Lauren Neels is a Product Marketing Manager at Marin Software. She previously worked in client services here at Marin, and at a marketing agency before that. She has been using her expertise in paid search, e-commerce marketing, and data analytics to help her clients deliver maximum performance on their digital campaigns for over six years. Outside of work Lauren enjoys live music, yoga, and hiking with her dogs.
Amazon is a colossal marketplace where brands fight to capture the attention of millions of potential customers. To beat fierce competition, brands must go beyond the basics.
But first, lets make sure all the basics are covered. Then, read on to learn advanced tips and tactics that will help your Amazon Ads and Listings stand out.
There are three main Amazon ad formats - Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display. Let’s review each ad type’s traits and use cases.
Sponsored Product is the most widely used advertising format on Amazon. These ads drive targeted traffic to your product listings by showcasing your product on the results page for specific search terms that you select as keywords. The sponsored ads appear alongside the organic search results, making this ad type feel very native to the user’s shopping experience. Shoppers may not even notice they’re clicking on an ad.
Sponsored Brand Ads allow you to showcase your brand and multiple products in a single ad. These are ideal for top-of-the-funnel advertising and are a great way to increase brand awareness. The downside is that these ads feel less organic to users and more like traditional ads, which may lead them to be biased against clicking on them. When running sponsored brand campaigns, it’s important to include eye-catching images or videos that will draw attention immediately.
The unique thing about Sponsored Display Ads is that you can use them to target shoppers regardless of where they decide to shop — on or off Amazon. Through machine-learning and multi-format creatives, you can reach your audience on Amazon and across thousands of other websites and apps.
Instead of focusing on keywords, these ads target users based on their shopping habits. Amazon claims that sellers who use these types of ads see an average of 33.9% more impressions, 3.6% more detail page views, and 2.6% more new-to-brand customers. Note those stats are for customers who run sponsored display campaigns alongside Sponsored Product and Sponsored Brand campaigns. So don’t rely just on one ad format, try all three and watch them work together!
Amazon sellers are considered ‘endemic’ advertisers - meaning they run ads on Amazon to sell products on Amazon. But Amazon advertising isn’t just for retailers anymore! Non-endemic brands like banks, insurance companies, and streaming services now have the opportunity to advertise to Amazon’s massive audience. While endemic ads target customers who are actively shopping on the platform, non-endemic ads are focused on driving traffic to a website rather than an Amazon store.
This means that even if you don't sell on Amazon, you can still run display ads through Amazon's Demand-Side Platform (DSP), which we'll talk more about later.
According to Junglescout, Sponsored brand campaigns see the highest average ROAS, followed by Sponsored Products, then Sponsored Display. It’s best to run all three ad types alongside one another, but if you’re just getting started, we recommend starting with Sponsored Brand campaigns if your goal is to improve brand awareness or starting with Sponsored Product campaigns if your goal is to drive sales.
Make sure that you have all of these basic optimizations covered before you move on to more advanced tactics. We’ll discuss those in the next section.
Conduct thorough keyword research to identify relevant search terms that potential customers are using to find products similar to yours. Marketing automation tools like Marin can automate keyword research for you by crawling the search terms that past purchasers have used to get to you product page and suggesting terms that drive a high volume of clicks to be added as keywords. The ‘DIY’ method is to use the Amazon search bar for keyword research. Simply type your core keywords into the search bar and review the queries it autocompletes. Add all relevant query variations as target keywords. You can do the same thing with the Google search bar too.
It's also important to understand the different types of Amazon Keywords:
Frontend Keywords: Keywords that are included in the copy for the product listing, i.e. any key terms in your product title and description. Frontend keyword optimization is the reason that products on Amazon aren’t called simple names like “Almay Lip Gloss”, but rather “Almay Hydrating Lip Gloss, Soft Natural Colors, Prebiotic Complex, Hyaluronic Filling-Sphere Technology, 200 Rose Glow, 0.1 fl oz.” Including all those keywords in your product name may not look cute, but it helps Amazon’s algorithm understand which search queries to return your products for.
Backend Keywords: These are the keywords that you add to your campaign in Amazon Ads Manager. They won’t be visible to customers but will guide the algorithm on which search queries to serve your ads on.
Be sure to incorporate as many frontend keywords as possible in your product listing, and feature the most important ones first. Your list of backend keywords should be more robust and contain all target keywords you’ve gathered through your research.
Make sure your copy is optimized for both search engines and potential customers. To showcase your product's features and benefits, write compelling product titles, detailed and informative descriptions, and provide high-quality images. A well-optimized listing not only improves your organic search ranking but also increases the likelihood of converting clicks into sales.
Make sure you’re adhering to Amazon’s product title requirements, listed here. Key takeaways are:
Failing to follow these guidelines may lead Amazon to suppress your listing.
When it comes to descriptions, Amazon highly recommends using bullet points to highlight your product’s top 5 features. Amazon Sellers can add 5 bullet points, while Amazon Vendors are able to add up to 10. Start by listing the most important feature as your first bullet point, then move on to the second most important, and so on. Unlike titles, you should prioritize clarity over including lots of keywords when writing your bullet points. We recommend reviewing Amazon’s guide to writing good bullet points.
Track key performance metrics such as conversion rate, click-through rate (CTR), and advertising cost of sales (ACoS) regularly to gauge the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. Use this data to identify areas for improvement and optimize your ad performance over time. Check out our detailed overview of key metrics and tools for measuring the ROI of e-commerce campaigns for more info.
Amazon Audiences are ready-made targeting groups that you can serve ads to with just a few clicks. Apply audience targets in addition to your target keywords for precise targeting. You can target four types of audiences:
In-market: Users who have recently been shopping for products similar to yours.
Lifestyle: Audiences built based on an aggregate of shopping and viewing behaviors across Amazon, Prime Video, Twitch and more. Amazon aggregates this data and sorts users into groups like “makeup enthusiasts” or “foodies”.
Interest: Interest audiences are built based on browsing and buying behavior, similar to Lifestyle segments, but are more specific, like “interested in Asian food” or “interested in wedding makeup.”
Life events: These are groups of people that are about to experience a life event, like going on vacation or moving.
Test targeting different types of audiences to discover which are most engaged with your brand.
To stand out in Amazon search results, offer promotions, discounts, and exclusive deals. Amazon's Coupons and Lightning Deals make it easy to run promotions. Not only are the coupons and deals displayed in your product listing, your product can also be listed on the Amazon Coupons page and deals page giving it visibility to users who weren’t even searching for it.
Once you've got the basics covered, try these advanced tips and tactics to elevate your Amazon advertising game.
Customers are gravitating towards video more than ever. Using product demonstrations, customer testimonials, and lifestyle clips in your ads is a great way to convey your brand message and connect with your target audience. Video is especially important for Sponsored Brand campaigns, which enable you to showcase a video and a few featured products right on the search results page. You can find Amazon’s detailed guide to creating Sponsored Brands video ads here.
If you’ve seen success selling on Amazon, consider advertising your Amazon store on other channels, like paid search and paid social. For example, many retailers include a sitelink to their Amazon Store in their paid search ads, with copy like “Buy on Amazon”. That way, the majority paid search traffic is still being driven to their website, but searchers have the option to buy on Amazon too. Having the option to order a product on Amazon may push users over the purchasing threshold since they’re familiar with the Amazon user experience and its quick purchasing process. If the product is available for Prime delivery, that’s another needle-mover.
It’s important to remember that if you do this while using Amazon’s tracking system, none of the conversions driven by your paid search campaigns will be attributed to paid search. Marin has built a cross-channel tracking solution to solve this problem. Click here to learn about Amazon Attribution.
With an increasing number of shoppers browsing and purchasing on mobile devices, you want to be sure your Amazon listings and ads are optimized for mobile. Product titles have a 200 character limit on desktop, but only 70 characters will show on mobile, so be sure that all important info like brand name, product type, and key features are covered in the first 70 characters of your product title.
It’s also important to optimize the images on your product page for mobile. While you’re able to add up to nine images, only the first 7 images will be displayed on mobile, so choose those early images wisely.
Lastly, remember that mobile screens offer less space to describe your product. On mobile, only the product name, brand, and images show ‘above the fold’, meaning users don’t have to scroll to see them. Mobile users may swipe through your images and skim over the details. Therefore, it’s valuable to showcase key selling points in one or two of the images, like in the example from Revlon below:
If your goal is to expand your reach and attract new customers, Amazon’s Demand-Side Platform (DSP) may be the answer. It enables you to programmatically buy ads and reach new and existing audiences both on and off Amazon, all the while using Amazon’s first-party data to target users in your demographic. Ads through Amazon DSP will serve on Amazon and on partner sites like Twitch, IMDb, Audible and more. Hitting users with ads on the sites where they spend their time can drive them back to your Amazon store. Amazon DSP offers unique options for ad types and targeting, and you can learn more about them in our Guide to Amazon DSP.
Leverage advanced optimization techniques not available through Amazon's native advertising platform with a third party bidding tool. Whether you're looking to increase sales or drive brand awareness, bidding solutions like Marin can help you achieve your goals. Of course, Amazon offers it’s own automated bidding strategies, but many marketers struggle to hit their targets with Amazon’s solutions and turn to Marin’s tried and true algorithms. Plus, since Marin houses all your front and backend marketing data, its algorithms often have access to conversion, revenue, and targeting data that Amazon does not. Learn how Marin’s bidding drove a 155% increase in revenue for an Amazon retailer here.
Like all advertising platforms, the keys to success on Amazon are staying on top of the latest trends, continuously optimizing your listings, and testing different copy and placements until you find what works for you.
If you’re finding it all a bit overwhelming, you can manage and optimize your Amazon ads alongside all your other digital marketing channels in Marin’s unified grid. MarinOne even comes with a dedicated digital marketing expert who you can consult with on strategy. If you’re not sure how to get your Amazon campaigns to hit your ROAS goals, Marin can help. Schedule a demo with our team to learn more.
Arguably the biggest innovation the paid search industry has seen in the past decade is the advent of Smart Bidding, Google’s automated bidding solution. I remember when I first entered the industry as an Account Coordinator… Ah, the good (or bad?) old days. A majority of my time was spent manually updating CPC bids for every keyword in my client’s Google and Bing Ad accounts. I would analyze how each campaign was pacing toward my client’s KPI and calculate new bids multiple times a week.
Enter Google’s tROAS and tCPA smart bidding strategies. I remember my Google account reps encouraging my team to test these automated strategies and how skeptical we all were. The only automated bidding we had heard of in the past was through Marin! But as the years went by and Google’s automation won more and more bidding tests, Smart Bidding became the norm.
Now manual bidding is a thing of the past – manual CPC isn’t even an option anymore. And what paid search marketer isn’t relieved to be freed of the tedious tasks associated with manual bidding?
These publisher bidding strategies are great… but they’re an incomplete solution. What if you want budget pacing, not just ROAS or CPA, to be considered in bidding decisions? Can you ask Google’s algorithm to do that? Not without a complex custom script… and I certainly don’t know how to code.
Managing budget pacing still requires manual intervention – that is unless you use Marin! Read on to understand some of the ways Marin makes smart bidding even better.
Jumping across publisher tools can be time-consuming and fragment your workflows and data. With Marin, all your different campaigns across Google, Bing, LinkedIn, Facebook, and more are unified in one UI.
Marin unifies publisher data from tools like Google and Microsoft ads with backend data from tracking solutions like Google Analytics. We even have our own tracking solution, Marin Attribution, which is a more straightforward alternative to Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
All that data comes together in our interactive, customizable reporting grids. From campaigns, all the way down to individual keywords, front-end metrics – like costs and clicks – are married to backend metrics – like conversions and revenue – and attributed to the correct source. You can even create your own custom columns with the calculations that matter most to you. That means no more spreadsheets.
Transitioning your reporting and analysis from an Excel grid to the Marin grid eliminates the need for any manual data wrangling, saving time and improving data accuracy. Check out how easy it is to analyze performance in Marin.
Marin makes it easier than ever to analyze cross-channel performance and clearly determine what is working well and what needs attention. If you decide to take any action based on that analysis, Marin makes that process easier than ever, too.
After using Marin’s reporting grid to determine what’s working and what’s not, you can use our multi-edit functionality to make changes. Update your smart bidding settings like strategy, target, bid cap, and more in Marin and avoid wasting time hopping between unintuitive publisher UIs.
If you find yourself grappling with questions of how much you should spend on each of your campaigns, let Marin solve them for you. Our budget allocation solution harnesses the power of AI to ensure your budget is distributed as efficiently as possible across campaigns and channels.
It all starts with your goals. First, you’ll meet with your Marin team to discuss your KPI targets and spend goals. Next, you’ll group your campaigns into different spend groups. Some examples of typical spend groups are brand, non-brand, retargeting, and prospecting.
Marin’s AI will take it from there. It will analyze how each of your campaigns is currently pacing toward your KPIs and review impression share metrics to determine if there is more room for a campaign to spend in the SERP or if that campaign is already dominating. It’ll then allocate your budget across all the campaigns in the given bucket based on each campaign’s potential.
You can either auto-apply Marin’s budget recommendations, or review them in the Marin app and apply them manually as you see fit. Manage it all in Marin’s budget pacing dashboard, which showcases not only how your budget groups are pacing toward spend goals, but revenue and ROAS trends as well.
The publishers all provide recommendations to improve performance. But if you look closely, these recommendations always seem to lead to you spending more money on ads — not necessarily getting you any closer to hitting your KPI targets. Marin’s recommendation engine is free from publisher bias and has complete context on how all of your campaigns are doing across your customer lifecycle. This makes it more accurate than Google or Bing’s recommendations. And just like Google’s recommendations, they can be applied with one click.
In the modern paid media landscape, maintaining independence from domineering publisher tools is more valuable than ever. If our blog hasn’t convinced you of that yet, Marin’s unbiased recommendations will.
If you’re only using publisher tools for paid search media buying, you're limiting your marketing program. Marin can help you save time and improve your ROAS or CPA in countless ways. The best part? Marin is completely customizable. Unlike the publisher tools' one-size-fits-all approach, we can adapt our software to your business’s specific needs. Share your struggles with a Marin rep today and learn what we can do to help!
If you’re still unsure what Marin can do for you, see some of our favorite features in action.
Working in retail media is challenging, fast-paced, and certainly never boring. It’s one of the most competitive spaces for media buyers to operate in. You have to constantly keep your finger on the pulse of industry trends and optimize campaigns daily based on the ever-changing marketplace.
We feel your pain. And we know you’re good at your job. But everyone could use a little help from AI these days! No matter what type of product you sell, Marin can make your life easier.
Our platform was built by retail media marketers, for retail media marketers, because a niche industry requires a specialized solution. We also built Marin to be flexible and customizable so it can meet each user's unique needs. Here are five ways Marin can help you work less and smash your performance goals.
Most retail media marketers manage many campaigns in different accounts and channels, and publisher walled-gardens can make it difficult to deploy automation across those channels. Marin was built to solve this problem. Marin’s dynamic budget allocation harnesses the power of AI to ensure your budget is distributed as efficiently as possible, across all your campaigns.
All you have to do is map each group of campaigns with a shared budget to a Strategy and set the spend target for the month or quarter. Then let us know what your goals are - ROAS, conversion volume, impression share, etc. Marin will take it from there.
By comparing each campaign’s performance against your KPI targets and analyzing impression share metrics to determine which campaigns have incremental room to drive more conversions, Marin will intelligently allocate your budget across all your campaigns in Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Meta, LinkedIn, and more. Goodbye, budget pacing spreadsheets!
The beauty of this solution lies in its customizability. We’ll start by meeting with your team and discussing your current budgeting workflow and goals. Then, your Marin team will customize the automation to meet your needs. You just sit back, relax, and watch your campaigns meet those spend targets every month.
As a busy digital marketer, one of the worst feelings is knowing that there are opportunities to improve performance but not having the time to act on them. Between investigating the next steps and building bulk sheets, even the simplest optimization initiative ends up taking hours. But with Marin, you can optimize your accounts in seconds.
Marin runs hundreds of daily checks on every account linked to our platform and identifies opportunities for growth. From ad copy improvements to changes to bidding targets to improving account structure, Marin covers the basics for you so you can focus on high-level strategy. Recommendations can be applied with one click, so no manual work is needed to act on your Insights.
