Category: Marketing Automation

If you work at a nonprofit organization (NPO), then you’re already quite familiar with the unique set of challenges nonprofits face when it comes to building an effective and sustainable marketing strategy. 
With scarce resources, relatively limited staffing, and leadership attention spread thin across numerous areas, investing in cohesive marketing efforts can often take a backseat to more pressing matters.
But having a marketing strategy is absolutely crucial to bringing in new donors and ensuring your organization gets recognized by the right people. And the most effective (and accessible) marketing tactic NPOs can put their effort towards is email marketing.
Email marketing is far from dead — and this is especially true in the world of NPO marketing, where personalized messaging and relationship building are keys to success. Plus, building an email strategy is usually less expensive and time consuming than other strategies.
In this post, you’ll find out how your nonprofit can stay connected with donors and bring in excited new prospects through email marketing.

Why does email work for nonprofits?
Studies show that email continues to offer the highest return on investment of any outreach strategy, making it just about as close to a sure bet as you can get. McKinsey reports that an email marketing campaign can deliver a return of $40 for every $1 spent. This makes email the channel with the highest ROI that nonprofits can use to reach prospective donors.
Additionally, since 91% of all US consumers still use e-mail daily, email can enable NPOs to reach audiences that might not otherwise engage with their marketing efforts on social media networks. 
Email Marketing Best Practices for Nonprofits
Commit to Regular Sends
Nonprofits are often stretched for resources, and it’s easy to set marketing aside for matters that seem more pressing. However, regular email marketing is one of the most effective ways to grow your organization. A content schedule for your emails can keep you on top of them so you can steadily grow your donor base.
Making email sends an “always on” part of your marketing strategy will play a big role in your success on the channel. “Always on” doesn’t mean that you’re bombarding your email list with constant messages — it means that you’re committed to consistency in how often you send your emails.
Sending informative emails on a predictable schedule (instead of only when you’re actively running a campaign or seeking donations) will help nurture your audience towards deeper forms of engagement (like donating or attending an event) in the future. Remember: the goal is building long-term relationships. 
Setting the right cadence for your emails is important to keep the members of your list engaged with your organization. When you’re first starting out, this requires a careful balancing act, as you don’t want to send too few emails but you also don’t want to veer into potential spam territory. More on that in the next section.
Be Wary of Spam Folders
If regular email sends are a new part of your strategy, and your audience is only used to hearing from you on a less-frequent, one-off basis, starting to send more emails on a more frequent basis could trigger some users’ email clients to send you to the spam folder. 
Email deliverability can be a complex subject, but here are a few important things to remember if email is becoming a more regular marketing outreach tool for your NPO:

Don’t directly embed forms or include attachments in your emails (linking out to web pages with forms is a better practice).
Send your emails from a recognizable address — if you can, avoid sending from a noreply@yourwebsite.com address. Use a name your readers will recognize.
Lead with informative subject lines instead of direct calls for donations (you can check out our blog post on picking great email subject lines here).
If you’re starting a new email project and are sending emails to a list that isn’t used to such frequent sends — let them know what’s going on! Tell your readers that you plan to start sending more informative emails, and most importantly, give them the opportunity to opt out. It might seem counterintuitive in the short term, but cleaning disengaged folks off your email list is important to the long-term health of your email program. 
For more tips on improving your email deliverability, check out our blog post on the subject here. 

Leverage Personal Connections with Your Audience
Your nonprofit’s cause is (hopefully) personal to everyone on your email list. Personalizing your emails is one technically simple — but potentially super powerful — step that you can take to utilize that personal connection to attract donations and deepen engagement with your organization. 
First, make sure you’re using an email tool that enables personalization. It might be an investment upfront, but having access to personalization features will greatly improve the value your audience gets out of your email sends. 
Worried about coming off as creepy or not sure where to start? Rachel Leist, the Senior Director of Automation at HubSpot, advises folks new to email marketing personalization to focus on personalizing emails based on actions your email recipients have taken on your website, instead of any personal data you may have collected about them in your contact management system.
Leist explains, “A good rule of thumb is to personalize around actions someone took on their website. Personalize around things like pages that were visited, topic of recent conversion, and of course name and company. If a person receives an email that refers to an action they took on your website, they will not be as nervous as they would if you were personalizing around specific personal information you happen to have on them.”
Segment Your Database
A segmented email list can help you ensure that the right person receives the right email at the right time. While everyone on your email list believes in your organization, you don’t need to send every email to them. Each person in your database is at a different stage on their journey with your organization, and the emails they receive should reflect that.
For example, someone who has donated $5 to your organization in the last year is probably not as engaged as someone who has donated $1000 to your organization in the last month.
Factors like donation amount, events attended, and actions taken on your website or social media channels can all be important indicators of engagement level, and shouldn’t be ignored when you’re sending out emails.
More engaged audience members will likely respond more positively to more frequent emails, while folks with fewer touch points should received fewer emails giving them more basic information about your NPO. 
Test, Analyze, and Adapt Accordingly
Finally, running an email program is not a “one and done” marketing strategy. You can’t just set it up and keep doing the same thing. It requires you to take note of key performance indicators and make changes to your approach periodically based on those factors. 
While industry benchmarks can be a useful starting point of comparison when you’re just beginning to flesh out your email strategy, remember that not all NPOs are the same, and not all NPO audiences are going to respond the same way to emails.
To start, keep track of a few key email metrics, measure them with each email send, and look for trends over time. Our article on email marketing metrics for beginners offers a helpful starting place if you’re not sure what to track.
Examples of Nonprofit Fundraising Emails
Want to put together an effective fundraising email? Check out some examples to get a sense of what yours can look like.
Alzheimer’s Association
This email from the Alzheimer’s Association requests donations but also outlines several other ways that its supporters can act for its cause. However, the request for a donation remains the focal point of the email, with a call to action to donate and a button allowing the reader to do so featured prominently in the middle of the email.
The Trevor Project
When folks first sign up for your emails, it’s a good indicator that they’re feeling engaged with your mission. Check out this automatic welcome email from the Trevor Project that introduces the organization to a new subscriber and requests a donation at the end. Your audience wants to help – don’t make them wait!
The International Rescue Committee 
The International Rescue Committee faces the urgent task of assisting people in conflict zones and disaster areas. They waste no time in showing how subscribers can help its mission. In this email, the IRC tells the recipient what steps they can take to make a concrete impact on their work.
The IRC knows that each of their subscribers is ready to take on a different level of commitment, so they recommend different actions that people can do to support them, from signing up for texts to starting a fundraiser.
The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art
Check out this email from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art for a different spin on fundraising. Unlike most nonprofit emails, this one looks like it could have come from a department store. If your nonprofit has merchandise to sell, consider taking a cue from retailers and create emails that showcase your products for a good cause.
Free Email Marketing Software for Nonprofits
Want to use professional email software for your nonprofit without breaking the bank? There are several free versions of professional marketing software that you can use. Check out what some of the most popular programs offer to find the right one for your needs!
HubSpot Email Marketing Software
HubSpot offers a free version of its paid email marketing software that integrates with its also-free CRM software. Users can run a sophisticated marketing campaign and get access to forms, landing pages, and Facebook, Instagram, Google, and LinkedIn ads, as well as templates They also have access to contact management and live chat capabilities to optimize the experience for each subscriber. There are also traffic and conversion analytics capabilities for campaign optimization..
Sender
Want to reach lots of people with beautiful, personalized emails? Sender could be just right for you, as it has extensive HTML editing and personalization capabilities. Sender also has impressive analytics capabilities that allow you to track the delivery and opening of individual emails. Sender also helps you build individual profiles of your recipients to further optimize your strategy.
Sendinblue
If you’re looking for variety in your emails, Sendinblue has you covered. This program includes over 70 responsive templates for emails that can be designed for any screen. The free version also gives you the ability to send 300 emails a day. You also have the ability to use A/B testing to find the right email content that works and segmenting options to make sure the right person receives it.
SendGrid
SendGrid specializes in email campaigns that are tailored to individual preferences. Its free version gives you access to a wide range of personalization tools, including APIs, Webhooks, STMP Relay. You’ll also have granular control over who receives your emails with a wide range of delivery optimization tools. There are also sophisticated email editing and analytics tools that allow you to optimize them for your target audience.
You don’t need to be a professional marketer to get professional results from email marketing for your nonprofit. However, you do need to set some time aside to do it. The good news is that there are few other investments you can make in your organization that will pay off like email marketing. Get started today if you haven’t already and you could generate more buzz for your organization than ever before!

