For those who may have recently started up their own business, you may want to consider marketing your brand through one or various social media platforms. A social platform is a online application that allows a business to develop, manage, and adapt social media solutions and services. Businesses typically use social media to further promote their brand and bring awareness to their services, and it gives them the opportunity to communicate directly with customers outside of phone calls and emails. While there are many different social media platforms to choose from, such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your business has to be on every single platform. Some platforms have more benefits than others, it all depends on what you are looking to achieve.
With so many options to choose from, the main question you should ask yourself is, “what social media platform works best for my business?” To help you narrow down your options, we’ve created a guide on the most popular social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and Linkedin. Here is an in-depth analysis of the five main social media platforms, going over which is the “best option” for your business and your business goals.
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1. The Importance of a Strong Brand Presence (PPC)
2. The Importance of Content Writing for Your Brand
3. How to Define and Redefine Your Brand with Content Writing
4. Tips on Content Writing for a Brand
Why Your Business Should Be On Social Media
As mentioned in the beginning, many businesses will use social media to help promote their brand and to communicate with consumers of a direct basis. However, there is more to those two features. While most companies have their own direct website, customers can leave their own reviews on the company website. With social media, you can get more personal with potential or existing customers, as this creates a bond between business and customer. By replying to customer inquiries and comments, this can help generate customer satisfaction and gets more traffic to your business’s website and social profiles.
Now, we will go into each of the five social media platforms we mentioned above, and discuss why they would be a good fit for your business. We will lead off with one of the more popular social media platforms for business, and that is Facebook.
Why Should You Care About Creating Targeted Audiences?
Platforms like Facebook or Google put a high level of importance on user experience for their users. Meeting those expectations will improve your ad performance (how high up on the search engine results pages your ads are shown), and reduce the cost of your ads.
But, how do they measure user experience?
One of the ways Google and Facebook measure user experience is bounce rate. A low bounce rate indicates to online advertising platforms that you are serving users a relevant experience.
So, what is bounce rate?
- A “bounce” is when a visitor doesn’t navigate to a different page on your site after arriving.
Bounce rate, then, is just the percentage of incoming page interactions that are bounces. - By targeting the people who are most likely to want to work with you (who you also want to work with), you can improve your bounce rate. After all, they are the users most likely to navigate through your site to learn more about you. Simple enough, right?
With that out of the way, let’s go into how to use targeting information with Google Ads to lower your bounce rate and improve your ad performance.
Demographic Targeting With Google Ads
With Google, you can individually customize the demographics targeting for each of your ad campaigns by gender, age, parental status, and household income. By doing so, your ads are likely to be shown to a more limited audience (but it’s worth the trade-off).
The process to accomplish this is done through your Google Ads account from the Campaign tab. We won’t list all of the details here, but if you are interested in doing this, Google has a help page that lists the steps to take to add demographics targeting.
Utilizing Negative Keywords
With the topic of optimization, we can’t ignore negative keywords. If you’re creating ad campaigns, you should already have an idea of what keywords are and why they’re important. But, negative keywords generally come into importance after you’ve gotten started.
In essence, negative keywords do the opposite of regular keywords (in the context of ad campaigns). Keywords tell Google what searches you want your ad to appear for; negative keywords tell Google what searches you don’t want your ad to appear for.
You want to utilize negative keywords for the same reasons that we wanted to utilize demographics targeting. It accomplishes exactly the same purpose, but with different means.
So, let’s hop into the different types of negative keywords.
Negative Keyword Types
Negative keywords can be of three different types: broad match, phrase match, and exact match. They operate according to their names, but it’s best to show examples to avoid any confusion.
Most of the time Higher ed executive search firm are looking for administrative and executive roles. Let’s say they don’t want their advertising displayed for search queries containing “teachers.”
If you add high school teacher as a negative broad match keyword, any search query containing both “high school” and “teacher” won’t trigger an ad. So, if someone searches “how to work at a high school as a teacher,” an ad won’t show.
Alternatively, if you add high school teacher as a negative phrase match keyword, it will only prevent an ad from showing when a search query contains “high school teacher” as an intact phrase. So, an ad could potentially still show for “how to become a teacher at my high school,” but it won’t for “how to become a high school teacher.”
Finally, adding high school teacher as a negative exact match keyword only stops an ad from showing when someone searches “high school teacher” and nothing else. A negative exact match wouldn’t prevent your ad from showing for either of the two previous search query examples.
It’s powerful stuff! As you can imagine, there are many kinds of search queries you don’t want your ads appearing for. Depending on the exact nature of your recruiting firm, you might favor one negative keyword type over another in order to accomplish this.
Negative Keyword Resources
To get you started with negative keywords, there are many lists compiled on the internet. We recommend using the AdWords Negative Keywords List from PaidInsights, which lists over 400 negative keywords, organized by category.
If you are still confused about the concept of negative keywords, WordStream has a good article about negative keyword match types that goes more in-depth about how they work and why you would want to use them.
Optimizing Ad Campaigns With… Your Website?
That’s right. Ad campaigns can only perform as well as your website is set up and designed. It’s important that you pay close attention to your website, as it’s ultimately where web visitors decide whether or not they want to work with you.
The most basic thing you can do is to make sure your ads are aligned with what users will be able to do when they land on your website. If the ad has a call-to-action, make sure they can accomplish that action on the landing page (a.k.a. the page they land on from clicking on an ad). Always aim for the highest alignment between the scope of the services listed on the ad and what information displays on the landing page.
Outside of aligning page content with ad content, there are general web design mistakes to stay away from that don’t relate to your ads.
One of the biggest mistakes we see with web design across different industries is not utilizing a conversion mindset. What matters in the end is that users come to your site and decide to work with you. Everything else is secondary.
There’s a lot of “cool,” trendy web-design features like sliders and video backgrounds floating around these days. However, time and time again, studies show that sliders are non-intuitive and distracting features.
Keep your web design features simple, and prioritize for mobile device usage. Features like sliders and video backgrounds not only are distracting, but increase the loading time of your website. A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
Would you rather have a pretty site, or a site with a better conversion rate? If you really must insist on these features, run comparisons between using these features and not using them. Run the tests for two weeks at a time for each version, and see which gives you better conversion rates.
- Research hashtags and the context they are used in so you may not dilute your message. The tweet above this paragraph is from Digiorno, a frozen pizza company. They used a hashtag, “#WhyIStayed,” and turned it into a joke about how the pizza was too good to leave. What they missed by not researching was that “#WhyIStayed” was a hashtag about why abused partners stayed in relationships, leading to the apology and bad press for them that day. A widespread hashtag could make your company seen as a joke if it is a meme unintentionally copied, or incompetent if it is a more serious hashtag used for corporate gain. Similar to the political posts, avoid posting hashtags that you do not know are safe to use in correlation with your brand until you research what they are and why it is trending.
Where To Go From Here
There’s a lot to learn about ad campaigns and web design. Depending on what stage of the process you’re at, your next steps might look different.
If you’re managing your ads yourself, start right away with compiling demographic information and setting up demographic targeting for your ads.
Then, compile a list of negative keywords and add it to your campaigns.
If you have a web designer or are doing it yourself, schedule a website audit to check for unnecessary features that are potentially hurting your conversion rate.
If you want to get all of this and more set up for your recruiting firm on a faster timeline, we can help.
At Mack Media, we offer web design and digital marketing services, including PPC (Google Ads), Social Media Marketing, and SEO. Every customer relationship is different, so we can give you a custom package that contains only the services you care about. Call us today!