For example, the above Insight recommends that our client move their top-performing ads into individual dedicated ad groups. This will help them manage the bid for that specific product independently, which makes sense since it's driving so much volume. To act on this recommendation, they simply need to click ‘Apply Changes.’ Marin will then build the new ad groups and pause the ad in the old group for them. It’s that easy!
See it in action:
Once you link your product feed to Marin, there are countless ways to apply automation based on it. For example, Marin can automatically create a new ad every time a new product is added to your feed. This is extremely helpful for brands that continuously create new products and want Shopping Ad coverage over every product. Rather than spending time every day checking your feed for new products and creating ads for them, automate that tedious process with Marin.
And speaking of shopping ads…
Marin pulls all your Google, Microsoft, and Amazon shopping ads into one unified view and organizes them by SKU. Understand your top-performing SKUs across channels and compare the performance of different channels for the same SKU to see what's working and what's not.
Create and edit shopping ads with our multi-edit grids and bulk creation tool. No more jumping from one publisher tool to another. Manage it all in one Marin Grid. And speaking of all-in-one grids…
The value of using Marin to clean, unify, and visualize all your cross-channel data cannot be overstated. Our clients often describe Marin as a ‘mission control center.’ We integrate with all the major publishers and backend sources of truth. You can link as many different tracking sources as you want, from Google Analytics to Tealium to Marin’s own first-party tracking solution. Marin supports all the major ad formats like sponsored products, sponsored brands, Amazon DSP, and more.
Look how easy it is to link all your data sources:
Marin also solves the challenge of tracking conversions that start on other ad platforms but end on Amazon. For example, lots of retail media marketers include sitelinks to ‘buy on Amazon’ in their paid search ads. Additionally, marketers may drive traffic from ads on Meta to an Amazon storefront. If you’re just using the Amazon Ads UI for reporting, there’s no way to attribute those conversions back to their original source. Marin’s cross-channel Amazon Attribution solves that problem. You can see Amazon conversions attributed to the paid search or social campaign that drove the conversion right in the Marin UI.
With all your data unified and attributed down to the keyword/product level, reporting on performance has never been easier. Create saved views in our grids to capture data you reference often, or build a custom dashboard using Marin’s data visualization tools. Whether you’re an agency team reporting to a client or a brand reporting marketing performance to upper management, you’ll never have to manually wrangle your data again.
“Marin automates all of our reporting, performance monitoring, and optimization, saving us countless hours per week so we can spend more time focusing on strategy as we expand our presence globally.”
- Philip Ascott, Director of Digital at YOTEL
Check out how quickly you can respond to an ad hoc data request with Marin:
And there you have it! These are just 5 of the countless ways Marin improves the lives of retail media marketers. And don’t just take it from me, check out our case studies where real retail clients have shared their Marin success stories.
The thing that makes Marin more powerful than other marketing automation tools is its customizability. Our technical team will tailor the platform to your needs, and that starts at the very beginning, when you schedule a customized demo with us. We look forward to chatting with you!
Retail e-commerce sales are projected to exceed $8 billion by 2026. Businesses are heavily relying on retail media marketing to capture these sales, drive brand awareness, and improve customer retention. However, without a proper understanding of how these campaigns are performing, it’s nearly impossible to optimize and make informed decisions.
This blog post provides insights and strategies for measuring the return on investment (ROI) of e-commerce marketing campaigns. Learn about the key metrics and tools that can help track and evaluate the success of your marketing efforts.
Understanding and measuring the ROI of e-commerce marketing initiatives is essential for businesses to evaluate the effectiveness of their strategies and make informed decisions. Here are some reasons you should track and measure the ROI of your marketing campaigns.
By measuring ROI, marketers can determine which campaigns are generating the desired results. This allows you to identify which channels, ad campaigns, or promotional activities are driving sales and which ones are underperforming. These insights help allocate marketing budgets effectively and focus on the areas that provide a higher return.
Social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok have become critical advertising channels for retail media marketers. Almost 60% of companies have seen an increase in sales made through social media recently. However, as more social media platforms come into prominence, marketers must allocate their budgets carefully. By understanding the ROI on various social media platforms, you can identify areas where you may be overspending or not getting the desired returns. With this knowledge, you can control costs, optimize your budget allocation, and ensure maximum revenue generation.
Measuring ROI can help you identify the most effective customer acquisition strategies. By evaluating the ROI for different channels, such as paid advertising, social media marketing, or influencer partnerships, you can determine which channels deliver the highest number of customers at the lowest cost. This information enables you to focus your efforts on the most profitable customer acquisition tactics, ultimately leading to increased revenue and business growth.
Measuring ROI helps marketers set realistic benchmarks and goals for marketing campaigns by providing a detailed assessment of past performance that they can compare to industry standards.
Some key metrics include conversion rate, average order value, customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, and return on ad spend. Here is an overview of each of these metrics.
The conversion rate metric measures the percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or subscribing to a newsletter. A higher conversion rate indicates better campaign performance and customer engagement.
The formula for calculating conversion rate is:
Conversion Rate = (Number of Conversions / Number of Visitors) x 100
To visualize conversion rates, you can use various methods such as:
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) measures the amount of money spent on acquiring a new customer. By comparing the CAC with the average customer lifetime value (CLV), businesses can determine the profitability of their marketing efforts.
The formula for CAC is:
CAC = (Total Sales + Marketing Expenses) / Number of New Customers Acquired
To visualize CAC, you can use various methods such as:
AOV calculates the average amount spent by a customer in a single transaction. Monitoring AOV helps evaluate the effectiveness of upselling and cross-selling strategies.
To calculate average order value (AOV):
AOV = Total Revenue / Number of Orders
To visualize AOV, you can use several methods, such as:
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) measures the revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. It provides insights into the profitability of specific ad campaigns or marketing channels.
The formula for calculating return on ad spend (ROAS) is:
ROAS = (Revenue from Ad Campaign / Cost of Ad Campaign) x 100
To visualize ROAS, you can use various methods, such as:
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) assesses the total revenue generated by a customer over their entire relationship with the business. Evaluating CLV helps marketers understand the long-term value of acquiring and retaining customers.
The basic formula for calculating CLV is:
CLV = Customer Value x Average Customer Lifespan
Visualizing CLV can help businesses understand the long-term value of their customers and make informed decisions regarding marketing, customer retention, and customer acquisition strategies. There are various ways to visualize CLV, including:
Various tools and techniques are available for measuring the ROI of e-commerce marketing campaigns. By leveraging these tools and techniques, businesses can track key metrics such as website traffic, conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, and customer lifetime value to accurately measure the success and profitability of their marketing campaigns.
Tools like Google Analytics provide valuable insights into website traffic, user behavior, conversion rates, and other essential metrics. By tracking these metrics, businesses can assess e-commerce campaign performance.
Marketing automation tools like Marin come with built-in analytics and reporting features. They help track marketing campaigns, lead generation, and conversions.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software allows businesses to track customer data throughout the sales cycle. CRM platforms like Salesforce or Zoho CRM provide insights into customer interactions and purchase history.
Running A/B tests allows businesses to compare the performance of different marketing elements, such as website layouts, call-to-action (CTA) buttons, or email subject lines. This helps identify the most effective strategies for improving ROI.
ROI calculation formulas can help businesses determine the financial impact of their marketing efforts. These formulas consider the cost of marketing campaigns and the revenue generated to calculate the ROI percentage.
Measuring the ROI of e-commerce marketing campaigns is critical to understanding the effectiveness of online business strategies. There are several key metrics and tools available to help businesses accurately track and optimize their campaigns, including AOV, ROAS, and CLV. However, the process of tracking and analyzing this data can be time consuming and complex.
With Marin, businesses can leverage advanced analytics and reporting capabilities to gain valuable insights into the performance of their campaigns. The platform provides a centralized hub where businesses can manage and optimize their campaigns, using machine learning and AI-powered insights to maximize ROI.
Start using Marin today to gain deeper insights into how your e-commerce marketing campaigns are performing.
Siloed marketing and sales teams have never been good for businesses. Recognizing this, organizations are attempting to improve alignment between marketing, sales, and customer success. How? By leaning into a relatively new and innovative organizational structure called Revenue Operations or “RevOps.”
Designed to break down the barriers between disparate operational teams, RevOps aims to forge a unified front with a singular reporting line and shared revenue goals. RevOps not only transforms organizational structures, but it also helps streamline digital marketing channels, identify high-performing strategies, and allocate resources effectively — all of which collectively contribute to a more cohesive and successful revenue generation strategy.
When marketing and sales teams work together and implement a RevOps strategy, it can increase overall effectiveness in driving revenue. The combination of improved communication and collaboration streamlines processes, facilitates smoother workflows, enables quicker decision-making, and allows for a more agile response to market changes.
A unified approach to revenue generation also provides a holistic view of the customer journey, which creates a better understanding and anticipation of customer needs, leading to improved satisfaction and loyalty. In addition, enhanced visibility into customer interactions and behaviors allows for more targeted and effective sales and outreach strategies.
Within digital marketing, where multiple channels contribute to customer engagement and conversion, RevOps acts as a strategic orchestrator. Collaboration between marketing, sales, and other revenue-focused teams ensures a unified approach to:
As a result, this alignment not only increases the overall efficiency of digital marketing efforts but also maximizes the impact of each channel on revenue generation.
Streamlining paid advertising with RevOps involves strategically aligning and optimizing various elements to positively impact your advertising efforts. Here are six key steps to achieve this synergy:
Begin by integrating data from advertising platforms, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and other sources. With a centralized repository, marketing, sales, and other teams have access to accurate and real-time data for informed decision making.
Encourage collaboration between marketing and sales teams to align advertising strategies with revenue goals. With collaboration, paid campaigns are more likely to attract high-quality leads and contribute directly to revenue generation.
Use unified data insights to optimize budget allocation across different advertising channels.
RevOps guarantees that advertising budgets are strategically distributed based on performance metrics and aligned with overall revenue objectives.
Make sure that your paid advertising efforts align seamlessly with all other marketing channels. A cohesive approach, facilitated by RevOps, prevents silos and creates a unified brand experience for users across various touchpoints.
Continuously monitor ad performance in real time. With RevOps, you can rapidly identify trends, allowing for quick adjustments to campaigns to maximize their effectiveness.
You’ll also want to ensure a smooth transition from lead generation to conversion — and the key to doing so is to integrate paid advertising efforts with sales processes. RevOps facilitates a seamless handover of qualified leads to the sales team, enhancing the overall efficiency of the revenue engine.
As you strive to optimize revenue generation, the fusion of RevOps and email marketing can help increase engagement levels and conversion rates.
By harnessing unified customer data from email marketing platforms, CRM systems, and other sources, you can create unified customer profiles to meticulously segment your audience, delving into demographics, behaviors, and preferences. With a granular understanding, you can generate highly targeted and personalized email campaigns by tailoring content in a way that makes each message feel relevant and valuable to the recipient, thereby increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion.
Closed-loop reporting in email marketing provides a comprehensive understanding of the complete customer journey, from the initial interaction with an email to the ultimate conversion. In other words, it allows you to gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your email campaigns at every stage of the customer lifecycle. Analyzing which emails have the most significant impact on conversions helps you identify successful strategies and refine your approach to future campaigns.
The integration of automation and workflow tools is instrumental in enhancing efficiency and driving successful customer journeys. By using marketing automation tools, your organization can streamline intricate email workflows and implement strategic lead nurturing programs. Not only does this save time but it also ensures consistent and timely communication with your audience.
The synergy between email marketing workflows and sales processes is equally crucial. Integrating these workflows facilitates a seamless transition for leads from initial engagement to eventual conversion. Automated coordination between marketing and sales teams ensures that the right messages are delivered at the right stages, optimizing the chances of turning leads into loyal customers.
Using behavioral triggers in email marketing can add a dynamic and responsive dimension to your customer engagement strategies that goes beyond generic outreach efforts. By implementing triggers based on customer actions or inactions, you can deliver personalized communication that aligns with individual behaviors. For example, if a customer clicks on a particular product but doesn't complete the purchase, a targeted follow-up email or exclusive offer can be triggered to re-engage them. This can enhance the relevance of the content and also guide customers toward conversions by addressing their specific interests and needs.
Continuously scrutinize email performance metrics and gather customer feedback to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns. This way, you can track what resonates with your audience and what areas need improvement. Whether it's adjusting content or reevaluating overarching strategies, an iterative process ensures that your email campaigns are always evolving to meet the dynamic preferences of your audience. Commitment to constant improvement not only enhances engagement but also contributes to the overall effectiveness of email marketing initiatives, ultimately creating a cycle of refinement that aligns with customer expectations and industry trends.
Gartner projects that 75% of leading global companies are expected to implement a RevOps model by 2025. If you’re not already part of that statistic, it’s time to join the growing ranks of companies embracing RevOps. Here’s how you can do that:
Start by auditing your existing processes to identify any disconnect between departments. Align all available data with your customer's lifecycle stage and formulate a plan to address any gaps. Finally, scrutinize the technology used across customer-facing departments for accurate data tracking.
Next, clearly define lifecycle stage definitions for your team. Evaluate your data to gain insights into the complete customer journey and assess your organization’s financial health. Plan to regularly audit your tech stack to eliminate redundancies and brief your team on the impact of RevOps processes on revenue.
Develop a plan for customer acquisition through inbound sales strategies, follow-up emails, and outbound sales outreach. Create a RevOps dashboard that highlights current challenges and areas for improvement in the customer experience.
Eighty-seven percent of sales and marketing leaders agree that collaboration between sales and marketing is critical for business growth. To ensure business growth and reinforce alignment with revenue and growth goals, you’ll need to conduct regular RevOps check-ins. It’s also a good idea to collaborate with heads of marketing and sales so everyone is on the same page. Follow a structured implementation plan to boost the adoption and optimization of your RevOps strategy.
For RevOps to be successful, your organization’s sales and marketing teams must work in unison. And that means breaking down silos and fostering collaboration across all revenue-focused functions.
MarinOne can help you move away from siloed organizational structures. With our platform, you can seamlessly integrate data from various channels and gain a unified view of the customer journey. Our advanced attribution modeling goes beyond the basics, enabling your organization to make data-driven decisions, optimize budget allocation, and align marketing strategies with broader revenue goals.
MarinOne's strength lies in its ability to streamline the integration of marketing automation platforms into the RevOps framework for cohesive workflows, personalized content delivery, and a direct alignment of marketing efforts with revenue objectives. Additionally, MarinOne's analytics capabilities can help your business gain actionable insights, measure key metrics, and continuously iterate your digital marketing strategies.
Ready to get started? Meet with a Marin rep today.
Promotions and events like holidays or in-store sales often impact the performance of your digital marketing campaigns. It’s important to understand this impact and factor it into your optimization and media plans. If we can predict an increase in site traffic due to an event, we can increase budgets and bids on our paid media campaigns ahead of that event so that we capture as many new customers as possible. Let’s walk through the process of analyzing a recurring event’s impact in Google Sheets. I’ll pretend I work for a big retailer that runs ads during the Super Bowl, and I want to analyze past years’ performance and set benchmarks for this year’s upcoming ad.
I’ve created a workbook that you can use as a template to aggregate your event data. The workbook also contains calendar templates for events that our clients commonly track. More on those later.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to analyzing event data in spreadsheets, using the Super Bowl as an example.
In your publisher tool or reporting system, export the data you want to analyze, segmented by date. In this example, I want to analyze ad views. So I did a data export with two columns – date and ad views – and pasted that in the Sample Data tab. Then, I added two new columns – Events and Category.
In the Sample Calendar tab, I created an event calendar that lists each instance of the Super Bowl and its date. I also recommend adding a Category label if you’re tracking more than one type of event. In this example, I’m keeping it simple and just tracking the Super Bowl. But you could track all your different event types, like sales, promotions, and holidays, in one unified calendar and label events by category. This way, you’ll be able to pivot on the category column and compare different event types.
