Google understands this problem and provides you with a navigation menu — conveniently located on the left of your screen when you log in — to help you quickly access the tool’s most useful features. The four sections in this menu (described in more detail below) provide the information you need to analyze performance, identify security risks, and fix any issues.

Search Appearance: When your website appears in a related search, there are a lot of things that can influence whether that user clicks your website link over another. The Search Appearance section of Google Search Console will show data to help you decide which changes to make to your website to improve your ranking and website visitor traffic.
Search Traffic: This section shows data for the traffic generated from search (desktop/mobile/tablet), the performance of your website when users don’t click, and the geographic location of the person performing the search.
Google Index: This section will help you identify and understand any issues Google has when it comes to understanding what your website is about and how it should show up in search. This is important because if a search engine has issues understanding and analyzing information on your website, it can result in reduced traffic or, sometimes, no traffic at all.
Crawl: While indexing is the process of finding, analyzing, and storing information, crawling is the process a search engine executes when it discovers pages on your site. This section shows data detailing issues, if any, that Google has encountered when visiting and crawling your website. This section also allows you to indicate to Google and other search engines which pages to crawl and which to avoid.

How to Put the Information and Resources in Google Search Console to Good Use

The plethora of information available at your fingertips in Google Search Console can indicate good and bad news about your site. As you examine and familiarize yourself with each of the sections we outlined above, you’ll want to monitor them regularly to learn more about items that might need to be fixed on a site you manage. We’ve highlighted a few ways to leverage this information to get you started.

Messages & Manual Actions

Google tends to share good and bad news with us in the messages section of Google Search Console. While helpful tidbits about how to improve performance might show up, there are also other messages Google might share.

For example, Google may notify you if your site has a manual webspam action against it; this notification indicates Google has found your site to contain malicious spam or violate Google’s Terms of Service, resulting in pages (or your entire site) being demoted or taken out of Google search completely. Instances like this can have a serious negative impact on your ability to attract new customers and generate ROI from your website. That’s why it’s important to stay on top of any messages you receive and take manual action when needed.

Search Appearance: HTML Improvements

As Google crawls your website, it finds information in specific areas, such as meta titles and descriptions, that indicate what your page is about and influence SEO. In HTML Improvements, Google outlines specific meta data that may be duplicated, is too long or too short, missing, or non-informative to help you optimize your website pages.

Search Analytics

Some of the most important information you’ll use to analyze performance can be found under Search Analytics. In this section you’ll:

Find out how many clicks from search engine pages occurred during a specific time period. Keep in mind that Google Search Console limits data to 90 days.
Gain an understanding of the number of site impressions(times a website appeared in Google search results) your website has received recently.
Be able to monitor your website’s click-through rate, which is the ratio of users who clicked on your website’s listing to those in total who saw it the search engine results page (SERP).
Learn your site’s average position for specific keyword queries.

These metrics can be graphed in easy-to-read charts illustrating upward or downward trends. Google Search Console reports information about the specific keywords or landing page your site ranks for with these metrics, too.

To make sure your website is always in its best shape, look for the following:

Keywords or landing pages that see large dips in impressions, click-through-rates, or clicks
Keywords that show a large decrease in average search position
Keywords or landing pages that differ greatly in performance between mobile, desktop, or tablet views

Index Status

The number of pages you currently have in Google’s index should reflect the amount of content you publish and pages you keep live on your site. By examining the Index Status section of Search Console, you can discover increases or decreases in the total number of indexed pages over time. If you don’t know why a large increase or decrease happened when analyzing this information, it might be time to investigate.

Crawl Errors & Stats

As a search engine discovers pages on your site, it can encounter a few issues as it tries to gain access. In the Crawl Errors report, you’ll be notified of issues such as Server Errors, Soft 404s, and 404 Not Found pages for both mobile and desktop, which indicate the following errors on your site.

Server Errors can be caused by issues with your hosting provider. The crawler may experience an issue if your hosting provider goes down and pages cannot be found.
Soft 404s are errors resulting from URLs not existing on your site. In these instances, the pages don’t exist and your site isn’t showing a 404 error.
404 Not Found notifications are errors indicating a page does not exist. It shows the user a 404 page and indicates the page is no longer there.

Crawl Stats indicate the rate at which a crawler is finding pages, pages crawled per day (high and low), the time it takes to download your page, and kilobytes downloaded in total. It’s important to analyze these stats over time for better insight into sudden spikes in traffic or time it takes to crawl your site, both of which could indicate issues that are worth investigating in more detail. After all, if search engines experience issues crawling your site, they very well could miss important information your prospective customers need to see.

Sitemaps

Every website should have a sitemap. If yours does not, I highly recommend building one today. A sitemap shows a search engine all of the pages on your site in a format that is simplified and easy for a bot to read and understand.

In Google Search Console, web property owners can submit their sitemaps and monitor the number of pages submitted and subsequent pages Google indexes. Any errors encountered with the sitemap are shown in this section. Take note of large differences between the number of pages submitted and the number of pages indexed. A large difference may indicate an issue and should be investigated.

Security Issues & Other Resources

Spam is prevalent online, and the security of your website could be at risk if it is not managed correctly. Google takes precautions and communicates if they discover any indication of spam or security threats on your site. If Malware is detected, Google Search Console will indicate it in the Security Issues section. Be sure to monitor this area regularly and check out the other resources available, too.

Optimizing Your Website Takes Time and Effort

Search Console is an amazing resource for anyone managing or overseeing marketing activities related to a website. Without this useful tool, you’re missing out on in-depth information to help you improve the amount of traffic you get from organic search and, as a result, failing to capture great leads that help drive ROI.

Optimizing your website, however, is only part of the equation. If you want to learn how you can do more with your website to engage visitors and keep them moving through the sales funnel, download our eBook, Personalizing the Web Experience: The Key to Better Customer Interaction and Engagement on Your Website (also linked below). In this useful guide, we’ll walk you through what you can do to engage and inspire visitors to convert once they’re actually on your site.

Demand and Lead Generation Archives - Act-On

73 Advertising Terms and Jargon Every Marketer Should Know

A/B Testing

Above the Fold

Account-Based Advertising

Ad Audience

Ad Click

Ad Exchange

Ad ID (Advertising ID)

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Ad Impressions

Ad Inventory

Ad Network

Ad Serving

Ad Targeting

Ad Units

Addressable

Affiliate Marketing

Attribution

Banner Ad

Bidding Strategy

Blocklist

Bounce Rate

Brand Awareness

Call to Action

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

Channel

Click-Through-Rate

Consent Management Platform (CMP)

Conversion

Conversion Pixel

Conversion Rate

Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion Tracking

Cookie

Cost Per Acquisition

Cost Per Click

Cost Per Completed View

Cost Per Lead

Cost Per Mille

Cross-Device Targeting

Contextual Targeting

Demand-Side Platform

Direct Response

Display

Expandable Banner

First-Party Cookies

First-Touch Attribution

Frequency Capping

Geographic Targeting

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)

Identity Graph

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

In-Stream Ads

Interstitial Ads

Keyword

Landing Page

Last Touch Attribution

Lead

Lookalike Audience

Lookback Window

Mobile Advertiser ID

Multi-Channel or Multi-Touch Attribution

Native Advertising

Overlay in Advertising

Paid Search

Pay-Per-Click

Personally Identifiable Information

Pop-Up Ad

Programmatic Advertising

Reach

Real-Time Bidding

Retargeting

Rich Media Advertising

Third-Party Cookies

View-Through Rate

Walled Garden

Use This List of Advertising Terms to Improve Your Campaigns