Over the past few years, video has become one of the most compelling ways for brands to tell their stories on social media.
From the instant popularity of Facebook Live videos to Instagram increasing their video length from 30 to 60 seconds, marketers are using the power of video to communicate their business’ personalities and brand stories, to express creativity, and to build emotional connections with fans and followers.
And it’s working: 51.9% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI, according to a research report from Adobe. And over 60% of marketers plan to increase their investment in video over the next year.
Right now, video is performing incredibly well on social media. So where is it headed during the rest of this year and beyond?
Read on to learn more about the future of social media video trends with these predictions backed by today’s research and notable marketing experts.
The Future of Social Media Video
YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram will be the preferred platforms for social media videos. 
While video will content to grow in popularity on social media, not every platform will benefit equally from this growth. Some social media platforms will be better equipped to create, publish, and share videos than others. And, the ones where marketers are the most successful will be the ones that brands will gravitate towards the most — namely Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.  
For instance, over 100 millions hours of video a day is watched on Facebook, and of the 79% of marketing teams that published videos on Facebook in 2020, 85% said it was successful. Of the 85% of marketing teams that published videos on Youtube, 83% found it to be successful. And, 65% of video marketers said that they plan to include Instagram in their 2020 marketing strategy because of how effective video content was on this social media platform. 
These three platforms will be the most popular when it comes to social media video content. Not only do they already have millions of active users, but they also let you engage with followers after you post a video. The more you respond to comments and communicate with your audience, the more they’ll interact with your content the next time you post.
Adweek’s Meghan O’Neil offers this advice.

“When you engage with your fans on Twitter and Facebook, it makes them all the more likely to notice when you have a new video up… and share it with their friends.” – Megan O’Neill, Adweek

There will be more video-based social media platforms.
While Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram will start as the leading platforms for social media video, that doesn’t mean they’ll be alone at the top for long. In fact, there’s already been a wave of new video-based social media platforms that are rapidly gaining popularity around the world. 
Take Twitch, for example. In just eight years, the video game streaming platform has grown from 102K viewers to over 1.4 million viewers.
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Tik Tok is another good example. It was the number one app downloaded in 2020 with an estimated 738 million downloads. With over 500 million active users, Tik Tok is now the sixth largest social media platform in the world behind Instagram, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Facebook, and WhatsApp. 
But, Tik Tok and Twitch aren’t the only social platforms aiming to joining the ranks of Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Aside from smaller players like Meerkat and Parascope, Twitter is now getting into video with its newest feature, Fleets. Fleets are temporary posts that expire after a day, similar to an Instagram Story. With Fleets, users can post videos to their timelines which are six times more likely to be retweeted than a photo tweet. And, research from Nielsen suggests that Twitter video is twice as memorable than videos watched on other social media platforms. The reasoning here is that Twitter videos tend to be viewed as more organic and genuine than videos posted to Facebook, Youtube, or Instagram. 
Social media platforms will compete with streaming services. 
The next frontier for social platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram appears to be television. In fact, Facebook marketing expert, Mari Smith, told Likeable that she believes that Facebook’s goal is “to become the next generation digital streaming television platform.”

“Facebook is on a mission to become the next generation television platform” – Mari Smith

This means that Facebook would completely directly with brands like Netlix and Hulu. Its goal is to become the destination for video streaming and, according to Smith, it’s investing heavily in its “Watch” feature to accomplish that goal. 
YouTube, on the other hand, has been experimenting with YouTube TV since 2017. With YouTube TV, users can watch live television without a cable subscription. This is much different than YouTube’s original approach, which was completely centered around user-generated content. With more social media platforms competing in its space, YouTube is expanding its offering to appeal to a larger audience. 
Let’s not forget Instagram, either. While it doesn’t offer a full-fledge streaming service, Instagram recently launched its IGTV feature which is geared towards long-form video content. And, rather than having to tilt your device sideways to watch a video, IGTV expands the image so the video can be watched from your device’s vertical interface. Research shows that watching videos from this angle improves its completion rate. 
Video will become part of the shopping experience. 
Video was already becoming a standard part of the customer experience, and now, as more people are working from home and shopping online, it’s an essential for brands trying to promote their products. Social media presents the perfect opportunity to share these videos as 61% of consumers crave video content when interacting with a brand. And, 55% of people will use a brand’s video content when making a purchase decision. 
Here’s an example of how J. Crew is using video to promote its new products on Instagram. 

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by J.Crew (@jcrew)

 
But, product promotion isn’t the only way to capitalize on social media video. Brands like Napoleon Cat are creating “explainer” videos where they explain how a product works and who would use it. 

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by NapoleonCat (@napoleoncatcom)

 
Other brands are hosting Q&A sessions and posting customer testimonial videos as well. This provides a level of social proof that helps customers trust a brand after they watch one of these video. For example, here’s a testimonial video for Clek created by one its customers. 

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Clek (@clekinc)

These are a just a few ways that social media videos are affecting the customer experience. As Brian Halligan highlights in the quote below, these are the timely opportunities that “marketers need to adapt to or risk extinction” by falling behind their competitors. 

For more video tips, learn how to create social media video ads. 

You already know how important social media is to increase brand awareness, generate more leads, and ultimately score more conversions.
The world is on social media — 50% of it, at least — so if you want your product, service, and mission to reach the maximum amount of people, your business needs to be on social media, too.
However, social media can be extremely time-consuming. It also spans so many diverse tasks, ranging from data-based activities like tracking analytics, to creative jobs such as designing graphics.

It can be difficult to find the skills and manpower needed to execute a good social media strategy — which is why you need social media tools to help you out.
Below, we’ll cover the top social media tools you should be using in 2021 to help you save time and increase conversions.