Use lookup formulas to populate the Events and Categories into their columns in the Sample Data tab. You’ll want to lookup against the dates in the Sample Calendar tab. To populate the ‘Events’ column, use this formula:
=xlookup(A3,'Sample Calendar'!$A$2:$A$8,'Sample Calendar'!$B$2:$B$8,"None")
Paste that formula in cell C2 and double-click on the bottom-right corner of the cell to populate all other rows.
To populate the ‘Category’ column, use this formula:
=xlookup(A2,'Sample Calendar'!$A$2:$A$8,'Sample Calendar'!$C$2:$C$8,"None")
Paste that formula in cell D2 and double-click on the bottom-right corner of the cell to populate all other rows.
Here's a tutorial on xlookup formulas that you can reference when writing your formulas.
In your data tab, select columns A-D and click insert > pivot table.
Now I have a pivot table that shows the number of ad views during each Super Bowl:
I created an additional table in the Sample Pivot Table tab that shows the average number of ad views on Super Bowl days vs. non-Super Bowl Days. This way, I can see how much of a lift in volume the Super Bowl drives. In cell C14, I’ve used a simple change formula to calculate that the Super Bowl drives an average +19% lift in volume.
This is powerful information. I now know to increase my budgets by at least 19% to prepare for the influx in traffic. You could also look at conversion rate changes for the same period to determine how to adjust your bidding targets.
In the pivot table tab, select cells A1 - B9 and click insert > chart. Select the chart type that works best for you.
I’ve gone with a column chart using the event name as my horizontal axis and the ad views as my vertical axis. The chart shows that ad view volume increased steadily from 2019 - 2022, followed by a slight drop in 2023. With this data, I could set a realistic goal for this year’s Super Bowl ad, like bringing ad views back up to 2022 levels.
I’ve also created an area chart with a trend line to display the positive YoY trends to my company’s leadership. The trendline shows that even though we saw a decline in ad views last year, the overall trend for the past five years is significantly positive.
And there you have it! Two easy visualizations of ad views for every Super Bowl since 2017.
Creating a spreadsheet that outlines every date on which the Super Bowl occurred for the past five years was tedious, so I’ve included a few calendars with historical dates for key events in the workbook for you to reference. In the first three tabs, you’ll find a Cyber Week calendar, Super Bowl calendar, and US Holiday calendar with historical dates for the past few years.
Analyzing year-over-year performance changes for a recurring event helps to prepare for future iterations of that event. Consider using your historical event data to set benchmarks or minimum thresholds for recurring events’ performance. For example, if your Annual Sale has been generating a year-over-year revenue growth of 5%, you can set a sales target for your next Annual Sale by increasing last year’s revenue by 5%.
You can also consider increasing your ad budget and/or bid targets based on this expected influx of traffic. If you predict that an upcoming event is going to drive additional searches for your products, consider increasing the budgets for your non-brand campaigns. Brand campaigns can likely remain stable. Extra money spent on brand terms is often wasted as those Googling your brand name will likely end up on your site regardless of if they see an ad. Just make sure your competitors aren’t bidding for the top spots in the SERP on your brand’s keywords in an attempt to capitalize on your increased search volume. But assuming you’re already running brand campaigns to defend your spot at the top of the SERP, you should be all set.
Inversely, you could track your top competitors’ annual sales and promotions and scale up bids and budgets on competitor terms during those periods to try and acquire some of their traffic. But keep in mind that competitor terms are some of the most expensive to bid on, and you’ll need some very compelling ad copy to lure searchers away from the brand they were originally looking for, and on to your page instead.
The process outlined above is time-consuming if you are doing it manually – and you have to repeat it for every new event! Instead, do it automatically with Marin’s automation across all your campaigns, accounts, and publishers.
With Marin’s Marketing Calendar, you just upload your event calendar into our platform, and AI will do the rest. Simply create a spreadsheet containing details like Event Name, Start Date, End Date, and optional details like Category and Description:
Marin will then chart year-over-year event data for you so that you can analyze past trends and plan for future iterations of the events.
Marin does the analysis and data visualization for you so you can spend more time focusing on turning that data into action.
We all know that the actions of your competitors directly impact your campaigns – and Marketing Calendar’s got your back here, too! Are competitor promotions driving down your metrics? Now you can tag those dates to easily identify the performance outliers and set your campaigns to combat these negative impacts in advance. All you have to do to track the impact of competitors’ promotions on your business is upload their event data into the platform. And you can store that data in Marin for years.
Did a competitor promotion get you down this year? With Marketing Calendar, you’ll see around the corner next year and be able to get ahead of the increase in competition.
With Marin’s Marketing Calendar, marketers can plan, execute, and monitor campaigns with incredible precision. To learn more, schedule a demo with one of our Digital Marketing experts today.
As Google continually introduces new algorithm updates, one thing has remained consistent for inbound marketers aiming to enhance their website's search presence: keyword research.
When people go online to search for something, they use specific keywords. So if your content is created with their needs in mind, you’ll be more successful at getting in front of your target audience. You’ll gain more traffic and increase your chances of generating revenue so you can supercharge your growth.
In this blog post, we’ll explain how automated keyword research can improve your profitability, and guide you on how to get started.
When you automate keyword research, you can revolutionize your approach to SEO and content optimization. Check out these five benefits:
When your content aligns with what users are actively searching for, you're more likely to capture their interest and engage them effectively. This means higher quality traffic and a greater likelihood of conversions. By focusing on keywords with transactional intent, you're also reaching an audience that is already inclined towards making a purchase or taking a desired action.
With this targeted approach, conversion rates increase and you can ensure that your marketing budget is allocated efficiently. As a result, your business will experience a larger return on investment (ROI), making every advertising dollar spent more valuable and effective.
By harnessing the power of advanced algorithms and data-driven insights, automated keyword research eliminates the need for laborious manual analysis, enabling you to reallocate valuable time and resources to more strategic tasks. Rather than poring over endless lists of keywords, marketing teams can focus on crafting compelling content and optimizing campaigns for maximum impact.
By doing so, you can accelerate the pace of decision-making and remain agile. Essentially, automated keyword research empowers your businesses to work smarter, not harder, ultimately leading to more effective and successful marketing endeavors.
By capitalizing on the current market trends and consumer behavior insights that automated tools offer, businesses can tailor their strategies to meet evolving customer needs. And when customer needs are met, customer satisfaction is enhanced, leading to an uptick in sales and increased revenue. If you position yourself to be a customer-centric enterprise, you’ll foster stronger customer relationships and guarantee repeat business along with brand loyalty, ensuring long-term success and sustained revenue growth.
According to HubSpot’s 2023 State of Marketing Report, 88% of marketers who are already actively doing SEO work plan to continue doing so. And there’s a good reason why. When you integrate high-performing keywords into your content, you open the door to significant improvements in your search engine rankings.
With increased visibility among potential customers, you’ll drive more organic traffic to your website, resulting in substantial cost savings on paid advertising. In turn, you’ll be able to stretch your marketing budget further while simultaneously establishing a more sustainable and cost-effective way to reach and engage with your target audience
19% of marketers say that generating leads is their biggest marketing challenge. Precision in keyword selection allows you to tailor your content and campaigns to meet the specific needs and interests of potential customers. Simply put, if you produce content to meet their needs and give them a call to action, you’ll be more likely to move them from the awareness stage of the buyer journey into the point-of-purchase stage. You’ll also be able to attract a more qualified and engaged audience, significantly increasing the likelihood of converting leads into paying customers.
Now that you understand how automated keyword research helps generate more revenue, here are five ways to get started:
AI-powered keyword generators scrutinize your website, niche, and competitors by utilizing artificial intelligence to produce strategic keywords that enhance your search engine rankings. These advanced tools offer targeted keyword suggestions for your content, streamlining the process and saving you valuable time and effort.
With the ability to analyze trends and patterns across vast datasets, AI generators can provide deep insights to boost your content optimization efforts. But what does that process look like? Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to use AI generators:
Start your search by clearly defining your main topic or subject. Once you choose a direction, simply use an AI keyword generator to effortlessly identify high-potential keywords related to the industry, topic, or content focus.
Next, use Google Keyword Planner to verify search data associated with the AI generated keywords. Since different AI keyword generators may use different data sources and methods for estimating search volume and competition data, this allows you to cross-reference the data. Doing so will ensure accuracy and prevent potential biases or inaccuracies from a single source and will also give you insights into the number of searches conducted for each keyword.
The next step is to generate an SEO brief to guarantee that your keyword research and content creation are optimized for both search engines and readers. Make sure it includes key topics and keywords from the research phase.
The final step involves making sure your content is set up for SEO success. To prevent over-optimizing, which can deter customers, strategically and organically weave your keywords into your content. Following keyword optimization best practices can enhance your content's visibility on search engines, improve its relevance to target audiences, and contribute to higher rankings in search results.
With the right keyword research tools, you can automate tasks like competitor analysis, keyword suggestion, and search volume insights. Marketers can input their domain or competitors' domains into platforms like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Moz to uncover high-performing keywords, assess keyword difficulty, and identify gaps in their content strategy. In addition, marketers can automate reports and alerts to streamline the monitoring process, enabling quick adjustments to keyword strategies based on real-time data.
Content optimization platforms like SurferSEO or Clearscope analyze top-ranking pages and generate keyword recommendations to improve content performance. These platforms also commonly provide insights into keyword competitiveness, search volume, and trends, enabling marketers to make informed decisions about which keywords to prioritize.
To integrate chosen keywords effectively within content, use a platform that offers on-page optimization recommendations. This automation not only accelerates the keyword research phase, but also ensures that content aligns with SEO best practices, ultimately improving the visibility and discoverability of marketing materials across search engines. Regularly monitor performance metrics provided by these platforms to adapt your keyword strategy based on evolving trends and user behavior.
When you incorporate web scraping and crawling tools into your strategies, you can gain valuable insights, optimize content effectively, and stay competitive. To get started, select a reliable web scraping tool that aligns with the specific requirements of your research. Define the websites, search engine results, or industry-specific platforms you want to analyze for keyword data.
Configure the web scraping tool to extract relevant information, such as keyword frequency, trends, and competitor strategies. Then schedule regular automated crawls to ensure that the data remains current and reflective of evolving trends. Ensure compliance with ethical and legal guidelines, respecting the terms of service for each website being scraped.
By integrating API integrations and custom scripts, marketers can create a tailored and efficient system for automated keyword research, ensuring a dynamic and data-driven approach to their SEO strategies.
First, identify the APIs that align with your specific keyword research needs, such as Google Search Console API for website data or social media APIs for monitoring trends. Establish secure connections with these APIs through authentication protocols. Once connected, set up scripts to automate the extraction and processing of relevant data from the APIs.
Custom scripts can also be designed to scrape data from diverse sources, providing a comprehensive view of the competitive landscape. For up-to-date and real-time insights, regularly schedule these scripts to run at predetermined intervals.
Automated keyword research is not just a tool — it's a strategic imperative for businesses looking to save money while supercharging their revenue streams. Don't miss out on the opportunity to revolutionize your approach to keyword research. Instead, implement automation today and unlock a new era of profitability.
Looking to automate keyword research for paid search campaigns? With MarinOne, you can leverage cutting-edge algorithms and comprehensive data analysis to uncover hidden keyword opportunities that might otherwise be overlooked. Our platform will not only help your business meet industry standards, but will also give you a competitive edge in the market.
Ready to unlock the full potential of your paid search keyword strategy? Schedule a demo today.
Marketing professionals have always been faced with the challenge of measuring the success and impact of their campaigns. Industry studies from Gartner revealed that businesses spend almost a tenth of their total revenue on marketing. This large budget often comes with additional pressure to deliver marketing results to business leaders.
Advanced marketing reporting plays a crucial role in providing insights and data-driven analysis to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing initiatives. However, conducting effective marketing reporting requires more than just crunching numbers — it involves the use of advanced techniques and strategies to gather, analyze, and present data in a meaningful way. In this blog post, we will explore techniques and strategies you can use to conduct precise and accurate advanced marketing reporting.
Marketing reporting has always been conducted in various forms. Some marketers use spreadsheets to generate reports, while others highlight a few pieces of information that are then shared in a presentation deck. Here are three reasons marketers should look beyond these outdated reporting techniques and explore advanced reporting software now:
Advanced reporting tools enable marketers to uncover trends, patterns, and correlations within their data. This helps identify potential opportunities or issues that may not be immediately obvious, allowing marketers to take action and capitalize on trends or mitigate risks.
Advanced reporting provides the ability to benchmark performance against industry standards or competitors. This helps marketers understand their position in the market and make data-driven decisions to stay ahead of the competition.
As social media platforms increasingly cater to highly targeted user segments, marketers have to understand the profile of users on each platform and plan marketing campaigns accordingly. A quarter of marketers have indicated that they plan to place greater emphasis on targeted social media ads in 2024. Advanced reporting enables marketers to evaluate the performance of individual campaigns or initiatives. By analyzing data such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and engagement metrics, marketers can identify areas where campaigns are falling short and take corrective measures to optimize their performance.
Most marketers understand the importance of effective reporting, but what makes reporting effective? All successful marketing reports have shared elements — here are seven that all marketers should have in their marketing reports:
Nobody enjoys being presented a string of data that lacks engaging elements to keep the viewer interested. Every successful marketer’s report should be well organized and visually appealing, with clear headings, subheadings, and sections.
It’s important to identify and include relevant KPIs that align with your marketing goals and objectives. This can include metrics such as website traffic, lead generation, conversion rates, and customer acquisition costs. It is important that marketers stay abreast of any business priority changes and adjust their reporting strategy accordingly.
Raw data alone may not provide actionable insights. A quarter of marketers consider tying social media marketing activities to business outcomes. To deliver this insight and improve the value of a report, it’s essential to provide context and analysis for the data. This could include market trends, comparisons with previous periods, and explanations for any fluctuations or patterns.
Marketing reports should include measurable goals and targets set at the beginning of the reporting period. This allows for tracking progress and evaluating the success of marketing efforts.
Incorporating visual elements such as graphs, charts, and infographics can help summarize complex data and make it easier to understand.
Effective marketing reports should not only present data, but also provide actionable recommendations for improvement. This could include suggestions for optimizing campaigns, targeting specific customer segments, or reallocating resources.
Marketing reports should be delivered at regular intervals, according to the needs of the organization. Timeliness is key to ensure that the information is relevant and up to date.
Once teams understand the importance of marketing reporting, choosing the right tools and learning how to use them effectively is essential. Read on to learn how to get started with three commonly used reporting tools — Google Analytics 4, Google Data Studio, and Marin Software:
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a powerful marketing reporting tool provided by Google. It offers comprehensive web analytics, tracks user behavior, and provides insights into website performance.
GA4 allows users to monitor and analyze key metrics such as traffic sources, user demographics, conversion rates, and much more. Its advanced features include event tracking, enhanced ecommerce tracking, and cross-device measurement.
The data collected by GA4 can be visualized and analyzed in various ways within the tool itself or exported to other reporting platforms. Follow these steps:
Google Data Studio is a data visualization and reporting tool that helps users to produce interactive and customizable dashboards and reports. The program integrates seamlessly with various data sources, including Google Analytics, Google Ads, and other marketing platforms.
With Data Studio, users can build dynamic visualizations such as charts, graphs, and tables to showcase important marketing metrics and KPIs. It enables collaboration by allowing multiple users to access and edit reports simultaneously.
Data Studio also supports real-time data updates and provides options to share reports with stakeholders in different formats. Utilize Google Data Studio with these 8 steps:
Marin Software is a marketing analytics and optimization platform designed to streamline and improve digital advertising campaigns. It offers features for managing paid search ads, paid social ads, display ads, and more.
In terms of reporting, Marin Software provides advanced analytics capabilities, including cross-channel attribution modeling, which helps marketers understand the impact of their advertising efforts across different touchpoints. It also enables users to customize reports and dashboards to track specific metrics and campaign performance.
Additionally, Marin Software offers budget and bid optimization tools to maximize advertising ROI and streamline the campaign management processes. Take advantage of Marin Software’s platform with these steps:
Effective marketing reporting is essential for driving informed decision making and gauging the success of marketing efforts. By employing AI-powered software like Marin, marketers can gain valuable insights into the performance of their campaigns.
Embrace the power of marketing reporting automation and take your marketing efforts to new heights. Schedule a demo of Marin today to learn how it can simplify and optimize your marketing reporting processes.
As marketers face increasing pressure to produce results, effective marketing strategies are essential to the success of any organization. However, with numerous marketing channels and variables to consider, measuring the impact of each component can be a daunting task.
This is where a marketing mix model analysis comes into play: a powerful tool that enables businesses to understand the individual contributions of various marketing elements and make data-driven decisions to optimize their marketing efforts.
Marketing Mix Model Analysis, also known as Market Mix Modeling (MMM), is a technique used to measure and quantify the impact of various marketing efforts on sales or market share. It helps businesses understand the effectiveness and contribution of each aspect of their marketing in driving sales and guides decision-making on resource allocation for different marketing activities.
This analysis combines statistical calculations and historical sales data to determine the relationship between marketing activities — such as different types of advertising, promotions, pricing, and distribution — and sales. Here are six of the most important reasons marketers rely on this method of analysis.
Marketing mix model analysis helps businesses understand the impact of their marketing activities on sales and other business outcomes. By quantifying the effectiveness of each marketing element, businesses can allocate their marketing budget more efficiently, focusing on the elements that generate the highest return on investment (ROI). The average digital marketing budget is allocated as shown in the chart below, but every business is unique, and marketers must adapt their marketing efforts to reflect their own audience’s needs, wants, and behaviors.
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Marketing mix model analysis provides businesses with valuable insights and data to make informed decisions. Rather than relying on assumptions or guesswork, businesses can use the analysis to identify the drivers of successes and failures in their marketing strategies and make data-driven decisions to refine and optimize their marketing efforts. In a recent survey by HubSpot, 36% of marketers said that data helps them reach their audience more effectively.
With marketing mix model analysis, businesses gain a clear understanding of the impact and effectiveness of various marketing components. This knowledge supports strategic planning by identifying the areas that need improvement, determining the best marketing mix for specific target markets, and identifying opportunities for growth and expansion.
By understanding the contribution of each marketing element, businesses can eliminate or reduce ineffective marketing activities and reallocate resources to the most effective strategies. This leads to enhanced efficiency in marketing spending and ultimately improves the ROI of marketing initiatives.
Marketing mix model analysis allows businesses to evaluate the performance of specific marketing campaigns and initiatives. By measuring the impact of various marketing activities during a specific period, businesses can assess the effectiveness of their strategies, identify successful campaigns, and replicate or refine them for future endeavors.
Marketing mix model analysis helps businesses gain a competitive advantage by understanding their marketing effectiveness relative to competitors. By analyzing external factors and competitor activities, businesses can make informed decisions to differentiate their marketing strategies and gain a stronger market position.
A marketing mix model can help marketers understand exactly how an ad is performing by quantifying performance in a way that is relevant for every stakeholder. Here’s a structured approach to building a successful strategy.
The first step in building a marketing mix model is to define the objectives. For example, a company may want to understand how changes in their marketing mix (e.g., pricing, promotions, advertising) affect sales and profitability. Other objectives could include understanding the impact of specific campaigns on brand awareness or identifying opportunities to improve customer satisfaction.
Once the objectives are clear, the next step is to identify the key marketing variables that will be included in the model. These variables will represent the different elements of the marketing mix, which are:
The aim of a marketing mix model analysis is to optimize these four factors and maximize the success of a product.
After identifying the key marketing variables, data must be collected from the appropriate sources, including internal data such as sales, customer profiles, and marketing expenses, as well as external data like market research, competitive analysis, and demographic trends.
For example, an online retailer may collect data on the sales of different products and the prices, discounts, and promotions used, as well as data on site traffic, marketing campaigns, and social media activity.
The marketing mix model combines the data from the different variables to build mathematical relationships between them and the business outcome being analyzed. The model should account for factors that impact business performance like seasonality, market share, and economic indicators.
Statistical techniques like regression analysis, time-series analysis, and machine learning can be used to develop the model and uncover patterns and relationships between the different marketing variables and business outcomes. Multiple models can be developed for different segments, geographies, or products.
For instance, a car manufacturer may create a marketing mix model to understand how different types of promotions affect sales of SUVs in a specific market. They can use data on promotions (such as discounts, free upgrades, and financing deals), sales, and external factors such as competitor advertising and economic conditions.
Once the model has been developed, it needs to be tested to ensure that it is accurate and realistic. This involves comparing the model's predictions with actual past outcomes and fine-tuning the model correspondingly. As new data becomes available, the model should be refined continuously.
For example, a restaurant chain may test their marketing mix model by using it to make predictions on sales for the upcoming months. They would compare their predictions to actual sales figures and then refine the model accordingly for future use.
Finally, marketers should re-evaluate the model periodically, revisiting the inputs, fine-tuning the outputs, and updating it to account for changes in the marketplace or customer behavior.
For example, an e-commerce firm may re-evaluate its marketing mix model every quarter to review the performance of campaigns, promotions, and customer acquisition efforts. They may adjust the model to account for changes in the competitive landscape or shifts in customer behavior patterns, such as the rise of mobile shopping.
Once you’re ready to begin your analysis, make sure to do the following to optimize your marketing strategies for the best results.
Businesses should focus on identifying the key insights gained from the marketing mix model analysis. These insights can include understanding the impact of different marketing tactics on sales, identifying the most effective channels, and understanding the interaction effects between different marketing activities. By prioritizing these insights, businesses can allocate their marketing budget and resources more effectively, ensuring that they invest in the strategies and tactics that have the most significant impact on sales and ROI.
It’s essential for businesses to build trust in the marketing mix model and ensure that stakeholders have confidence in its accuracy and reliability. This can be achieved by validating the model against real-world data, conducting sensitivity analyses, and involving key stakeholders in the model development process. When stakeholders trust the model, they are more likely to make data-driven decisions based on its insights.
Once the insights from the marketing mix model analysis are established, businesses can use them to develop marketing plans that optimize their marketing efforts. By understanding the impact of different marketing activities and channels, businesses can allocate their budget and resources in a way that maximizes their return on investment (ROI). They can identify the most effective marketing tactics and channels to invest in, adjust their marketing mix based on changing market conditions, and fine-tune their strategies to reach their target audience more effectively.
To create an accurate sales forecast, marketers must consider many variables. Marketing mix elements are divided into base, incremental, and other variables, each with its own factors affecting market performance. Some are independent, while others change according to the circumstances. Understanding these variables is crucial for making precise forecasts of the effects of promotional activities and distribution strategies.
As marketing environments evolve, new platforms are emerging for engaging with customers, especially millennials. This necessitates accounting for new marketing mix variables. Market trends, product launches, and customer preferences play a vital role in shaping baseline outcomes and demand for products.
To maintain a competitive edge, it’s essential to monitor your competition and understand the halo and cannibalization effects. The halo effect occurs when positive experiences with a brand's products influence consumers' favoritism toward other products from the same brand. On the other hand, cannibalization occurs when a brand's multiple products in the same category negatively impact each other's sales.
If you’ve followed all these tips and are still not receiving the insights you should be getting, you can troubleshoot your marketing mix model using these four steps.
Take a close look at your existing model and identify any weaknesses or inefficiencies. Are you accurately tracking and measuring the performance of your marketing channels? Are there any gaps in your data collection process? Understanding the limitations of your current model is crucial for making improvements.
Remember, you must establish clear objectives before you can fix your marketing mix model. What are your marketing goals? Are you aiming to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or drive sales? Clearly define your objectives so that you can align your marketing mix model accordingly.
To get a complete picture of your marketing performance, you need to collect comprehensive data. Make sure you have access to data from all relevant marketing channels, such as social media, email marketing, SEO, paid advertising, and more. Investing in the right tools and technology can help automate data collection and aggregation, saving you valuable time and effort.
One of the critical aspects of fixing your marketing mix model is accurately attributing ROI to different marketing channels. You need to understand which channels are delivering the highest return on investment and optimize your budget allocation accordingly. Implementing multi-touch attribution models and advanced analytics can help you measure the impact of each channel more accurately.
If you find fixing your marketing mix model overwhelming or lack the resources to do it in-house, don't hesitate to seek expert help. Marketing analytics and consulting firms specialize in helping businesses optimize their marketing mix models. Their expertise and insights can provide you with valuable guidance and save you time and effort.
Ultimately, these tips and insights can help marketers understand how their digital marketing assets perform over time. Marketers can use this information to ensure that their ads and marketing efforts hit the mark every time.
You can also use a Marketing Platform like Marin to gather all the data you need to build your marketing mix model. Schedule a demo today to learn more.
If you’re not using a holistic approach to tackle your digital marketing efforts, you can easily fall behind your competition, and worse — your business may lose credibility and ROI. The adoption of integrated solutions is no longer a mere trend — it's a strategic imperative.
By aligning marketing efforts with your overall business goals, you can maximize the impact of your campaigns, ensuring that every dollar spent contributes effectively towards driving meaningful results and ultimately propels your business towards success.
If you want to revolutionize your digital marketing strategy, we’ve got everything you need to know about an integrated digital marketing budget — from its top benefits to how you can get started right away.
An integrated digital marketing budget allocates financial resources across various online marketing channels in a coordinated and synchronized manner. Instead of treating each digital marketing channel as a separate entity with its own budget allocation, an integrated approach involves strategically distributing resources to create a cohesive and synergistic campaign.
This means funds are allocated based on a comprehensive understanding of how different channels work together to achieve overarching marketing objectives. For instance, funds may be allocated to areas such as social media advertising, content marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing, and more, all working in tandem to create a unified brand message and drive optimal results.
Beyond improving ROI, an integrated digital marketing budget facilitates consistent brand messaging to help build trust and credibility. When you centralize your digital marketing efforts under one integrated budget, you can analyze data collectively and identify trends, patterns, and other areas for improvement more effectively.
An integrated approach also allows for quick adjustments in response to market changes or shifts in consumer behavior. In addition, by integrating data from various touchpoints, a holistic approach enables you to deliver a seamless and personalized customer experience, thereby enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty, ultimately driving higher retention rates and customer lifetime value.
Getting started with an integrated digital marketing budget is a crucial step towards maximizing the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you embark on this strategic approach:
Begin by clearly outlining your overarching business goals. Clear business goals provide a roadmap for all your marketing efforts, ensuring that every action taken aligns with the broader objectives of the company. Whether it's generating leads, increasing brand awareness, boosting sales, or driving website traffic, clearly defined objectives will serve as the foundation for your integrated digital marketing strategy, ensuring they are targeted, focused, and measurable.
Understand your audience's demographics, preferences, and behaviors. This way, you can craft tailored messages and choose the most effective channels to reach and engage your potential customers. Using Google Analytics, social media insights, CRM software, and market research tools can help you create comprehensive customer profiles.
When you evaluate the various digital marketing channels available to you, also be sure to consider the strengths and weaknesses of each one.
Understanding these channels' dynamics is crucial to leveraging their strengths and mitigating their weaknesses. In addition, recognizing how these channels can complement each other is key. For instance, content marketing can bolster SEO efforts by creating valuable content that attracts organic traffic while also providing material to share on social media platforms.
PPC advertising can supplement SEO efforts by targeting specific keywords or demographics not immediately reachable through organic search. Integrating email marketing into these strategies can nurture leads acquired through various channels, enhancing overall conversion rates. A holistic approach that integrates these channels strategically can create a powerful synergy, amplifying the impact of your digital marketing efforts and reaching your audience across multiple touchpoints in their buying journey.
Allocating budgets across various components of your digital marketing strategy should align with your business goals and channel analysis. Consider distributing resources based on the effectiveness and potential ROI of each channel. Allocate a larger portion of the budget to channels that directly contribute to achieving your primary business objectives. If your goal is to boost brand awareness, you might allocate a significant portion of the budget to social media and content marketing, which excel in reaching wider audiences and improving engagement. Simultaneously, if lead generation or conversions are your primary focus, investing in PPC advertising or targeted SEO strategies might take precedence due to their immediate impact on driving traffic and conversions.
If your strategy involves content marketing to support SEO efforts, allocate resources not just for content creation but also for SEO optimization to maximize the content's visibility. Or, if you plan to run social media ads, allocate a budget not only for ad spend but also for content creation and monitoring to maintain consistency in messaging and brand representation.
The 70-20-10 distribution rule is useful. Allocate 70% of your budget on channels you’re certain will work, 20% on channels you are less sure will be successful, and 10% on areas you want to test out.
Utilize advanced analytics tools to track and measure the performance of your campaigns. This includes monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) such as click-through rates (CTRs), conversion rates, ROI, and customer acquisition costs (CAC).
CTRs help gauge the engagement levels of your audience with your ads or content, while conversion rates shed light on the effectiveness of turning leads into customers. ROI analysis measures the profitability of your campaigns in relation to the resources invested, enabling you to optimize strategies that yield the best returns. Simultaneously, understanding CAC aids in evaluating the cost-effectiveness of acquiring new customers, ensuring efficient allocation of resources across different marketing channels.
These analytics not only offer quantitative measurements but also serve as guiding metrics to make data-driven decisions. They provide a comprehensive view of your marketing strategies' strengths and weaknesses, allowing for informed adjustments and optimizations. By harnessing these insights, you can refine your campaigns, allocate budgets more effectively, and fine-tune your overall marketing strategy to achieve better results and higher returns on your investments.
Creating a centralized system that collects and consolidates data from different channels provides a comprehensive view of how your audience engages with your brands. This integrated approach offers insights into customer preferences, behaviors, and the effectiveness of different marketing strategies in real time.
By having a unified database, you can analyze cross-channel interactions, identify patterns, and gain a deeper understanding of your audience's journey. With this invaluable information, you can make data-driven decisions, personalize marketing efforts, optimize campaigns, and ultimately enhance the overall effectiveness of your marketing strategy.
Continuously monitor the performance of your integrated digital marketing efforts. Identify what's working well and where there's room for improvement. Use these insights to make adjustments to your strategy and reallocate resources as needed. Ongoing evaluation ensures that your marketing efforts remain agile and responsive to changes in consumer behavior and market dynamics.
With emerging technologies, shifting consumer behaviors, and updated algorithms from platforms constantly evolving, it’s essential to keep up with the latest trends and best practices so your integrated approach remains relevant and effective. According to HubSpot, almost 80% of marketers agree that their industry has experienced more change in the past three years than over the last five decades. With advancements in AI-driven marketing automation, the rise of new content formats, and changes in SEO strategies, staying informed allows you to meet current market demands and consumer preferences.
Marin's Budget Optimizer uses algorithmic forecasting to predict the future performance of each of your campaigns, and then allocates budget based on that data. This cross-channel solution can automatically update budgets for all your different campaigns across publisher accounts. By making Marin a part of your daily workflow, you can eliminate most of the steps listed above. Marin will create and implement an integrated marketing budget for you.
Schedule a demo today to see how Marin can manage your integrated digital marketing budget.
Personalized social media content is not merely a trend, but a strategic approach that allows brands to connect with their audience on a more human level. However, to truly maximize the effectiveness of personalized engagement — especially on Meta platforms like Facebook and Instagram — marketers must strike a delicate balance between getting their message across and doing it without compromising authenticity or crossing boundaries.
When used properly, personalization can be a powerful tool for engaging your audience. Here’s a rundown of the dos and don’ts of personalized social media engagement to help you establish more meaningful connections while driving business growth and increasing brand awareness.
To make sure your personalized Instagram and Facebook content is effective, consider using these tips to woo your audience.
Instagram Insights is a goldmine for marketing data. You’ll find everything you need about your audience, from who your followers are to the content they engage with the most, and what times your audience is most active. With all this data at your fingertips, you can create tailored audience segments based on specific interests, behaviors, or engagement levels to ensure your marketing campaigns are effective.
Facebook Dynamic Ads dynamically display products or services to users who have shown interest in them, allowing for personalized recommendations based on their browsing history or previous interactions.
Similarly, Instagram Shopping integrates seamlessly with organic content, enabling your business to tag products in posts and stories, providing a direct shopping experience within the platform. Together, these features not only enhance the user experience by delivering relevant and personalized content but also streamline the path to purchase and improve conversion rates.