What makes for a good social media tool?
Although the term “social media tool” is very general and can apply to a wide range of services, there are a few key features that your top social media tools should have.
It saves you time.
The goal of a social media tool is to save you time while getting similar — or better — results than you could without it. Look for social media tools that automate a process, but make sure the process still happens correctly, since some shortcuts might be too fast and therefore won’t focus on quality.
It helps you increase brand awareness.
One of the biggest benefits of social media is its ability to increase your brand awareness, which is why each social media tool you select should perform its services with brand awareness in mind.
Maybe your tool of choice is an editing platform such as Lightroom, which can help you create images to match the rest of your feed. Or, maybe it’s an Instagram scheduler like Later so you can preview your profile before you post images. Whatever the case may be, social media tools should focus largely on brand awareness.
It’s easy to use.
Social media tools are only a time-saver if they’re easy and intuitive. Each tool you select should be super user-friendly so that, if needed, your accounting team could edit photos and your creative, right-brained writers could still use the analytics function to track daily social metrics.
Many social media tools provide tutorials on their websites. Others, such as Kicksta, have top-notch customer service so you can get immediate expert advice if you need help getting off the ground.
It’s affordable.
Social media tools should be affordable (and most of them are). Many high-quality social media tools are even free, such as the Unfold app, which is perfect for creating Instagram stories.
With social media tools, there’s no need for you to go back and forth with the accounting department trying to get your budget approved. Most social media tools are already budget-friendly so all you need to do is sign up.
It keeps you organized.
One of the ways social media tools save you time is by keeping you organized, so make sure the social media tools you decide to use are efficient and tidy.
For example, HubSpot’s Social Inbox tool helps you prioritize your social media interactions, and graphic design website Canva saves your designs so you can go back and edit them later.

1. HubSpot’s Social Inbox Tool
Price: Starts at $800/month, included in the Marketing Hub Professional tier
HubSpot’s Social Inbox tool saves you valuable time while still optimizing your social efforts. Schedule your posts, integrate your social networks with your blog, and monitor messages and mentions so you can nurture new leads.
HubSpot also integrates all of your marketing with your CRM, so it’s easy to figure out how many leads and customers you’re receiving directly from social media. “HubSpot Marketing Hub … puts the potential of corporate marketing within everyone’s reach,” one customer says.

2. Kicksta
Price: Starts at $49/month for individual creatives
Kicksta is an Instagram growth service that helps you get more organic followers on your Instagram business account. Using your company account, the growth service “likes” around 30,000 photos a month on carefully-targeted accounts. Those users — real people, not spam bots or fake accounts — will begin to follow your account, increasing your brand awareness.
Kicksta is a good fit for any industry and provides a friendly, responsive, and helpful customer success team. “Kicksta helps introduce new audiences to our brand while providing consistent organic Instagram growth,” says Ryan Beltran, CEO of watch company Original Grain. “It’s great for social proof too!”

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3. Lightroom
Price: Starts at $9.99/month
Adobe’s Lightroom product is a tool that lets you organize and edit photos. Since social media is all about visuals, it’s critical your business’s social media accounts showcase vibrant, on-brand photos.
Sliders, filters, and many other features make Lightroom a user-friendly tool to create beautiful photos even if you don’t have much editing experience. Lightroom is available for both mobile and desktop, and best of all, changes made on one device immediately apply to all devices.

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4. Canva
Price: Free, or starts at $9.95/month
Canva is an easy-to-use graphic design website where you can create custom, on-brand graphics for your company’s social media accounts. The website has dozens of templates — everything from Facebook banners to Instagram stories to Twitter posts — so if starting from scratch to create social graphics seems intimidating, use a template instead.
One user said, “Canva has been a lifesaver to me and my business. No more hours sitting in front of the computer coming up with graphics for social media post[s] or Pinterest post[s].”

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5. Unfold
Price: Free
Described as “a toolkit for storytellers”, Unfold is an iOS and Android app that helps you create beautiful templates for Instagram stories. Bringing your creative visions to life is the driving idea behind Unfold.
It’s an ideal app for lifestyle brands who want to create stylish collages to keep their social media accounts on-brand and receive the maximum amount of engagement from followers.

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6. HypeAuditor
Price: Starts at $200/month for 50 reports
You’ll never earn money from fake followers — they just make your engagement look bad (think millions of followers, but only a few hundred likes per photo) and ruin your reputation. That’s why HypeAuditor weeds out fake followers on your Instagram account to help you determine your organic reach.
Additionally, HypeAuditor analyzes your audience to figure out where they live, their age and gender, and which of your followers are ghosts.

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7. Retouchup
Price: Starts at $0.25 per image
The website Retouchup provides an easy way to edit photos for social media, from basic color correction to more advanced Photoshop-like features such as adding or removing people from a photo. With Retouchup, you don’t do the work yourself — instead, just submit a photo and the website’s experts will edit the photo for you within 24 hours.
“You’re making me look like an awesome photographer!” one user gushed. Retouchup can save you time during the editing stage, and make your images appear higher-quality and more compelling.

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8. Marketing Video Builder
Price: Free, or starts at $33/month.
Marketing Video Builder by Animoto helps you make professional-tier videos to engage with audiences. Videos can be created in minutes using the online video editor. The best part about the tool is that you don’t even need editing experience to get started.
You can increase brand awareness by making videos for your company, and share them across social channels to grow your audience. Additionally, if you’re a HubSpot customer, you can integrate that account with your Animoto account.

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When you create videos, you can use a pre-built storyboard template curated by either Animoto or HubSpot. Alternatively, you can make a video from scratch. When you’re done, you can export the video to your HubSpot file manager with one click and manage it from there.
Animoto also integrates with Getty Images, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn, so you can have video tools for a good portion of social media platforms all in one place.

In addition to the HubSpot Social Inbox Tool, which is helpful while planning and executing campaigns, these social media campaign tools are also helpful to add to your tool belt.
1. Falcon
Price: $129/mo.
Falcon is a social media management platform that allows you to create posts for social networks on a collaborative content calendar.
It integrates with HubSpot, Microsoft, and Salesforce to help users streamline marketing tasks among teams. For a visual to see how Falcon integrates with other software, refer to the photo below:

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HubSpot customers can use this integration to create audience segments. These segmentations will help you target your customers with social media posts, making sure your content is being seen by the right people. Any changes you make within HubSpot will automatically transfer to Falcon, so you don’t have to worry about manually updating content.
2. Quuu
Price: Free, or starts at $19/month.
Quuu is a platform that helps its users execute visually stunning social media content. It automates the time-consuming process of properly creating professional, engaging multimedia assets for campaigns.
When using Quuu, you can choose from over 500 interest categories, like marketing or real estate, and receive content suggestions based on those choices. You’ll receive a certain amount of content suggestions per day per profile based on your settings, ensuring you’ll always have relevant posts for your audience.

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If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can integrate the two platforms. Quuu finds the best content for your social profiles, and HubSpot lets you control those suggestions. You can go to your draft folder via HubSpot and pick which content you want to upload if your Quuu account isn’t automated, which you can change.
Quuu looks for content so you don’t have to. The tool also integrates with Buffer, Hootsuite, and Socialbee.
3. Later
Price: Free, or starts at $7.50/month
Social media marketing platform Later lets you plan and schedule your Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest posts. The drag-and-drop calendar makes it easy for you to map out your upcoming posts and see at a glance how your feed will look.
You can also track your analytics, which will help you figure out the best time of day to post, and the best hashtags to use. Additionally, the Linkin.Bio feature for Instagram helps your posts become instantly shoppable.
“I love that you can either use it via the website or app on-the-go,” one user remarks. “It is one of those apps that I could not live without … Later is [a] super easy tool to set up.”