Employing advanced retargeting strategies such as Facebook Pixel and Instagram Pixel to track user interactions and behavior on your website or app can significantly bolster your personalized social media engagement efforts. Because both tracking tools enable you to gather data on user behavior, it’s easier to retarget users with personalized content based on their previous actions, preferences, or abandoned carts. It also allows you to create a more personalized and relevant experience for users, reminding them of products they've shown interest in, thereby nurturing a more meaningful connection between your brand and audience.
AI-powered chatbots can use machine learning algorithms to understand user queries, preferences, and behaviors, delivering highly personalized responses and recommendations. Facebook and Instagram bots in particular enable real-time, automated interactions with users, offering personalized assistance, recommendations, and support round the clock.
These chatbots deliver tailored responses and suggestions, mimicking human interactions. Integrating AI-powered chatbots not only expedites customer service but also allows for personalized product recommendations, content delivery, and even transactional assistance. In addition, these chatbots continuously learn from interactions, refining their responses and recommendations over time, ensuring a seamless and personalized experience for users. Using this technology, you can actively engage with users, which demonstrates your commitment to your audience's needs and concerns.
One of Instagram’s most recent new features, Collab, allows marketers to co-author content with a collaborator, which can multiply engagement and reach and can increase followers. Consider leveraging this feature to collaborate with industry leaders, influencers, and brand partners so that when collab posts show up in your followers’ feeds, you can garner higher engagement.
Eight out of 10 consumers are worried about data privacy. Considering the vast array of accessible data, it's crucial to use personal information ethically and transparently. Before using personal information, always ask for consent and explain how you plan to use the data.
Upholding user privacy instills confidence in customers that their information is handled responsibly, safeguarding against potential breaches or misuse. While there is a fine line between tailored content and intrusion, respecting boundaries enhances the user experience without making individuals feel exposed or uncomfortable. It also helps your business adhere to legal and ethical standards.
Users don’t log in to their social media accounts to see ads. In fact, statistics reveal that approximately 47% use it to keep in touch with friends and family, while 36% find it to be a good way to spend their free time. If you want to really capture your audience’s attention, focus 80% of your content on providing value, education, entertainment, or addressing tailored audience needs. Reserve the remaining 20% for promotional or branded content to create a sense of exclusivity.
When users’ social media accounts become inundated with endless promotional messages, they’ll start to tune you out. However, if you dedicate the majority of efforts towards offering meaningful, tailored content that resonates with your audience, not only will you captivate your audience and foster authentic connections, but you’ll also maximize revenue.
By providing a holistic view of your audience's behaviors, preferences, and interactions across different channels, through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) enables you to orchestrate personalized campaign content. It ensures that each interaction resonates with the specific interests and needs of different audience segments.
Through-channel marketing automation also facilitates precise scheduling and deployment of content, optimizing the timing and frequency of posts and ads to maximize engagement and impact. Additionally, it streamlines workflows, allowing you to allocate resources more efficiently and focus on refining strategies to foster brand loyalty and more meaningful connections across Facebook and Instagram.
Customized marketing is powerful, but using it the wrong way can frustrate your audience. To avoid potential pitfalls, steer clear of these personalization practices.
While automation can streamline processes, excessive reliance on automated responses or messages can come off as impersonal. Avoid using automation to replace genuine human interaction entirely. Instead, aim to blend automation intelligently within human-led interactions to enhance efficiency while maintaining a personalized touch. Doing so will ensure a balanced and authentic customer experience.
Ignoring negative comments or feedback can harm your brand reputation. Address criticism respectfully, offering solutions or clarifications publicly or privately, based on the situation. Acknowledging and addressing negative feedback not only exhibits empathy, but also strengthens trust with your audience by showcasing a willingness to learn, evolve, and prioritize the needs of your customers.
Avoid making assumptions based on limited personal information. Personalization should be based on verified data or user-provided information rather than assumptions that might be inaccurate or offensive. Rather than relying on stereotypes or generalizations, personalization should cater to individual preferences. Aim to treat each user uniquely and definitely don’t use data that wasn’t voluntarily provided.
Bombarding users with excessive messages, notifications, or content can be overwhelming and push them away. Being too overbearing can be a huge turn-off for consumers and cause them to disengage or unsubscribe from your channels altogether. By implementing a frequency cap on ads you can strike a good balance between personalized targeting and avoiding audience saturation. With the right frequency, you’ll be able to retain interest while keeping content fresh and respecting your audience's tolerance for advertising content.
While personalization aims for connection, avoid engaging in controversial or sensitive topics without a thoughtful approach. Such discussions may alienate segments of your audience or create conflicts. Assess whether the topic aligns with the brand's values and if the discussion will add genuine value or positively contribute to the audience's experience. A thoughtful approach that respects diverse viewpoints and avoids inflammatory rhetoric is essential to maintain a harmonious and inclusive community within your audience.
Regularly monitoring the effectiveness of personalized engagement strategies is fundamental to optimizing and enhancing your approach. Your ongoing evaluation should involve tracking various metrics, including user engagement rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, sentiment analysis, and more.
Also be sure to gather feedback from users through surveys, comments, or direct messages to obtain invaluable qualitative data that will help you understand audience perceptions and preferences. By meticulously assessing these indicators, you can identify patterns, pinpoint successful strategies, and recognize areas needing improvement and adjust accordingly.
Your primary aim on social media should be to deliver an exceptional experience tailored specifically to your target audience. Customizing each piece of content your audience encounters to align with their unique interests and preferences is crucial. When you do, your business will reap the rewards of heightened engagement and increased customer satisfaction, creating a mutually beneficial scenario.
With MarinOne’s all-in-one platform, marketers can delve into detailed audience segmentation, allowing for precise targeting based on demographics, behaviors, and preferences. Our platform facilitates the seamless integration of data from various sources, providing invaluable insights into audience interactions across different channels. Using our advanced analytics, marketers can optimize content strategies, identify trends, and tailor their social media content to resonate deeply with specific audience segments.
Whether through content scheduling, A/B testing, or audience-centric optimizations, MarinOne equips marketers with the necessary tools to create compelling, personalized social media content that fosters stronger connections and drives meaningful engagement with their target audience.
Are you ready to start generating personalized social media content for your audience? Sign up for a free trial today.
When I was a senior in college, all I wanted was to work at a prestigious marketing agency. I dreamed of the fast-paced corporate life. I imagined going to fancy client dinners and building creative, influential ad campaigns. And I did it! I secured a job at an agency with a great reputation, and working there taught me so much about the paid media world.
But it wasn’t all glitz and glamour, it was stressful. Balancing many client accounts, making sure to spend their budgets in full, and hitting efficiency targets was a lot to handle. I often felt overwhelmed with the amount of work on my plate. I also felt there must be a way to automate some of the tedious daily tasks. As an entry-level Account Coordinator, one of my main responsibilities was building out reports to present on weekly client calls. Every time I performed this manual work, I couldn't shake the feeling that there had to be a better way. And well, I was right!
When I discovered Marin, I was shocked at how much time the platform saved me. The Marin team is full of ex-agency employees, like me. We’ve built a product that would make daily work easier for our past selves. (And, of course, for current agency clients!) Here are 4 ways Marin helps agencies save time and improve performance.
Budgeting is arguably the most stressful part of managing client ad accounts. The goal is to spend as much of the client’s budget as possible without ever going over the monthly limit. And you have to ensure that you distribute spend properly across campaigns. It’s stressful – but it doesn’t have to be anymore because Marin can do it for you.
With Marin, you can group your campaigns into budget buckets and allocate a monthly or quarterly spend allowance to each bucket. Let's say your client gives you different budgets for brand, non-brand, and retargeting. Those would be the buckets, and you would place a group of campaigns inside each bucket. Marin would then visualize how each bucket is pacing toward its spend goal and forecast projected spend for the month or quarter.
Marin can take it one step further and automatically allocate budget across the campaigns within each bucket for you based on forecasted performance. Our algorithm would analyze the historical performance of all the campaigns in the budget bucket. It would also consider impression share metrics to determine the best possible allocation of spend across the campaigns in the bucket. Then, it would set the monthly budget for each campaign. And it’ll reallocate the budget throughout the month if performance trends shift. This solution enables you to spend your budget as efficiently as possible without manual intervention.
If a bucket spends its full budget before the month is over, Marin will automatically pause the campaigns in that bucket. Marin will also re-enable them when a new month starts. So you can rest easy knowing you’ll never have to reimburse a client for overspend again.
This solution can also run across publishers. Therefore, Google, Bing, Meta, and other campaigns can all live within one budget bucket. Our cross-channel budgeting solution makes it easy to manage your client’s entire marketing program. It can even help with upselling. You can approach clients with, "Hey, we're managing search spend with Marin. Why not let us use it for Meta as well?" And suddenly you have more client spend on your books!
We know that every client is different, so we’ve made our budgeting solution customizable. Our technical team will work through the setup with you. We’ll make sure that Marin is optimizing toward the performance goals that are important to your client.
Marin is like a guard dog. It always protects your campaigns, ensuring they hit spend goals and stopping them from going too far. You can’t work 24/7, but our algorithms can.
Creating reports for clients used to involve pulling front-end data from various publisher tools, gathering backend data from a tracking system like Google Analytics, pasting everything into a Google sheet, and then converting it into charts and graphs. But Marin does all that for you, every day, without you having to lift a finger.
Marin is a Marketing Data Pipeline. It connects to all your different data sources via API. It brings in data from your clients’ publishers and revenue systems in near real-time, normalizes it, and attributes it to the proper campaigns and ads.
Marin’s dashboards allow you to build whatever charts and graphs you need, and the data updates daily from all your different sources. You can share a read-only link to a dashboard with your clients and use the visuals to talk through weekly performance. This means that all you’ll need to do to prep for a client call is prepare talking points. All the charts, graphs, and unified data will already be ready for you to share.
You can also view cross-client data in Marin’s charts, graphs, and dashboards. If you’re managing many client accounts in MarinOne, you can get a high-level overview of performance for all of them.
A cross-client dashboard is where lots of agency teams start their day. The multi-client performance overview informs which clients need attention and directs focus for the day ahead. If you need to make optimizations, you can do so directly in the Marin UI for all clients. This leads me to my next point…
Marin’s ‘All Clients’ view enables you to optimize all your different accounts in one place. It's a one-stop shop for agency Account Managers. Our "territory" filter lets each Account Manager label the accounts they are responsible for. When they enter Marin, they’ll only see the accounts that they work on. This makes things less busy while still providing a unified optimization and reporting suite.
Our bulk uploader enables Account Managers to create and edit campaigns, groups, ads, and more for multiple clients and publishers with one sheet. This saves agency teams countless hours.
I remember having to create four separate bulk sheets for my client’s different Google and Bing accounts every time we launched a new paid search initiative. I’d have to go into each Google and Bing Ads Editor and upload numerous bulk sheets for campaigns, then groups, then ads, then keywords. This process would often consume an entire workday. But never again! Marin enables you to do it all with a few clicks.
One Marin client manages over 20 different ad accounts. The biggest value they see from Marin is being able to manage all those accounts in one place. With Marin’s easy-to-use unified grids, they change bids and budgets, pause and enable ads, and much more.
Marin can integrate with any of the programs your clients use for reporting, management, and data tracking. No more learning new platforms because you have a new client. You can just reach out to your Marin rep, and we’ll set up an API integration. Marin can unify many backend tracking systems as well. The options for conversion types to pull into Marin are endless!
Learn more about our integrations here.
Those are a few of the ways Marin helps agencies win. And this is just a preview – there are tons more to discuss. If you’re interested in learning more, schedule a demo with our team. We’ll help solve the issues that are keeping your team awake at night!
It’s no secret that the art of keyword research lies at the heart of successful online marketing strategies. As the volume of online content continues to surge, the competition for visibility in search engine results has become increasingly fierce.
In response to this challenge, marketers are turning to cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), which has already revolutionized numerous industries and is now making its mark in the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). By harnessing the power of AI, marketers can uncover consumer behavior insights, paving the way for more strategic and impactful digital marketing campaigns.
In this blog, we’ll explore the reasons you should take advantage of the transformative power of AI to automate keyword research. We’ll also provide practical strategies and actionable advice about how to effectively use AI to craft targeted, high-impact content that resonates with your target audience and drives tangible results.
Simply put, AI-powered technology is crucial if you want to stay ahead of the competition in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape.
Automating keyword research with AI is a transformative step toward maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of your SEO strategy. Traditional manual research can be incredibly time-consuming, requiring substantial resource allocation. In contrast, AI-powered automation streamlines this process, swiftly parsing through extensive datasets and delivering insights in a fraction of the time.
By reducing repetitive tasks and labor-intensive processes, businesses can redirect their efforts toward more strategic endeavors. Additionally, AI's unparalleled capacity for rapid data analysis ensures that no opportunity is overlooked. This not only boosts SEO performance but also enables businesses to stay agile.
AI also facilitates comprehensive market research and competitor analysis, providing a holistic view of the competitive landscape and empowering businesses to make data-driven decisions for sustained success.
AI offers a quantum leap in accuracy and relevance, surpassing what manual efforts can achieve. By eliminating the potential for human error, including typos, oversight, and inconsistencies, it ensures that every keyword chosen is precise and relevant. In turn, this increases targeted traffic and boosts visibility, thereby creating a more effective SEO strategy.
One of the key advantages of AI is its ability to conduct superior search intent analysis. For 67% of marketers, making intent data actionable is a challenge. But by leveraging advanced algorithms, AI can swiftly discern the underlying motivations and objectives behind user searches. This ensures that the content you create is not only relevant but also perfectly aligned with user intent.
If you want to capture the attention of your target audience and provide them with precisely what they’re looking for, this alignment is critical. Not only does AI enhance your SEO efforts, but it also ensures that your content resonates with your audience on a deeper level, ultimately driving higher engagement and better conversion rates.
AI-driven keyword research provides a treasure trove of data-driven insights that can revolutionize your marketing strategy. It can precisely interpret complex data patterns, extracting actionable insights that might have otherwise remained hidden.
With deeper insights, AI paves the way for informed decision-making, allowing for campaign optimization with unparalleled precision. With AI at the helm of keyword research, your business can confidently navigate the competitive world of online marketing so that every strategic move is backed by robust, data-driven intelligence.
With its ability to efficiently analyze vast amounts of data, AI-powered tools enable marketers to swiftly identify relevant keywords tailored to diverse industries and target audiences. Using AI not only expedites the keyword research process but also ensures a level of accuracy and scalability unattainable through manual methods. AI-automated keyword research also ensures consistency by applying standardized criteria in keyword selection, eliminating human biases and errors. By continually refining and optimizing SEO strategies, marketers can adapt content to resonate effectively with the evolving preferences of the audience.
Automating keyword research with AI also fosters a seamless continuity in research efforts. It reduces dependency on individual researcher expertise, safeguarding against fluctuations in performance due to personnel changes or skill variations. And since consistency is crucial for maintaining the quality and relevance of keyword selection across team members and over timeframes, AI is particularly helpful. It also paves the way for long-term campaign planning and execution, as businesses can rely on a reliable and standardized approach to keyword research, regardless of external factors or internal team dynamics.
By harnessing AI for automated keyword research, you can take advantage of its powerful capabilities to help your business unlock new opportunities for growth and visibility.
With a plethora of AI keyword research tools on the market, the best place to start is by researching which options meet your specific needs and goals. Don’t forget to consider factors like budget constraints and required features when selecting the most suitable solution. Opt for tools that provide a comprehensive suite of features, including robust data analysis, precise keyword suggestions, and user-friendly interfaces. Here are some of the best AI SEO tools:
Top Features:
Drawbacks:
Top Features:
Drawbacks:
Top Features:
Drawbacks:
Before diving into keyword research, it's imperative to establish clear objectives and parameters. Define your research goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Use these to guide the AI tool in generating results for your specific requirements. Configuring the AI tool to cater to your objectives ensures that the generated insights are tailored to your business's unique needs.
While AI is a powerful tool, it's not immune to potential biases or anomalies in results. Therefore, it’s best to implement filters and validation checks for better accuracy and reliability of the generated data. Addressing any discrepancies promptly will help maintain the integrity of your keyword research efforts.
AI-generated insights are a goldmine for refining your SEO strategy. Analyze and prioritize the keyword recommendations provided by the AI. Focus on keywords with high relevance, search volume, and competitiveness, and then seamlessly integrate these keywords into your content and campaigns to optimize your online presence.
The power of AI lies in its ability to adapt and learn. Regularly review the reports and suggestions generated by the AI. Keep a close eye on performance metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and keyword rankings. Use these insights to adjust your strategies and continually refine your keyword research efforts.
When it comes to AI-powered keywords for SEO, there are some common pitfalls that you should try to avoid. Chief among these is depending too much on AI without human oversight, which can result in either skewed results or inaccuracies. The absence of human oversight alongside AI reliance can result in a lack of contextual understanding, inaccurate interpretations, and potential biases, ultimately affecting the effectiveness and quality of your SEO strategy.
It’s also important to avoid over-optimization. While integrating relevant keywords into content is essential, using them excessively can adversely impact rankings. Google even flags such repetitive content as spam. To prevent “stuffing,” aim to prioritize high-quality content by using natural language and incorporating key terms where it’s contextually appropriate. Experts say that a 2%–5% keyword density is considered safe. However, to secure higher rankings in search results, you'll notice that the optimal keyword density can differ based on your specific niche and its level of competition.
Another pitfall to be aware of is that AI can be limiting when it comes to user intent. While algorithms are adept at analyzing data patterns and making predictions about user searches, they fall short in comprehending context-specific queries and can’t always pick up on the subtleties of human behavior. However, by using a combination of AI and your own expertise to interpret data and anticipate customer needs, you can successfully tailor your SEO strategy.MarinOne's seamless integration with SEO research tools
MarinOne's all-in-one platform seamlessly integrates with SEO research tools to unify data. Our platform empowers marketers with a comprehensive understanding of their SEO performance, enabling data-driven decision-making and the formulation of more cohesive and effective marketing strategies.
MarinOne's integration ensures that marketers can harness the full potential of their SEO research, so they can make informed decisions and formulate robust strategies grounded in data-driven insights.
To get started, schedule a live, personal demo today.
Choosing the right social media platform is crucial for businesses to effectively reach and engage their target audience. This blog post provides an in-depth understanding of the different social media platforms available and helps businesses determine which platform aligns best with their unique needs and goals. Utilizing everything from demographics and features to content formats and marketing objectives, you can discover the platform that fits your business like a glove.
Modern marketers must understand how each social media platform differs from its competitors and find the appropriate channel to reach their intended audience. Here’s an overview of the five most popular platforms today.
Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world, based on reach. Its ad reach constitutes 38.4% of the total number of users on the internet. It also has users from a wide variety of customer segments. While younger internet users spend their time across multiple applications, Facebook is still regularly in the mix due to its ubiquity and longevity.
Businesses that sell mass market products targeting a mix of customers from different age groups, backgrounds, and financial standings — such as retailers and grocers — should consider advertising on Facebook to connect with a broad audience. Facebook allows advertisers to target customers with more specificity, but the platform’s greatest strength is its massive reach.
Instagram also has significant ad reach, which has steadily increased over the years and is rapidly catching up with Facebook. However, Instagram users are younger — the vast majority are aged between 18 and 34 — and often conduct more research before pulling the trigger on their purchases. This makes the platform the perfect choice for businesses that want to target customers with that profile.
Instagram is designed for images and videos first. So, it’s perfect for businesses that create ads with a strong visual element, such as fashion brands, skincare companies, and other lifestyle businesses.
LinkedIn is a professional social networking platform. Users often use this platform to share their professional experiences, offer their expertise, and expand their professional network. Unlike its competitors, interactions on LinkedIn rely on a person’s affiliation with a business or an industry to build relationships with others.
The nature of the platform has led some companies to erroneously assume that it hosts older users. LinkedIn is actually most popular with users between the ages of 30 and 39. Businesses rely on LinkedIn to connect with professionals in their industry who might be looking for professional growth opportunities. B2B companies and educational institutions often find success on LinkedIn due to its ability to target industry-specific viewers. Businesses that sell big ticket items such as cars, real estate, or investment products can also use LinkedIn to reach out to buyers that have specific job titles or belong to a certain salary range.
X, formerly known as Twitter, is extremely popular with journalists, celebrities, and their followers. It has been used as an important tool for disseminating information. However, the platform has experienced major upheaval in recent months following its acquisition by Elon Musk. It has undergone constant changes and there have even been discussions about putting access to the platform behind a paywall. Consequently, X lost almost a third of its ad reach in the first quarter of 2023.
Despite its reduction in ad reach, businesses targeting a hyper-specific audience such as current affairs and sports journalists that are more active on X can still find success there. However, it’s important to monitor the changes that will affect the platform in the coming months, such as the increasing popularity of Threads, Meta’s direct X competitor.
One social media platform that is rapidly growing in popularity (despite efforts to control its influence in certain geographies) is TikTok. This creative and dynamic platform is perfect for marketers hoping to connect with the younger audience that makes up the majority of its users. With its vast user base, powerful algorithm, and variousadvertising options, TikTok can be an effective marketing tool for businesses seeking to cultivate brand awareness and drive engagement. TikTok is a popular tool used by influencers. This makes it ideal for trend-based businesses such as fashion, beauty, and lifestyle brands.
TikTok has an extremely strong influencer community despite the lack of an obvious monetization strategy for creators. Collaborating with influencers can help marketers gain exposure and credibility. Influencers on TikTok have a significant following and can create and promote branded content in an authentic and engaging way. The platform has also increased its focus on making it easy for businesses to advertise with CRM integrations and advance ad controls.
Numerous social media platforms are available for marketers to reach their audience. Most Americans also use multiple social media platforms to serve different purposes. Here’s how marketers can choose which platforms should be used to reach their target audience most effectively.
Several resources such as the annual Digital Report from We Are Social and Sprout Social’s regular updates provide up-to-date social media demographics data. These reports can provide insights into the demographics of users on different platforms, allowing you to align your customer demographics with the appropriate social media platforms.
Look for alignment between your target audience and the user base of various platforms by comparing your customers’ demographic data. For example, if your target audience consists of younger adults, TikTok and Instagram may be the most suitable platforms. If you’re targeting professionals, LinkedIn might be a better choice.
Once you’ve identified the platforms that align with your customer demographics, create a presence on those platforms and monitor their performance. Track engagement metrics, follower growth, and conversions to evaluate the effectiveness of each platform in reaching your target audience.
Once marketers understand where their audience spends the most time, they must define their strategies to make the most of every ad dollar. These tips can help marketers produce consistently positive results on their platform of choice:
Analyze your competitors’ content strategies to identify trends, successful formats, and gaps in the market. This analysis can help you differentiate your content and find unique angles to attract and engage your audience. Tools such as Meta Ad Library allow marketers to see which issues and topics are getting the most traction across Meta-owned platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
Use data analytics tools to track and measure the performance of your content across different formats and features. Monitor key metrics like engagement rates, click-through rates, conversions, and customer feedback to identify what’s working and what needs improvement.
Don't be afraid to experiment with different content formats. Try:
See what performs best for your marketing objectives and audience preferences.
Tailor your content delivery based on audience preferences and behavior. Use marketing automation tools to segment your audience and deliver personalized content experiences that speak directly to their needs and interests. For example, LinkedIn users might be looking for information-dense content while TikTok users crave more engaging and entertaining content to hold their attention.
Stay informed about emerging trends and technologies in the digital marketing landscape. Adopt new content formats and features that align with your objectives and show potential to engage and captivate your audience.
Regularly analyze and optimize your content strategy based on data insights, customer feedback, and performance metrics. Keep experimenting, learning, and adapting based on the changing needs and preferences of your audience.
Actively seek feedback from your audience through surveys, comments, or social media interactions. This direct feedback will provide valuable insights into audience preferences and help you align your content formats and features with their expectations.
MarinOne offers a comprehensive solution for managing and optimizing advertising campaigns across various channels, including social media. MarinOne helps businesses optimize their marketing efforts with these methods:
Unified platform: MarinOne provides a unified platform where businesses can manage all their advertising campaigns across different social media platforms in one place. This helps streamline campaign management, allowing businesses to save time and effort by accessing all their campaigns and metrics on a single interface.
Data-driven insights: MarinOne provides businesses with detailed analytics and reporting tools to gain insights into campaign performance across different social media platforms. These insights help businesses understand which strategies and tactics are most effective, enabling them to make data-driven decisions and optimize their marketing efforts accordingly.
Automated optimization: MarinOne offers automated optimization features that allow businesses to set specific goals and parameters for their campaigns. The platform continuously monitors campaign performance and automatically adjusts bidding, targeting, and creative elements to achieve the desired outcomes. This helps businesses maximize their marketing ROI and achieve better results across different social media platforms.
To get started today, schedule a live, personal demo.
Data visualization is an essential tool for performance marketers, enabling them to convey complex information in a clear and engaging manner. With the increasing volume of data available to marketers, the ability to present it in a visually compelling way has become more important than ever. Whether you’re analyzing campaign performance, tracking customer behavior, or presenting key performance indicators to stakeholders, creating stunning data visualizations can help you make better decisions and drive better results.
In this blog post, we will provide a step-by-step guide for creating data visualizations that make an impact. From selecting the right design elements and tools to transforming raw data into meaningful insights, this guide offers actionable tips and best practices for anyone looking to create visualizations that grab attention and communicate information effectively.
Performance marketers are utilizing data visualization in 2023 to drive their campaigns and use data to drive decisions in several ways. Let’s dive deep into the latest tools, techniques, and trends that performance marketers are leveraging to make their marketing analytics more efficient and effective.
With clear visual representations, marketers can instantly grasp and analyze key metrics such as conversion rates, click-through rates, and ROI. These visualizations provide a comprehensive overview of campaign performance, enabling marketers to identify areas of improvement and take appropriate action.
Performance marketers need to calculate and track the ROI of their campaigns. Data visualization makes it easier to comprehend complex financial metrics related to campaign performance. Marketers can create visualizations that illustrate the relationship between ad spend and revenue generated, enabling them to optimize their marketing budgets and ensure a strong ROI.
Attribution modeling is crucial for understanding the impact of various touch-points on a customer's journey. Data visualization tools assist performance marketers in visualizing complex attribution models, making it easier to identify the most influential touch-points and allocate resources accordingly. These visualizations enable marketers to optimize their campaigns and achieve better attribution accuracy.
There are some key data visualizations that every performance marketer should know and utilize. From customer segmentation to geographic heatmaps, we will break down these visualizations and explain how they can help you gain valuable insights, optimize your strategies, and ultimately maximize your performance marketing efforts.
Every customer goes through a process before making an actual purchase. Businesses must be able to see and understand this process before they can optimize the path to a final sale. Sales funnel visualization helps marketers represent the different stages of the customer journey, from initial awareness to final conversion. It helps marketers identify the drop-off points and optimize their marketing efforts at each stage.
Most businesses appeal to more than one customer segment. Marketers must understand how these customer segments are similar to each other and how they are different.
A visualization that groups customers into segments based on characteristics such as demographics, behavior, or preferences is called a “customer segmentation visualization.” This helps marketers understand their target audience better and tailor their marketing strategies accordingly.
Social media has become an indispensable arrow in a marketer’s quiver. Its ubiquity and popularity means that simply observing social media engagement can give marketers greater insights into their target audience’s likes, dislikes, interests, and trigger points.
Visualizations of social media metrics, including likes, comments, and shares of posts, as well as follower growth, provide insights into the effectiveness of social media marketing campaigns and help track engagement and brand awareness.
Almost one-third of marketers consider website traffic to be the most important metric that they monitor. Visualizations of website analytics metrics like page views, bounce rates, time on page, and conversion rates provide insights into website performance, user behavior, and areas for improvement in marketing campaigns.
Visualizations of email campaign metrics, such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions help measure the effectiveness of email marketing efforts and identify trends and opportunities for optimization.
A visualization that shows the value of a customer over their entire relationship with a brand helps marketers understand the profitability of different customer segments and focus their marketing efforts accordingly.
Visualizations of key advertising metrics like impressions, click-through rates, and conversions help marketers evaluate the performance of their advertising campaigns and optimize their allocation of advertising budgets.
Performance can often only be fully understood when placed in the context of an entire industry. A business can be profitable while lagging behind its industry counterparts. A market share visualization that compares the market share of different brands or products within a particular industry provides insights into brand performance relative to competitors and market trends.
Visualizing data on a map helps marketers understand regional customer behavior, preferences, or market penetration. It can assist in localizing marketing campaigns and targeting specific regions or demographics.
Visualizations that compare key metrics, such as market share, customer satisfaction, or social media engagement, between a company and its competitors help marketers understand their competitive position and identify areas for improvement.
For modern businesses, collecting raw data alone is not enough. To derive value from this data, it needs to be analyzed, interpreted, and transformed into meaningful insights. In this section, we will explore the process of converting raw data into actionable insights that drive better decision-making.
Businesses generate a staggering amount of data — but this information is not always easily accessible due to the way it’s stored and shared. An industry survey revealed that 80% of businesses say their data is stored across different software applications and 81% believe that their data is stored across different departments.
To overcome this challenge, businesses should start by thoroughly understanding the raw data they have and creating a single source of truth. Once that’s done, marketers must identify the variables and ascertain their relationships and any patterns or trends within the data.
On the surface, creating data visualizations can seem extremely time and labor intensive. Recent research has shown that 79% of companies believe that they lack the personnel capacity to consistently mine their data effectively.
However, once your front- and back-end data are housed on a single platform, you can explore features such as automatic data visualizations to populate charts and simplify the process from data gathering to data utilization.
Select the visualization type that most effectively represents the data and aligns with your goals. Common types include bar charts, line graphs, pie charts, scatter plots, and maps.
Clean and preprocess the raw data to remove any errors, missing values, or outliers that might affect the accuracy of the visualization. Perform necessary calculations, aggregations, or transformations to prepare the data for visualization. MarinOne software allows businesses to populate data without worrying about human error.
Craft a narrative or story around your data to make it more engaging and relatable to the audience. Develop a logical flow that leads the viewer through the visualization, highlighting key points and insights.
MarinOne enables marketers to easily access and analyze their data, with customizable dashboards that can be tailored according to their specific business needs. The platform allows marketers to visualize their campaigns' performance through easy-to-read graphs, charts, and tables, empowering them to identify trends, insights, and areas for improvement.
With MarinOne, performance marketers can:
Furthermore, MarinOne's platform integrates with leading third-party data visualization tools like Tableau and Domo, allowing marketers to create stunning visualizations and stories with their data.
MarinOne provides a suite of reporting and analytics tools that can help performance marketers consolidate data, track campaigns, create custom reports, and optimize campaigns. By empowering marketers with visual and data-driven insights, MarinOne can help marketers improve their performance and drive better results.
To get started, schedule a live, personal demo today.
In 2020, Google announced its plans to phase out third-party cookies, following the privacy protection measures already adopted by Safari and Firefox. After several delays, Chrome will finally begin blocking 3rd party cookies in 2024. Google announced that the testing phase will start in Q1, with 1% of third-party cookies initially blocked, ramping up to 100% in Q3 of 2024.
This change is stirring concerns among advertisers about the potential loss of valuable data, impacting strategies and the effectiveness of online advertising campaigns. This blog post delves into the implications of this shift, particularly for clients using publisher tracking pixels, Google Analytics, and Marin Software's Attribution.
Websites rely heavily on cookies to improve the user experience, and they will continue to do so after this change because only third-party cookies will be blocked. First-party cookies are set and read by the same domain as the website you are visiting. In addition to saving things like user preferences and login status, many measurement solutions, including Marin Attribution, can be set to the first-party context.
Third-party cookies allow unrelated domains to read the cookie and track users across different websites. These have long been a staple in display advertising, allowing advertisers to target users with third-party data or to retarget users across the open web. Publishers and ad tech providers will need to adapt the APIs and tools in the Google Privacy Sandbox to continue to offer these capabilities.