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There are numerous choices out there for high-quality social media tools. Ultimately, it’s your job to decide which tool is the best fit for your needs, your budget, your campaigns, and your marketing goals.
4. Design Wizard
Price: Free, or starts at $9.99/month
This tool lets you create different types of content, like photos and videos, with no professional editing experience required. If you have a limited budget and time on your hands, this free visual content tool is ideal for you.
Design Wizard has a library of over a million multimedia graphics for inspiration and use. Plus, all images are licensed for commercial use, so if you use one from the site, you won’t run into copyright infringements.

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Over to You
Your beautiful, on-brand images will be able to integrate with HubSpot. You can manage all of the files you create with Design Wizard from your HubSpot account, which you can use for campaign posts.
Need a painless way to track your social interactions? Try HubSpot’s social inbox tool today.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in May 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Companies are still struggling to improve the reach and reliability of personalized data about potential clients and customers.
Part of the problem is supply — bigger data volumes offer greater insight around B2B and B2C buying preferences both immediately and over time.
But variety also plays a role. While information about individuals at a company (demographics) and the technology they use (technographics) can help enhance marketing and sales outcomes, there’s also a place for firmographics, which are datasets that help businesses effectively segment organizations into meaningful categories.
The challenge? Although this is a great high-level definition, it doesn’t offer much in the way of specifics or actionable strategies.
In this complete guide to firmographics, we’ll define firmographic data with a look at key forms and functions, explore how it’s used for segmentation, and dig into the types of questions that can help your company locate — and leverage — firmographic data.

What is firmographic data?
Demographic data focuses on information tied to individuals. Data such as contact names and customer purchase preferences are examples of demographic assets that can be used to drive targeted marketing campaigns.
Firmographic data shifts the focus to organizations — or firms — to collect and analyze key information about the operation of enterprises themselves. Common firmographic data examples include:

Industry type — From manufacturing or logistics organizations to financial, professional or legal service firms, industry type is a key vector for segmentation. Worth noting? Many companies occupy more than one industry vertical and can also occupy multiple firmographic segments.

Organizational size — How big is the organization, both in terms of physical location and staff size?

Total sales and revenue — Both quarterly and annual information is relevant here. While annual sales and revenue data can drive long-term sales strategies, quarterly results can help pinpoint more immediate needs.

Current location — Where is the company headquarters located? How many satellite offices do they have, and where?

Ownership framework — Is the company a public organization? A private enterprise? An NGO, charity or non-profit? Each comes with their own unique market approach.

Growth trends — Is the company growing, downsizing or maintaining its current market position? All three movement metrics offer opportunity, but must be approached in different ways.

There’s also a crossover segment of firmographic and demographic data as it relates to specific job roles, titles, departments, and potential buying power.
By understanding more about the people responsible for decision-making within an organization along with the operational framework that surrounds them, businesses can better target marketing efforts to receptive audiences with the power to take immediate action.
Benefits of Firmographic Segmentation
The primary goal of firmographic data is to help organizations segment potential B2B customers into meaningful segments, which in turn can reduce the distance between observation and action.
If marketers, sales teams, and C-suites have access to segmented information that classifies prospective clients by size, location, revenue, or current growth trajectory, they don’t need to spend time and effort separating this data before making decisions. Instead, potential purchasing partners are pre-sorted into relevant categories.
Segmentation offers specific benefits for organizations, such as:
1. Improved market targeting.
Understanding the physical and market size of potential B2B buyers can significantly improve sales targeting. Here’s why: Smaller, “mom and pop” businesses don’t have the same needs as larger enterprises — while both are potentially valuable clients, their paths from initial contact to sales conversion are significantly different. For example, while many SMBs want one-size-fits all solutions to help reduce total complexity, many enterprises are after custom-built tools and technologies to help address specific issues.
2. Enhanced customer service.
Leveraging key firmographic data about where companies are located and how their employees are geographically distributed can help improve customer service offerings. Consider a manufacturing firm located entirely within a single state — chances are they’ll prioritize partners that can deliver local service. Multinational firms, meanwhile, often prefer on-demand, distributed digital services.
3. Long-term buying potential.
Companies moving up the market offer the potential for B2B businesses to get in on the ground floor and enjoy increased conversion volume over time. Enterprises that are currently downsizing, meanwhile, also come with sales potential but require a different approach with services that are both cost-effective in the short term and can scale over time as revenue targets evolve.
Key Firmographic Questions
So how do you gather firmographic data that’s relevant to your brand and can help drive corporate success? It all starts with asking the right questions. Commonly-used queries include:

When was the company founded?
How many employees in total does the company have?
How many staff at each office or satellite location?
What is the company’s revenue per year?
What percentage of their target market share does the company currently have?
Are they currently in a growth phase, downsizing or remaining relatively consistent?
What does their organizational structure look like (flat leadership, standard hierarchy, etc.)

When it comes to collecting firmographic data, you’ve got three broad options: Survey companies directly, conduct online reconnaissance or purchase firmographic information from a data clearinghouse or similar service.
All three come with potential benefits and drawbacks. For example, while surveys offer the most accurate firmographic information, many companies prefer not to share this data — especially if you’re taking a “cold call” approach.
Online searches, meanwhile, can turn up a host of useful firmographic data but there’s no guarantee about its accuracy or relevance; the actionable value of data gathered this way depends heavily on the source and the date the information was obtained.
Purchasing data from a reputable seller provides the most accurate and up-to-date option, but prices vary significantly and it’s worth cross-referencing this information with publicly available sources to ensure sellers are consistently accurate.
Finding a Firm(ographic) Foundation
Timely, accurate and actionable “graphic” data — demographic, technographic, and firmographic — can help B2B organizations create custom-built sales and marketing strategies and improve overall conversion rates.
To ensure firmographic frameworks deliver intended outcomes, it’s critical for companies to focus on both segmentation forms and decision-making functions.
By asking the right questions, accurately segmenting potential customers and using this data to inform sales and marketing efforts, companies can reduce the time between information and action while simultaneously increasing sales success.

A Facebook ad is nothing without a Facebook landing page. You need to attract people to click on your message, but at the same time, you’ll need to keep them interested once they do it. How? In this article, you’ll learn how to create that landing page for a successful Facebook ad campaign.

For more than a decade, email has been the marketing channel that delivers the highest ROI. A study from McKinsey & Company reports that email marketing can be as much as 40 times more effective at reaching target customers than social media.
At the same time, we’ve seen the emergence of Chatbots, which can be effective when people engage with your website. Forty-five percent (45%) of consumers report they prefer to use chatbots to communicate with brands when it comes to getting a quick response, while a survey by Campaign Monitor revealed email was among their most important channels to customer communications.
 

Perhaps it’s time for marketers to start bridging the gap. It’s not a matter of one strategy versus the other; combining both email marketing strategies and the use of Chatbots can boost engagement and accelerate results.
Integrating email marketing and chatbots
Email marketing and Chatbots create an inbound marketing strategy and outbound marketing strategy that complement each other. Here are some of the strategies you need to use to make email and Chatbots work together to boost your marketing efforts.
Securing email addresses and permissions
At the heart of many of your marketing efforts, especially email marketing, is procuring the email addresses of your customers and potential customers. A qualified list of people who have opted in to receive email from you provides a multitude of opportunities for marketing. Getting that email address and getting people to agree to receive offers and content from you is crucial.
Here’s where Chatbots can help. When visitors are browsing your website, a Chatbot can interact at key moments to request email addresses. For example, if someone is reading your blog, a Chatbot might ask them if they would be interested in subscribing to your email newsletter. If someone is reading about one of your products, a Chatbot can pop up and ask if they’re interested in receiving discount coupons.
An effective strategy is to offer content that provides real value, such as eBooks, guides, demos, and how-to videos. Someone looking at a website for sauces might be willing to exchange their email address for recipes, for example.
The more customized you can make the “ask,” the more success you’re likely to have.
Gathering the data you need for effective segmentation
One of the most effective strategies for email marketing is segmenting. Rather than blanket customers with a generic email, you need to make sure your marketing efforts are relevant and customized. Segmenting your list narrows the target and gives you a much greater likelihood of hitting the target with the right message.

Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to get opened. Personalization requires segmenting. When done right, marketers using email segmenting strategies report an incredible 760% increase in revenue generated from email.
Segmentation takes many forms. Based on your product or service, and your industry, you might segment your audience by:

Demographics (Age, Gender, Income, Marital Status, Education, etc.)
Geo-location
Past purchases
Purchase Intent
Buying Frequency
Stage in the Customer Journey
Page Views
and more.

Chatbots are one of the most effective ways to gather the data you need to efficiently segment your list. This is because you can ask your customers specific questions to get the data point you need to craft effective marketing messages.
Some of the data you want to collect may not be supported by the chatbot software or email platform you’re using. For example, you may not be able to directly pass images or larger files from a chatbot to your email engine.
You may need developers to create customer software for these functions. Once you have the data, you’ll be able to better qualify potential customers to tailor Chatbot conversations, sales leads, and develop a segmented email marketing list.
Improve your conversion rates
Someone who has shown an interest in your product or services by visiting your website and then engaging further with you will have a much higher potential for conversion than a casual visitor and sending mass emails.
Chatbots can personalize the conversation by providing relevant information based on page content and visitor queries. This helps move potential customers through the sales funnel. Your email can follow-up on specific topics or questions, or send them back to the website for more information.
Another advantage of Chatbots is that they don’t take breaks or vacations. When someone is ready to engage with your company, Chatbots are there to keep the conversation moving forward. Nearly two-thirds of internet users say the best part about Chatbots is 24-hour service. When they read that marketing email at 2 am, Chatbots will still be there to answer their questions.
Provide diversity in your communication channels
90% of customers say they want a seamless interaction with brands using omnichannel communications. The more ways you can interact with consumers, the better chance you have to convert them. Research shows that companies deploying an omnichannel communication strategy for customer engagement retain nearly 3 times the number of customers versus companies without multiple channels for customer interaction.
Having a website, being available by phone, email, social channels, and Chatbots present multiple ways for people to engage with your brand. It makes sure customers don’t fall through the cracks and provides them a way to get the answers to their questions quickly and in their preferred method of communicating.
Chatbots can personalize the experience, provide on-the-spot answers, and help gather the data you need to personalize your email marketing campaigns.
Wrapping up
Creating effective email campaigns, taking advantage of marketing automation, and integrating Chatbots into your marketing mix can create synergies that build on top of each other for more effective marketing. 
It takes special skills and experience to do it well. If you don’t have the right experience in-house already, you may want to consider turning to a top staffing agency to help with recruiting. It takes the right team with the experience to build and manage the tech, create the marketing, and make it all work together seamlessly.
The post How Chatbot and Email Integration Can Boost Engagement appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

Keywords are king when it comes to engaging users and increasing your search engine ranking.
As a result, search engine optimization (SEO) has become a multi-million dollar business with a host of experts offering advice on how best to move up the search engine results page (SERP) and claim the coveted number one spot.
Most actionable SEO advice boils down to a few solid suggestions: Do your market research so you know which keywords are relevant to your target audience, and create content that’s timely and relevant.
Something that doesn’t make the SEO rounds quite so often is keyword cannibalization. While this unpleasant-sounding issue won’t sink your website, it can cause your pages and posts to rank lower than they should and — if left unchecked — could harm the overall reputation of your site.
Here’s what you need to know about finding, evaluating, and eliminating keyword cannibalization.

What is Keyword Cannibalization in SEO?
Keyword cannibalization occurs when two or more pages on your website end up competing for the same keyword.
Let’s say your company sells roof shingles. Your blog content will likely include posts about how to extend shingle life through proper care and maintenance — with the right combination of authority and actionable insight, this kind of content can attract the attention of your target audience and lead them to purchase shingles from your site when their home requires repair or replacement.
To ensure you’re capturing the right audience, you do a keyword search and find that “roof shingle prices” ranks extremely high. You then create multiple pages that all leverage this keyword — one piece might deal with the most costly shingle types, another with less-expensive options, and a third with the costs of potential repairs if shingles are damaged.
The problem? By using the same keyword for each page, you’re essentially stealing search engine rankings from yourself.
Here’s why: From the perspective of search engines each of these pages is its own separate entity with its own authority and page ranking, meaning your pages are fighting for SEO attention.
What’s more, these similar-but-different pages will split your click-through rate (CTR) across multiple links, in turn decreasing the value of each page. As a result, these three pages might rank sixth, seventh, and eighth in SERPs while a single page could rank second or even first.
How to Detect Keyword Cannibalization
The simplest way to detect keyword cannibalization is to create a spreadsheet containing the keyword(s) for any content you create.
Before making a new post, check your spreadsheet and see if you’ve already used the same keyword. If so, consider tweaking your content to focus on another keyword or ensure that the content you’re creating is substantially different than that of previous posts.
You can also check for keyword cannibalization with a quick online search of your most relevant keywords. If you see multiple pages from your site listed close to one another in SERPs for the same keyword, you have a cannibalization problem.
In addition, keyword cannibalization checker tools can help ensure you’re not missing potential overlap — better to know ASAP and modify your content before it gets pushed down the search rankings by more targeted posts from your competitors.
How to Eliminate Keyword Cannibalization
So what happens if you discover keyword cannibalization on your site?
First, take a look at the content on each page. Wherever possible, combine the information from both pages into a single post to boost search rankings and increase authority.
In the case of our shingle company, for example, it’s worth combining the “most costly” and “least expensive” shingle pages into a single post that targets the “roof shingle prices” keyword. If there are particular aspects of low-cost or high-priced shingles that could help customers make their decision, create new posts with new keywords, and link to them in the original post.
In other cases, you may find that older posts on your site are still ranking highly thanks to targeted keyword use but are no longer relevant to your company’s product line or service offering. Here, it’s a good idea to integrate any useful data from older posts into newer content and then delete the original, in turn allowing search engines to rank up your most relevant post.
Worth noting? As with anything in SEO, there are exceptions to the keyword cannibalization rule.
For example, if you have two posts with the same keyword that are both highly ranked and their ranking position isn’t fluctuating, there’s no need to combine them.
If competitors’ pages start to rank higher, however, or if your top-ranked page stops delivering sustained click-through rates, this could indicate the need for action.
Keyword Cannibalization Checker Tools
While keeping a spreadsheet of page URLs, metadata, and keyword use can help reduce the risk of unintentional cannibalization, this becomes prohibitively complex as sites scale up.
Consider an ecommerce site that sells multiple types of winter jackets — with a product page for each jacket, category pages for each jacket type, and blog posts around jacket care, storage, and repair, it’s easy for keywords to overlap and SERP to suffer.
Keyword cannibalization checker tools can help streamline this process and reduce the risk of missing a potential keyword problem. Some popular options include:
1. Keylogs Keyword Cannibalization Checker