Many advertisers rely on a combination of Publisher Tracking and Google Analytics to measure the performance of their campaigns. With last year’s transition to Google Analytics 4 from Universal Analytics, Google has upgraded its tracking to be compatible with this “post-cookie” world. Those using the latest publisher tracking pixels are also fine during this transition.
At Marin, we understand the importance of accurately measuring digital campaigns. Marin Attribution, our independent measurement solution for performance media, has always used first-party cookies. There is no impact from the upcoming Chrome update.
In addition to first-party cookies, Marin Software offers a server-to-server option. This advanced solution provides an added layer of protection and data integrity. It allows for more complete measurement by bypassing the need for cookies altogether. This method is more secure and future-proofs your data collection strategy against further privacy changes in the digital landscape.
As the digital advertising world evolves, staying ahead of the curve is essential. Marin Software is committed to providing cutting-edge solutions that respect user privacy while delivering the insights and performance marketers need. Our clients can rest assured that with our Attribution, they can confidently succeed in the post-third-party cookie era.
In conclusion, while the phasing out of third-party cookies by Google Chrome presents challenges, it also offers an opportunity to innovate and adapt. By leveraging Marin Software's Attribution and our server-to-server options, advertisers can continue to gather valuable insights and drive impactful advertising campaigns in a privacy-compliant manner.
We’re excited to announce some of the recent updates we’ve made to our user interface. These upgrades make our software not only easier to use, but also, well… prettier! Tl;dr: this phase of updates has focused on streamlining our navigation and making it more intuitive. We've consolidated all navigation into one single bar on the left side of the app – where there are seven different expandable sections. And we’ve moved all the admin tools into the upper right to make them easier to find no matter where you are in the platform.
Let's dive into all the powerful features that live within each section.
When you first visit Marin, you’ll be brought to the ‘Home’ sub-tab within the ‘Overview’ tab. Here, you’ll see a customizable dashboard full of charts and tables designed to give you a high-level overview of your performance. You’ll probably use this as your home base to provide a snapshot of which campaigns are doing well, which are doing poorly, and what needs your attention.
The second sub-tab in the ‘Overview’ section is Insights. Marin runs over 200 nightly checks on every account linked to the platform, identifying areas for improvement. Then, it provides easily implemented recommendations to improve performance – many of which you can apply with just one click.
The third sub-tab is ‘Dashboards’. This is where you can customize your home screen and create as many additional reporting dashboards as you’d like. Our dashboards are neat because you can interact with each individual chart and graph – changing date ranges, filters, and more. Additionally, links to your Dashboards are shareable to anyone, even those without Marin access. When someone without Marin access clicks a link to a Dashboard, it will take them to a read-only view of the report. This is great for real-time reporting on performance to leadership, or sharing marketing data with other teams.
The Accounts section is where you’ll probably spend most of your time. Here, you’ll see a traditional waterfall view of all the different levels of a paid media campaign. This is where one of Marin’s most valuable features comes into play; consolidated reporting and optimization across publishers.
And our grids have been undergoing a bit of a makeover, too! Now, you can view and edit all the filters you’ve applied at the top of the grid. We’ve moved some other buttons around to make workflows more intuitive, too. For example, we’ve added a breadcrumb trail at the top of the grid that informs the exact path you took to get to the screen you’re currently on. You can toggle between different sections of the system using the breadcrumbs at the top or hover in the area around the breadcrumbs to open the Navigator to jump to critical parts of the system.
We’ve also made our charting feature collapsible and slicker. With our in-app charting, you can visualize your data with just a few clicks.
The one sub-tab here that you may not recognize from the traditional paid media waterfall (of campaigns>groups>keywords>ads, etc.) is the ‘History’ sub-tab. This tab gives you a high-level view of performance, rolled up by date. It’s great for understanding high-level trends in your campaigns' performance.
Under Social, you’ll find all the Marin features that are exclusive to Meta. The two coolest ones are our Message Booster and Rules. Message Booster automatically turns your best performing organic posts into paid ads based on criteria you choose, like number of likes or comments.
And for those who are a bit dissatisfied with Meta’s bidding algorithms, Marin’s Rules allow you to choose your own criteria for automated bidding. This way, you’re able to use Marin’s intelligent bidding to automatically increase or decrease bids based on the KPIs that matter most to you.
Dimensions are Marin’s bespoke labeling solution. Some classic examples of dimension tags are campaign attributes like brand vs. non-brand, or geo location. In the dimensions tab, you can see data by dimension, and even pivot different dimensions against each other. This makes reporting on the categories that matter to you a breeze.
Here is where you’ll find all of Marin’s (you guessed it…) optimization features. The first sub-tab is ‘Strategies’. This is where you can manage your cross-channel bid strategies and targets.
The second ‘Pacing’ sub-tab showcases our highly requested budget pacing feature, which allows you to segment campaigns into different spend categories and manage how each category is pacing toward its spend goal for the month or quarter. Marin can automatically update budgets, bids, and publisher bidding targets based on these pacing widgets as well.
Lastly, under Optimization you’ll see the ‘Dynamic Actions’ sub-tab, which enables clients that are using Marin bidding to layer custom rules on top of their algorithmically calculated bids.
Under Automate, we first have the ‘Impact Summary’ sub-tab. This is a dashboard that showcases all the automated actions that Marin’s AI has taken on each object within your accounts. We understand that placing your marketing campaigns in the hands of AI can be scary. That’s why we built this dashboard – so you can understand all the automated changes being made, and have the power to override the automation if you want to.
The other sub-tab under ‘Automate’ is ‘Scripts’. Our Scripts feature is new and we’re very excited about it! It enables clients to create their own custom automation with python code. From automating dimension labeling, to changing budgets based on custom rules, to increasing or decreasing CPA or ROAS targets based on backend data, the possibilities are endless. And with our ChatGPT integration, AI will write the code for you, and our Solutions Architects can help too. We certainly don’t expect you to learn to code in order to use Marin. Just let us know what you're trying to achieve and our support team will write and / or QA the code for you.
Under ‘Reports,’ you’ll find two sub-tabs, ‘Completed’ and ‘Scheduled’. This is pretty straightforward – completed reports can be downloaded from the ‘Completed’ sub-tab and scheduled reports can be edited in the ‘Scheduled’ sub-tab. But you’ll really appreciate the scheduled tab, because it allows you to edit any aspect of a recurring report. So no need to re-create a whole report because you’re missing one column or one filter. Never again – you’re too busy for that!
That brings us to the end of our tour of Marin’s new UI. But stay tuned, because there are many more updates coming out next quarter that we can’t wait to share with you! And if you’re considering Marin and want to learn more, click here to schedule a demo of our gorgeous new UI.
The ad management tools provided by Google, Facebook, and even Amazon to manage paid media campaigns have come a long way. It wasn't too long ago that doing basic reporting, campaign management, or something as simple as bidding required you to look to a third-party platform.
But today, the publisher platforms offer great campaign management tools that help you get the most out of your investment in that channel. However, because they only function within that channel, there are a lot of limitations for cross-channel advertisers.
This isn't to say that you shouldn't use the publisher tools. They’re an important part of your toolkit. But you’d likely benefit from expanding your workflows to include a cross-channel platform. Let's dive into the reasons why this is important…
All of the publisher platforms offer automated recommendations on how to improve the performance of your campaigns. These are helpful – but if you look closely, they’re often aligned with increased spending, not necessarily increased performance for your business. For example, consider recommendations that focus on click-through rates. Yes, having a high click-through rate is great. But if those clicks won't turn into revenue, you may spend more for no additional return. It’s better to have recommendations that are based on your business goals. Did you get to grade your own homework? Do you ask the barber if you need a haircut? Of course not! So why would you ask the publishers where you should allocate your budget?
Since the demise of cookies, publisher tools have had a much harder time tracking conversions. Google Ads now employs conversion modeling techniques that use aggregated data to estimate conversions. While they’re trying their best, it's in your business’s best interests to use a first-party data measurement platform that can track conversions without cookies.
Google Analytics is often seen as the industry standard for conversion and revenue tracking and it’s definitely the tracking option that many of Marin’s customers use. While we’re happy to integrate with Google Analytics, the rollout of Google Analytics 4’s new data-driven attribution model raised some concerns about the accuracy of its conversion data attribution.
The last iteration of Google Analytics, commonly referred to as Universal Analytics or GA 360, defaulted to a last-click attribution model. This attribution model was quite straightforward — it gave credit for a conversion to the last channel that the customer interacted with before converting. But the new Google Analytics 4 (GA4) defaults to a data-driven attribution model, which uses Google’s machine learning to assign partial credit to various touchpoints along the conversion path. This attribution model is much less straightforward, and there are concerns that GA4 may be underreporting conversion data from Google’s competitors like Microsoft Ads.
In late September, Microsoft representatives emailed advertisers expressing concerns about the efficacy of GA4’s reporting on Microsoft Ads’ conversions and revenue. They noted that the shift to data-driven attribution was “causing potentially large discrepancies in conversion attribution reporting between Google’s tools (GA4 and Search Ads 360 (SA360)) and Microsoft Advertising.” They estimated that “the magnitude of underrepresentation is ~50%.” That’s a big discrepancy. The Microsoft representatives also noted that they “have seen cases where the move to GA4 has caused discrepancies even when clients continued to use last-click attribution” and therefore they “always encourage you to check Microsoft’s reporting for Microsoft conversions.” While they didn’t share any proof that Google Analytics is maliciously underreporting Microsoft Ads’ conversions, this sort of gray area, and Google-first bias, is exactly the sort of thing you can avoid by using a neutral first-party data tracking system like Marin.
In order to get the most out of publisher bidding algorithms, you need to provide them with conversion and revenue data from your source of truth. Ideally, you’re giving the publishers enough information to understand the profitability of each click. However, how much data does a publisher account need to effectively optimize a campaign? And how much of your proprietary information do you really want to share with Google, Bing, Meta, etc.? When it comes to data privacy, understanding how your data is being used is more important than ever – but transparency from publishers is severely lacking. A guaranteed way to capitalize on intelligent bidding without jeopardizing your proprietary data is to leverage a third-party tool like Marin. third-party tools offer a safe and secure space to store the data needed for optimizations, separate from the publisher platforms you're marketing on.
If you create and edit campaigns in one publisher tool at a time, you’ll be repeating workflows over and over again. Many of us have suffered through the process of creating multiple bulk sheets, and then uploading those sheets into each individual ad editor when launching a cross-publisher campaign. Then once that campaign is complete, exporting the front-end data from the publishers and backend data from Google analytics, unifying it into one Google sheet, then creating reports and data visualizations…These tedious processes used to be a rite of passage for entry-level paid search associates, but no one should have to suffer through that! Your team’s time is better spent working on strategy. From data collection to launching new campaigns to optimization, you’ll work more efficiently if you can execute these workflows all at one time, in one platform.
As the performance marketing world grows increasingly more complex, relying exclusively on publisher tools is a mistake. It forces you to work in silos, leaving you open to blind spots and wasted investment. The modern customer encounters many ads across multiple channels before reaching the bottom of the conversion funnel. Don’t you wish you had some sort of ‘referee’ to monitor your spend, ROAS, and CPA independent of publisher bias?
That’s where a Marketing Data Pipeline, like Marin, can swoop in and make your life easier (and your ROAS better). Our omnichannel platform normalizes and organizes marketing data into a single source of truth – so your team can easily retrieve, examine, tell the story of, and act on insights from your data.
Marin brings all your data together under one roof. Then, it analyzes your performance across all your channels – and provides unbiased recommendations on where to spend your next dollar, how to better optimize campaigns, and more. Since we have no skin in the game, we don’t care which publisher you spend your money on. We care about your bottom line — getting the best return on advertising investment for your business.
Our clients typically have about 20% more time to focus on strategy after integrating Marin into their daily workflows. These time saving tools also drive an increase in revenue. It’s a win-win.
Interested in learning more? Click here to schedule a demo with one of our experts!
As traditional metrics like clicks and views become less meaningful, businesses must adapt and find more effective ways to measure engagement. In this post, we’ll explore how to measure engagement in the Web3 era — which is forecasted to reach a market size of $81.5 billion by 2030 — going beyond superficial metrics and diving into deeper indicators of user participation and value.
Clicks and views have long been the go-to metrics for measuring engagement in the digital realm. While they provide a basic understanding of user interaction, they fail to capture the true essence of engagement. In the Web3 era, where user empowerment and ownership take center stage, these traditional metrics fall short in truly reflecting the depth of user involvement and value creation.
The emergence of the Web3 era has brought about a significant shift in the landscape of user engagement. Unlike Web2, where users primarily consumed content passively, the Web3 era promotes active participation and ownership. Users are no longer mere consumers but are contributors and stakeholders.
With Web3, users co-create content, applications, and even entire ecosystems. Instead of measuring superficial metrics like clicks and views, which offer limited perspectives, the Web3 era focuses on evaluating the depth and quality of user interactions and digital experiences, where users have a vested interest in the platforms they engage with.
Measuring engagement in the Web3 era has far-reaching implications for businesses and the overall success of Web3 communities.
Armed with a data-driven approach, companies can make more informed decisions based on user behavior, preferences, and trends. Analyzing engagement metrics enables them to identify patterns, optimize their offerings, and tailor their strategies to better meet the needs and expectations of their target audience.
Measuring engagement in the Web3 era provides businesses with the opportunity to fine-tune their strategies and maximize their chances of success. By understanding which aspects of their platform or content drive the highest levels of engagement, they can allocate resources more effectively and focus on areas that generate the most value. In turn, this optimization leads to improved user experiences, increased user retention, and ultimately, better business outcomes.
By understanding the factors that drive engagement, businesses can build and nurture vibrant communities that foster active participation, collaboration, and positive interactions among users. With engagement metrics, companies can identify and reward community members who contribute valuable content or provide insightful contributions, thereby encouraging a culture of involvement and expertise sharing. Not only does this approach enhance user loyalty, but it also harnesses the collective intelligence of the community for improved innovation and problem-solving, which becomes beneficial for all participants.
One of the first indicators of engagement in the Web3 era is attention — time spent by users on a particular platform or application. Time spent is a valuable metric that demonstrates the level of interest and commitment of users. However, it's important to analyze the quality of time spent rather than just the quantity.
Pro tip: To successfully track the duration users spend interacting with their platforms and content, leverage blockchain's transparent and timestamped records. Additionally, smart contracts and decentralized applications provide granular insights into user interactions, allowing companies to quantify and analyze the depth and frequency of user engagement.
In the Web3 era, the creation and sharing of user-generated content (UGC) holds immense significance because it transforms passive consumers into active contributors, fostering a dynamic and interconnected digital landscape where individuals have the power to shape narratives, influence trends, and collectively co-create the value they seek.
UGC redefines traditional notions of content ownership and distribution, and also facilitates the emergence of more authentic, diverse, and community-driven digital environments that reflect the true essence of Web3 principles. In fact, because UGC has been proven to build trust and authenticity, 86% of companies have integrated it into their marketing strategy.
Pro tip: By creating blockchain-based protocols that track and validate UGC submissions, businesses can ensure the authenticity and ownership of contributed content. Just as smart contracts can be used to track a user’s time and attention, they can be employed to record the creation, sharing, and remixing of UGC, enabling precise quantification of user interactions.
Through token-based incentives, businesses can easily align user interactions with tangible value. As users earn and trade tokens based on engagement levels, companies gain real-time insights into which activities are most captivating and impactful. The evolving token marketplace provides a gauge of sentiment and demand for various interactions, allowing businesses to adapt and optimize their engagement strategies in response to user preferences. Doing so fosters stronger connections between businesses and users and provides valuable data for refining products, enhancing experiences, and ultimately driving sustained growth in the Web3 landscape.
Pro tip: To design a robust token economy, determine how users will earn tokens through actions like content creation, participation in events, referrals, or other valuable contributions. Then assign different weights to each activity based on its importance to your ecosystem. Ensure that token rewards are aligned with the behaviors and outcomes you want to promote.
Leveraging blockchain-based metrics offers a revolutionary approach to measuring engagement that enhances accuracy, transparency, and trust. Utilizing the inherent immutability of the blockchain allows businesses to create tamper-proof records of user interactions and transactions.