The Keylogs Cannibalization Checker offers a free trial — simply log in with a Google account that’s connected to your website(s) and the Checker does the rest.
You’ll get results about any pages on your site that are competing for the same ranked keyword along with strategies to resolve the issue. Worth noting? The free tier of this tool only tracks three keywords across one site. Paid plans are required for multiple sites and unlimited keyword tracking.
2. SEMrush Position Tracking Tool

SEMrush is a popular SEO tracking and monitoring toolset. With a paid plan, site owners have access to a Cannibalization report within the SEMrush Position Tracking Tool, which provides a cannibalization score for the keywords entered.
A 100% score means no cannibalization has been detected — lower scores indicate potential problems and will specify both affected keywords and cannibal pages.
3. Google Search Console

Using the performance report section of Google Search Console lets you view the queries that have earned your site impressions and clicks from Google searches.
Drill down into these queries with the “pages” tab to see a list of URLs that rank for specific keywords and queries — if you see more than one URL from your site listed for the same keyword, you may have a cannibalization issue.
4. SEOScout Cannibalization Checker

SEOScout’s Cannibalization Checker offers an alternative to managing keyword spreadsheets. Simply create an account for a 7-day free trial, enter your site’s domain and the tool will create a report detailing any duplicate keyword rankings, allowing you to quickly track down and eliminate cannibal content.
5. Moz Keyword Explorer

The Moz Keyword Explorer lets you find ranking keywords, determine page ranking positions, and make decisions about which pages to keep and which ones need to be reworked or eliminated. Moz also makes it easy to download CSV spreadsheet files which can then be analyzed offline for duplicate keyword listings.
Staying Aware of Keyword Cannibalization
For site owners and admins, cannibal keyword content is problematic — multiple URLs ranking for the same keyword can negatively impact page authority, frustrate potential customers, and reduce SERPs.
Solve for keyword cannibalization by finding duplicate keyword use, then combining or deleting content as needed to ensure your most relevant content earns the highest SERP placement with popular search engines.

Did you know that there are more than 600 million blogs on the internet, and that 77% of web-surfers read blogs regularly?
Blogging has exploded since its humble beginnings in the 1990s, and many people today interact with blogs frequently if not daily.
By setting up a blog, you have the opportunity to make meaningful connections with other people, whether you want to share your recipes, talk about your lifestyle, or sell products and services. Whatever the topic, blogging serves as an outlet that can even become profitable.
But before you see dollar signs, you’ll need to set up a blog, which involves choosing a content management system (CMS), deciding on themes and color schemes, and reaching your target audience.
This guide will help you navigate the process of setting up a blog successfully across various platforms.
But before you set up a blog, you’ll need to choose a CMS. Let’s dive into that, first.

How to Choose a CMS
You can’t have a blog without a CMS, or a content management system. As the name suggests, this is a system that manages your content. While you could certainly build a blog from scratch with savvy coding skills, a CMS does the hard work for you.
This software makes it nearly effortless to switch up your blog’s font styles, colors, and overall theme. It also means you can generate content much easier, simply clicking a few buttons to add photos and videos.
All of these seemingly simple actions can be difficult to implement through HTML and CSS coding, which is why many bloggers opt to use a CMS. This way, you can dive right into making great content.
When you’re looking at different CMS platforms, there are a few things to consider.

User-Friendly Interface
Price
Customization
Support
Extensions
Security
Marketing Capabilities

Let’s dive into each element to help you decide what you need in a CMS.
1. User-Friendly Interface
The point of choosing a CMS is to make creating your blog easier for you. If you find it difficult to navigate the dashboard or the text editor, blogging will just like a chore.
Look for a CMS with drag-and-drop capabilities, and unless you have top-notch developer skills, steer clear of anything that requires heavy coding.
2. Price
As we’ll cover below, it is completely possible to start a blog for free. But if you are looking for more robust features, you’ll need to consider your budget.
If you are looking at paid platforms, consider what you get with each CMS for the price, and double-check for hidden fees.
3. Customization
You want your blog to look and perform how you’ve envisioned it, so make sure your CMS allows for customization through different themes and templates that can also be adjusted as you see fit.
For example, with Ceros, you can completely customize every element of the content you publish without adding a single line of code.
4. Support
If your blog glitches while you’re writing an important post, you’ll want to be able to get help right when you need it.
CMS support ranges widely — you might only find a digital handbook or FAQ page full of common issues and fixes with no number or live chat to reach for urgent matters.
Or the platform could only have an email or number available during standard office hours, Monday through Friday. Meanwhile, some CMS platforms have extensive support options, including agents available 24/7.
If you don’t have experience working with CMS systems and want access to hands-on support, take this into consideration when comparing platforms.
5. Extensions
One of the most helpful features for CMS platforms is the ability to work with third-party extensions or plugins, which add even more functionality to your blog.
There are extensions for nearly everything you could think of, so whether you want help with search engine optimization (SEO) or the ability to create galleries or social media feeds on your blog, extensions and plugins can help you do so. If your CMS isn’t compatible with most of these applications, your blog could suffer.
6. Security
Protecting your information and your content is important. You could also lose your audience’s and customers’ trust if your blog is compromised. As such, you’ll want to make sure the CMS you choose has plenty of security features.
Check if SSL, Firewall and content delivery network (CDN) are included, and be sure updates and vulnerability scans are done frequently. This also relates to support — is someone available to help you should your site be compromised? If not, run — don’t walk — to another platform.
7. Marketing Capabilities
Once your blog is established and you are producing content, make sure you can get this content to your target audience. Check to see if your CMS offers options for social and email marketing, or if it offers compatibility with extensions such as UpContent to make sharing your content simple.
How to Set Up a Blog for Free
If you are working with a limited budget, you can certainly start blogging for free. There will be some limitations, but you can always choose to upgrade or move your content to a paid CMS. To get started, you’ll need to find a free blogging platform. Common free blogging platforms include

WordPress.com (not to be confused with WordPress.org)
Blogger
Wix
Weebly

Tumblr. Keep in mind that some free blogging platforms will restrict your freedom with domain name and may be limited in services like support, security, and customization. After choosing a free platform, you’ll sign up and head for the dashboard to choose a free theme or design template, then use the platform’s CMS to add content.
How to Set Up a Blog
Whether you decide to invest in a blog or go the free route, there are a few different ways to get started depending on the platform you choose. Here are some of the most-popular blogging platforms and how to set up your blog on each one.
1. WordPress
If you want to blog on WordPress, you’ll need to choose a domain name and a hosting service. The hosting service is the server space that stores your website’s files and information, making it accessible to others on the internet.
Hosting is typically a paid service; there are free options, but be wary of the security, support, and functionality if you do choose a free host.
Once you’ve selected the domain name, such as yourblog.com, and a host, you’ll be able to create your WordPress account. From there, you can access the dashboard, where you can decide on themes, add plugins, and, of course, write and publish content.
2. Blogger
If you are looking for a popular and free CMS, Blogger, formerly BlogSpot, is a free blogging platform by Google.
To get started, visit Blogger and create an account with your Gmail address and password. From there, you’ll choose a profile. If you don’t wish to have the name associated with your Gmail address on your blog, you can choose a limited profile.
After this, you’ll be taken to the dashboard, where you can choose your blog name and theme. Then it’s as easy as using the straightforward CMS to write your blog.
3. Wix
Wix is another free and simple CMS to consider when setting up a blog. Simply sign up for an account, then you can choose from templates.
Note that while Wix offers many templates, only certain ones offer Wix Blog. If you choose one without this application, you can still add it on later through Wix’s App Market.
Customize the template to fit your vision, then go to the Wix Editor>Menus & Pages>Show More>Rename to name your blog. Wix offers free hosting, but if you want your own domain name, you’ll need to establish that and then connect it to your blog via the Wix Editor. Once these logistics are set, you’re ready to start a new post and get to blogging.
Now that you know the ins and outs of starting a blog, you’re ready to get started! Evaluate CMS platforms based on support, security, and design and functionality features.
Once you’ve decided on a CMS, the platform will make the rest of your work a breeze. And once that blog is up and running, you can start considering even more options, like marketing and advertising, to make your brand known and even turn a profit.

If your SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay per click) teams exist in complete silos, it’s time to change that.
Commonly held opposing viewpoints are: PPC is too complex, and SEO is too slow. (For the record, I don’t agree.)
When these two teams collaborate, you’ll be rewarded with magical insights, learnings, and results that neither team could get on its own.
These channels aren’t meant to be siloed, and getting them aligned is one of the most underrated ways to improve your overall digital marketing performance.
PPC is one of SEO’s most powerful tools — and vice versa. Here are seven ways to thrive in both SEO and PPC.

1. Avoid paid keyword traps.
Sharing keyword intelligence is a standard best practice. Sometimes, certain types of keywords can have subtle differences, and end up aligning to the wrong intent. It’s important to understand the intent behind search terms, because you want to avoid keyword traps.
SEO-focused marketers are the masters of understanding search intent, and therefore collaboration between SEO and SEM is critical.
For example, the restaurant POS software, Toast, is bidding on “phone systems for restaurants” but they don’t sell phone systems! They’re broad match bidding on terms containing “restaurant.”

This is why Google has become a modern day casino for advertisers. The marketing team at Toast is gambling on the mere possibility that restaurant managers seeking a phone system might also be in the market for POS software.
While it might work, the potential for bleeding is likely. That said, Toast is venture-backed and valued at $4.9B, so this is probably a gamble they’re comfortable taking.
You need to study the search results closely if you want to master the art of understanding keyword intent. Google often signals their own interpretation of a search term, based on the types of results.
For example, if you Google “sales funnel” the search engine results page (SERP) indicates you’re looking for the definition of a sales funnel.
The results are largely definition style SEO pages, and therefore it’s obvious that a product page wouldn’t rank for this query.

Let’s examine another example of a keyword trap. If you perform a Google search for “online training” you’re going to see two vastly different results in the ads.

Cisco – Virtual Classroom Solutions

Udemy – Best Selling Online Courses

These are two wildly different search intents. How do you know if a searcher wants online training software versus online courses? There’s no way to be 100% certain.
However, the organic results are overwhelmingly online course companies such as Udemy, Lynda, and Coursera. The people also ask box is hinting at the search intent, because most of the questions are about online training.

Based on what the organic listings are showing, I would conclude that Cisco’s ad is largely irrelevant. They might get lucky and grab some clicks, but they’re probably losing money on this ad set.
Now, the question becomes, do they care? Probably not. After all, they’re a $180B market cap, which means Cisco can afford to continue making Google rich.

What about the small guys? This is where SMBs have a tremendous disadvantage, and can’t afford to bleed on paid ads like the behemoths. For that reason, I would recommend startups prioritize SEO efforts in order to avoid the royal rumble of paid ads with giant companies like Cisco.
Let’s also examine “sms marketing examples” where Mobile Monkey nails the search intent with this page, and gets rewarded with the organic featured snippet. Meanwhile, advertisers are off the mark.

Vonage – hoping that a subset of searchers might be interested in APIs for SMS.
Remarkety – hoping that a subset of searchers might be interested in SMS marketing solutions.

What’s the bottom line?
SEOs will habitually review SERP signals to make sure the content they publish matches with Google’s organic search results, and ultimately delivers a high degree of satisfaction with regard to searcher task accomplishment.
Is your content helping searchers accomplish the task they need to complete?
This is particularly useful when there are potential keyword traps — words and phrases that sound good, but have dual meanings or a mismatched intent.

If potential dual meanings exist in your industry, SEOs will catch them. All that’s left to do is to get them to share their insights with your PPC team.

2. Share PPC insights on best performing headlines and descriptions.
When your SEO team decides to pursue a new keyword, it can be months before they see measurable results. If it was the right keyword and phrase to target, that’s success.
But if click-through rate (CTR) and engagement is low — even if it ranks on page one — you’ve now spent your time and budget running circles in an SEO hamster wheel. And, by the way, CTR is an indirect SEO ranking factor.
SEM is the exact opposite. You’ll know whether or not PPC ad copy is working — usually within a matter of days with low investment. So you might consider using PPC to get fast, short-term results, and use those insights to fuel your larger SEO strategy.
Test as many ad copy variations as possible, until you have the data that will support your SEO campaigns.
Here are some things you can test:

Headlines, title tags, and description copy.
Keywords and topics.
Specific keyword angles.
Landing page variations.
New product messaging.

PPC campaign results will reveal each headline’s impact on clicks, time on page, bounce rate, goal completions, and other meaningful engagement signals. If you run longer tests, you can also learn how a specific keyword’s demand fluctuates from month to month, which will help you set more accurate expectations with your SEO team.
Use PPC insights to choose the best topics, write and optimize your headlines and meta descriptions, and align to your audience’s needs and expectations.
3. Optimize your landing pages to reap both SEO and PPC benefits.
Spending money on paid ads without running efficient landing page tests could result in tons of wasted money and effort. 
The benefits of optimizing your landing pages are fairly obvious: you don’t burn precious marketing dollars on ineffective content experiences.
If you’re looking for more in-depth specifics on creating landing pages that convert, I would recommend checking out 19 of the Best Landing Page Design Examples You Need to See in 2020.
Ultimately, SEO & PPC teams must align their most valuable assets —landing pages.
3 important actions need to happen:

You have a noindexed, conversion focused landing page built for PPC advertising. Your main goal conversions are going to be form completions, demo requests, live chat inquiries, etc.
You are working with the SEO and CRO teams to build new landing page variants with intelligent hypotheses. Your goal is to split test these pages and monitor the results.
You are working with the SEO team to create a separate asset, which is longer-form and educational, on the same topic for which you want to drive organic visibility.

Ultimately, marketers should craft a surround sound search engine marketing strategy.
Say, for example, a shopper searches for your brand or product name, clicks on your PPC ad, stays for a minute, and then exits the page.
Days later, they search for guides to help them choose a solution, which leads them to an educational piece of content you produced on that same topic.
As they click around, browse, and scroll through the online listings, your brand is on their radar. They get used to your tone, visuals, and messaging. If they liked what they saw through your PPC ads, they’ll look for your name in a sea of organic listings the next time — and vice versa.
In brand marketing, what gets repeated gets remembered, and what gets remembered, gets done.
SEO expert, Rand Fishkin, wrote about the ludicrously powerful influence of brand repetition in his 2020 election recap article:
“Hear a song over and over, and even if you hate it, your brain will subconsciously hum it. Hear a brand name over and over and you’ll assume the company behind it must be a big, important, and probably trustworthy one.”
4. Work together to achieve SERP domination.
Taking up the first organic spot for your target keyword is not enough anymore. There’s so much noise and clutter in Google’s result pages, that you need to occupy as much digital real estate as possible.
Udemy has clearly figured this out. Check out their ad + organic listing, flying high together for the SERP targeting “excel courses.”

Check out GetVoIP’s SEO + PPC combo strategy for an insanely competitive SERP. They’ve got a killer landing page targeting “Business VoIP” and it’s soaking up both organic and paid traffic. This particular SERP is a double whammy for GetVoIP, because they’ve also got the precious featured snippet.
You can also see Nextiva ranking organically below GetVoIP. Since Nextiva is mentioned positively and has excellent reviews on GetVoIP’s listing page, this is a strategic chess move which is part of the surround sound search marketing playbook, coined by Irina Nica from HubSpot.

The list of SERP features that could push your organic success down the page is endless, including: 

Rich snippets.
Google shopping results.
Knowledge cards.
People also ask.
Video carousels.
Image packs.
Localized results.

It can leave your SEO team feeling deflated, doing all that grueling work to earn a #1 organic ranking just to be thwarted by Google’s UX schemes.
The reality is that Google is extorting companies for playing brand defense. (Bing is just as guilty).

While this is a challenge for some marketers, don’t hate the player — hate the game. You can still fight back with smart collaboration between SEO, PPC, and affiliate partners.
Apart from Google’s questionable ethics, you should still continue to bid against the high value search terms you’re already ranking for, in order to achieve what’s known as SERP domination.
Here’s how the productivity platform ClickUp achieves this.

Out of the top five results we can see above the fold, ClickUp took up two. The paid result takes you to a product page, while the organic result is a blog post — both super specific to the search term.
To implement this, analyze your SEO performance to find your highest-ranking pieces and run paid ads against those keywords. This will unlock SERP domination for your most valuable keywords.
5. Reveal “hidden keywords” within the buyer journey.
It’s unrealistic to expect every keyword, blog post, landing page, and paid search ad to convert visitors into leads. In fact, I’ve talked about this extensively with Chris Walker on the state of demand generation podcast — stop creating content purely for lead generation, and instead focus on educating a niche audience.
All roads lead back to user intent. Your keyword research needs to focus on the searcher’s ultimate goal and be broken down into three main intent buckets: transaction vs. research vs. education.
Here’s how we’ve mapped out the customer journey at Nextiva within the context of marketing our commercial phone service offering. Each stage of the buying process has a distinct emotion tied to it.

Unaware: Not aware I have a problem → I’ve never actually considered we may have a problem communicating with our customers, prospects and partners.

Problem aware: I think I have a problem but I’m not doing anything about it yet → I think we’re having issues communicating with our customers, prospects and partners, but I haven’t started searching for a solution yet.

Solution Aware: I’m actively searching for a solution → I’ve finally realized we have a problem communicating with our customers, prospects and partners, so I’m searching for a solution online.

Product aware: I’ve found a few solutions, including yours → I’ve seen your solution, but I’m not entirely convinced you’re the right one for me.

Most aware: I’ve chosen your product and I’m ready to commit → Show me the buy button.

This concept is nothing new. HubSpot pioneered the buyer’s journey in B2B before it was a big thing.

Based on the buying process, you should bucket your keywords for SEO and PPC campaigns into:

Educational: Guide, tutorial, resource, questions like ‘how,’ ‘what,’ and ‘why,’ examples, tips.

Solution: Best, reviews, integrations, comparison, top.

Transactional: Demo, free trial, buy, pricing.

Advertisers should avoid bidding on education keywords, and focus on solution + transactional.
The following graphic is a brilliant resource from Mike Sonders, outlining the highest demand keywords for SaaS consideration stage content:

At this point, you should align with your PPC team on the following:

Which keywords have tolerable CPC (cost per click) + high conversion rates?
Which keywords have the best cost per acquisition?
Which keywords are the most profitable?
Which keywords actually generate meaningful pipeline value?
Which keywords have the best sales close rates?
Which keywords drive the longest LTV customers?

At this crossroad is where the greatest SEO and PPC magic typically happens.
6. Use audience insights to test and clarify messaging.
I mentioned the value of instant results that come with PPC campaigns compared to SEO. Another key benefit of PPC is testing ads against various demographics and interests.
You can analyze specifics such as:

Age groups
Gender
Household income
Locations
Devices
Interests and lifestyle

We once tested some aspirational messaging on Nextiva’s homepage. And I’ll be honest, it bombed.

At least we were able to course correct quickly, thanks to the speediness of learning via paid ads.
The greatest benefit of audience targeting is that you can test brand and product-specific messages against various demographics and interest groups. Some companies claim they’ve mastered the art of personalization based on the website traffic segment visiting the page, but I have yet to see one company do this excellently.
Pro tip: Look at the search terms report in your Google Ads platform (formerly Google AdWords) to find those long-tail gold mines. These are the search terms that are actually generating clicks from your broad and phrase match campaigns.
With this unique wealth of knowledge, you’ll be able to better inform your SEO strategy by unlocking hidden long-tail opportunities, aligned to your different target audience segments.
7. Apply PPC conversion data to your SEO strategy.
The benefit of search engine optimization is that the longer you do it, the more actionable your data becomes. At Nextiva, our SEO strategy is aligned closely to our PPC campaigns, therefore allowing us to grow organic traffic in a meaningful way, rather than vanity driven top-of-funnel visibility.

We’ve followed HubSpot’s classic pillar clustering model to rank for outrageously competitive head terms like VoIP (mind blowing 80,000 monthly searches), supported by adjacent longer tail content all cross-linked together.
Not only is this a brilliant internal linking mechanism, but it helps your website build authority and topical depth. Eventually, Google starts to closely associate your brand with important concepts and entities. This is how you evolve past SEO 101 and unlock SEO mastery.
Ranking for an 80,000 monthly search volume keyword is pretty damn sweet. But it’s even better when you’re at position zero with a glorious featured snippet.

Why did Nextiva focus on ranking for VoIP? Because our PPC data told us it drives larger line size opportunities. That’s the beauty of SEO & PPC alignment — uncovering those precious hidden insights.
Your PPC team operates like a stock broker, optimizing for the highest return on investment. This means that their marketing campaign reports tell them which keywords:

Convince the most visitors to become subscribers and leads.
Generate the most engagement.
Lead to most purchases.
Are the most profitable.

Believe it or not, most SaaS companies are not running profitable Google Ads campaigns. There are many reasons why this happens. I’ve spoken extensively about this with Chris Walker on the State of Demand Generation podcast.
What’s the bottom line?
PPC conversion data is powerful. When you match these keywords to your SEO goals, you can focus your organic SEO efforts on keywords that will make the biggest difference to your organic search traffic — including brand awareness, engagement, and net-new customer acquisition.
SEO + PPC = Search Marketing Glory
When you break down your SEO and PPC silos, you’ll unlock a world of opportunities. Use this list and start uniting your SEO and PPC teams without getting overwhelmed.
It’s not about SEO vs. PPC anymore — it’s about crafting a holistic approach to search marketing, increasing your competitive advantage across your best performing channels, and reaching your target customers exactly when (and how) they are looking for you.

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