Each engagement, whether it's content creation, token transfers, or application usage, is time-stamped and securely stored, ensuring a reliable source of data for analysis. The transparency of the blockchain gives users the ability to independently verify their interactions, fostering a sense of both authenticity and accountability. Blockchain-based metrics also enable businesses to map out complex user journeys, understand engagement patterns, and gain insights into which activities resonate most within the community.
Pro tip: To take full advantage of blockchain-based metrics, begin by identifying key metrics and use cases. Collaborate with blockchain developers to build smart contracts that automate the recording and tracking of the identified metrics. Additionally, introduce your users to the benefits of blockchain-based metrics to encourage participation.
Because engagement in the Web3 era is heavily reliant on community interactions, it requires tracking and analyzing interactions between users, such as comments, likes, shares, and collaborations. By monitoring both the sentiment and quality of these interactions, businesses can comprehensively assess the vibrancy and impact of their community interactions, shaping strategies that nurture deeper connections and meaningful collaboration with their users.
Pro tip: To evaluate the sentiment of user comments, feedback, and discussions within the community, implement sentiment analysis tools that utilize natural language processing (NLP). These tools can analyze the tone and emotions expressed in text to gauge whether interactions are positive, negative, or neutral. Consider also integrating decentralized reputation systems where users can provide feedback and rate the quality of each other's contributions. Content ranking mechanisms may also be useful in enabling the community to upvote or downvote contributions based on their perceived quality.
A decentralized decision-making process, such as token-based voting or consensus mechanisms, allows users to contribute to key decisions regarding features, upgrades, and strategic directions. By tracking the level of participation in these governance activities, including the number of votes cast or proposals submitted, businesses can gauge the depth of engagement.
Additionally, analyzing the diversity of participants and their contributions offers insights into the inclusivity of the decision-making process. As users become stakeholders with a genuine influence, their engagement is inherently tied to the platform's success, creating a symbiotic relationship that drives active participation and sustainable growth.
Pro tip: To track the level of participation in governance activities, utilize blockchain's transparent and immutable ledger. Every vote cast or proposal submitted is recorded as a unique transaction on the blockchain, providing a reliable and auditable record of user engagement. With this information, businesses can analyze the frequency and volume of transactions and can quantitatively measure the depth of user involvement in the decision-making process.
The Web3 era encourages network effects, wherein users actively invite others to join and participate in the ecosystem. By using tracking mechanisms that monitor the growth of their user base, companies can measure the reach and impact of individual users' recommendations, identify the most effective channels for viral sharing, and quantify the ripple effect of engaged users bringing in new participants.
Pro tip: To accurately monitor network effects and referrals, create a tracking system that assigns unique identifiers to users and generates distinct referral links for each participant. Incorporate UTM parameters or similar tracking tags in the referral links. To understand the ripple effect of user referrals, implement attribution modeling. Businesses may also choose to experiment with different referral incentives and sharing strategies.
Currently, 2.8% of users own an NFT. By issuing NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) as collectible items, limited editions, or rewards for engagement, companies can track and analyze user interactions with these assets. Monitoring NFT ownership, transfers, and trading activities provides insights into user preferences and the value they place on specific digital content.
Pro tip: To foster a deeper sense of engagement and belonging among users who participate in the NFT ecosystem, businesses can observe which NFTs gain the most attention, are frequently traded, or spark discussions. This data can then be used to assess the resonance of their offerings and refine their content strategies.
As we navigate the Web3 era, it becomes evident that traditional metrics like clicks and views no longer capture the true essence of engagement.
With the multifaceted nature of engagement in the Web3 era, partnering with MarinOne can help you delve deeper into the dynamics of user participation. Its robust platform and suite of tools and analytics will take you beyond superficial metrics so you can gain valuable insights into the quality and depth of user engagement, enabling you to make data-driven decisions and optimize your strategies.
Curious to learn how? Schedule a demo.
You’re a customer-first brand that prioritizes customer satisfaction, but no matter how hard you try, there will always be a handful of unhappy customers who leave disgruntled reviews or share negative sentiments about your brand on social media. Perhaps they received a faulty product, or maybe they were just having a bad day and the product didn’t live up to their expectations. You can’t please everyone, but having a strong online reputation management (ORM) strategy can minimize the impact of negative feedback to help your brand maintain a positive reputation.
Online reputation management (ORM) involves monitoring mentions of your brand name on the internet, primarily in reviews and on social media. This may sound like a job for your PR team, but ORM is different. PR teams work proactively to increase exposure to your brand and strengthen your reputation. ORM is a more defensive strategy that centers around seeking out negative content and working to minimize the damage.
In the age of Instagram, ORM is more important than ever before. Social media algorithms favor viral content, and unfortunately negative and controversial content has some of the highest potential for virality. This is because virality is based on engagement. Engagement meaning, how many people are watching the video (most likely a tiktok or reel) from start to finish? How many people are liking and commenting? The more controversial a video is, the higher the engagement will be. This can cause negative press around a brand to spread quickly. However, the phenomenon of virality also causes trends to come and go rapidly. So while negative press around a brand could be trending for a day or two, as soon as a new scandal happens, the internet will all but forget about it.
Internet trends move so quickly that most viral mishaps are often looked past within a matter of weeks. For example, many of us remember the Kendall Jenner + Pepsi Ad Debacle of 2017. For those who don’t, Pepsi released an ad where Kendall Jenner walked into a crowd of protestors, approached front line police, and handed the police officers a can of Pepsi which miraculously ended a conflict between police and protestors. Viewers were outraged as they felt this ad belittled protestors and minimized the issue of police brutality.
In April of 2017 it felt like this ad was all anyone was talking about. Folks on Twitter were calling for boycotts of all Pepsi products, and Pepsi’s stock certainly took a hit. But today, most people scarcely even remember that it happened. This scenario exemplifies how brands can quickly move past even the most ‘cancellable’ scenarios. Between Pepsi’s reputation as a staple household soda and the speed at which internet gossip moves, Pepsi recovered quickly. By May, the internet had moved on to other scandals, and nowadays no one thinks twice about drinking a Pespi. Virality is both an enemy and a friend to brands trying to maintain a positive online reputation.
Online Reputation Management aims to get ahead of any negative sentiments and address them before they become a larger, or even a viral issue. Things rarely escalate to the viral level, but regardless, social media has made people more connected than ever before which enables negative or positive sentiment about a brand to spread quickly if you let it.
Here are a few key steps to an effective ORM strategy:
If someone tweets about a negative experience and tags your brand, they expect a response within a few hours. The speed of communication on social media demands a dedicated employee or team to monitor mentions of the brand on Twitter, Instagram and Tiktok. Additionally, if a customer contacts a brand via social media and does not receive a timely response, they may post a negative comment on the brand’s account in order to get the company’s attention, or to express their frustration and gain sympathy from others online. Instagram has even started including a ‘typically responds within’ blurb that users see when messaging a verified business account. People are utilizing social media as a way to get a quick response from a company representative when they have an issue. And this makes sense; we scarcely talk on the phone anymore as everyone communicates through Instagram instead. So instead of relying on a customer support hotline, brands need to meet customers where they're at, which is on Instagram and Twitter. For example, check out this helpful exchange with a member of the community management team at clothing retailer Savage X Fenty:
Their community management team responded within minutes and began working to answer the question at hand. This quick response was possible because Savage X Fenty has a dedicated team managing their social media accounts. If this customer were to receive no response to their direct message, they might start commenting on the brand’s posts asking why they’re being ignored. Then, others will see the comments and develop a negative impression of the brand.
It’s interesting; people spend so much time on Instagram talking to their friends who are also on Instagram all the time and therefore respond quite quickly to each other. But now, people expect the same behavior from brands. Which is fair, since brands want their followers to see their social media content as native and relatable, just like a post from a friend. In turn, brands are held to the same standards that we have for our peers when it comes to social media interactions. These high expectations are exactly why having a community management team is so important.
Let’s say a customer tags a clothing company in a tweet stating their pants developed holes after just two wears. The customer likely wants two things; a refund and a public apology. A generic example of an appropriate response would be to reply to the tweet stating “This is not the experience we want our customers to have. Please message us directly so that we can make it right.” This way, you’re showing you care and will work to correct the situation, but you're also taking the conversation out of a public forum so the details can be handled privately. The disgruntled customer gets their resolution, and the public viewers of the tweet see that you value customer satisfaction.
The same goes for responding to negative reviews on your website. Publicly state that you are sorry to hear about the customer’s negative experience, and ask them to email your customer service team directly so you can make it right. This way future customers who read the review will know that if they receive a faulty or defective product, the situation will be remedied.
Here’s an example of a great response from Starbucks to a customer complaint on Twitter:
The Starbucks care team expressed empathy, apologized, and provided clear and concise instructions on how to continue the conversation in a private forum. That’s how it’s done!
Do not delete negative reviews or “bury” negative reviews under positive ones. Customers are smart, and an overwhelming amount of 5 star reviews will be seen as a red flag that your company is hiding negative reviews. It may seem counterintuitive, but a couple bad reviews actually help to validate the positive reviews by proving that the feedback is unbiased. However, if a review has overly vitriolic or profane language, it’s best to delete it as that is an unreasonable reaction and you don’t want other customers to be confronted with foul language when visiting your site.
If your company makes a more widespread mistake, quickly post a public apology stating why the mistake happened and what you plan to do to fix it. Utilizing the pants with holes example again, I’d recommend an instagram story post explaining that the fabric was faulty and the team will be sending out higher quality replacements or refunding customers who experienced that issue. The Instagram story is the best placement for a public apology because it is easily visible by your engaged customer base, but it won’t live on your Instagram grid forever like a feed post will. This way, you’ve addressed the issue without drawing unnecessary attention to it, so it can be resolved and your brand can move on.
In order to be forgiven in the court of public opinion, you must truly take action to remedy the issue at hand. This often comes in the form of issuing a refund or store credit for a problematic item. Or if you provide a service, making fixes easy for the customer. Here’s a great example of a helpful response from Jetblue Airways:
The ORM team responded quickly and helpfully. Rather than just telling the customer to stay on the line until they reach a customer service representative, the community manager offered to fix the issue for them. The key here is that they are making issue resolution as easy as possible for the customer, diffusing frustration. This experience could have caused K. M. Sutton and their followers to stop being brand loyal to Jetblue, but by fixing the issue, their team was able to retain a loyal customer.
Set up Google Alerts for brand terms so that you know immediately when any negative press arises. Setting up a Google alert is easy. Simply visit https://www.google.com/alerts, type in your brand name and enter in a few settings around where the alerts should be sent and how often you would like to be alerted:
Google alerts are a great way to monitor sentiment around your brand, both positive and negative.
In conclusion, a branding issue or bad review can feel like a big deal, but utilizing our ORM tips, your brand should be able to recover quickly. The internet moves fast! So as long as you’ve got a plan in place that involves reacting to negative sentiment with empathy and truly making things right with your customers, you’ve got nothing to worry about.
ORM is a part of your business that requires empathy, energy and genuine connection between the customer and the brand representative. If you're struggling to find the budget to hire a dedicated community manager, or your current team lacks the time to do community management yourselves, consider using a tool like MarinOne to automate some of your more mundane and time consuming tasks like reporting, paid media ad creation, and ad account optimization. Automate the things you can, so that you can focus on the things you can’t. Click here to schedule a demo of MarinOne today.
If you’re new to advertising on Meta, it can be a bit overwhelming. But never fear, Marin is here with a guide to set you on the right path. I’ll outline the process of setting up your Facebook Business Manager account. Then, I’ll provide a few strategic recommendations to help you get started.
Business Manager is a hub designed to help you manage all of your business’s pages and ad accounts in one place. Creating a Business Manager account is free and easy to do. Simply visit business.facebook.com, log in to your personal account, and then enter some info about your business.
Once you’re in, it's time to link your business’s page to your ad account:
Be sure to link all Facebook and Instagram pages you plan to run ads for. You will be given the option to add a page, request access to a page, or create a new page. Select whichever applies to you.
Next you’ll want to link an ad account to your Business Manager account:
You will be given the same options to add an ad account, request access to an ad account, or create a new ad account. Select whichever applies to you.
Next, you’ll want to grant your team members access to your Business Manager account. You have two different access levels to choose from:
You will also need to assign access levels for your Ad Accounts in Business Manager:
After all your roles are assigned, it’s time to set up your billing information, which can be done on the ‘payment methods’ page:
Billing on Facebook can work in one of two ways. Automatic billing will automatically charge your card for advertising costs, while manual billing will allow you to add funds to your account that Facebook will then pull from as ad money is spent.
You can cap your total ad cost by setting an account spending limit, in which case your ads will be paused when you hit that limit and won’t serve again until you increase or remove the limit.
Once you’ve got billing set up and your proper user roles assigned, you’re ready to start advertising! If you’re not sure where to start, check out these strategic recommendations.
If you’re new to buying ad space on Facebook and Instagram, the first thing you’ll want to do is make sure that the organic content on your social media pages is optimized to drive engagement. For example, a woman’s clothing retailer should make sure that their instagram page features their most popular pieces and that the posts on their instagram contain links to buy the items featured. B2C businesses can also benefit from creating an instagram ‘shop’ page. This way customers can click a link to shop at the bottom of each instagram post and be taken to your company’s shopping page within the instagram app. This makes the buying process easier than ever for customers, as you don’t even have to leave Instagram to make the purchase.
Once you’ve got your organic content optimized, start by promoting a few of your top organic posts. Analyze which posts received the best engagement. Once you’ve chosen your top organic content, Meta makes it easy to turn an organic post into an ad using Business Manager.
Marin’s Message Booster makes this process even easier. Simply select the post you’d like to boost, choose a campaign and a few settings, and you’re good to go.
Once you’re ready to progress from boosting content to creating intentional paid ads, I recommend a top-to-bottom marketing funnel approach.
To get started, you’ll want to cast a wide net to fill your marketing funnel from the top down with potential customers.
Video views are quite cheap with Meta, so that ad format is a great way to gain traction and build an audience. If you send out a video ad to a broad audience, for example targeting only by age range, you can then analyze who watched more than 5 seconds of your ad. Those who engaged with your ad for longer than 5 seconds are at least somewhat interested in your product. Users who viewed your top of funnel, broad targeting ad should then get moved down to the middle of your funnel so you can retarget them.
You can also analyze these audiences to gain demographic data about what potential customers’ online profile looks like, and target lookalike audiences.
For example, let's say you’re a university trying to acquire more students and you know that prospective university students are likely between the ages of 16 and 35. Start with an ad targeting just that age range. Then you can study the demographic that engages with your ad, and build an audience of interested prospects from there.
Now you’ve built your middle funnel audience from whom you see at least some intent to purchase, or learn more about your products/services. Retarget this audience with a click-to-website ad that leads to a landing page where they can learn more. Click-to-website ads are affordable but a bit pricier than video ads, so be sure that your landing page contains multiple calls to action so you can learn more about what your potential customers are interested in and then use that info to segment your audience further as you continue to retarget them, hopefully pushing them further down the funnel.
In the example of a university marketing to new students, the advertiser would want to drive ad clicks to a landing page on which users can click different links to learn about each degree program. This way, the advertiser is gathering more information about each potential student. They can then push those who clicked on a link further down the funnel by retargeting them with an ad tailored to the degree program they showed interest in.
This retargeting audience is now towards the bottom of the funnel, and you can continue to serve them customized ads in hopes of pushing them across the finish line and getting that application.
Hopefully this guide helps you get started! Many of the recommendations discussed here can be implemented quickly with the help of MarinOne for social. Click here to learn more.
Market segmentation is the foundation of a successful marketing campaign. There are likely many different types of consumers that could be interested in your products, and sending the right message to each type of customer is key to acquiring new users. Whether it be targeting customers based on their age, or understanding that different types of customers value different aspects of your product or service, you’ll want to deliver unique, personalized messages to different segments in order to foster enthusiastic brand loyalty.
Let’s run through the 5 different types of market segmentation in detail so that you can understand which is right for you.
This is usually the first type of segmentation we think of when starting to define our different customer personas. These are basic defining characteristics such as age, gender, race, income level and education level. Demographic targeting can be anything from advertising high end products to those with higher income levels, to a clothing company advertising gendered clothing to women and men separately.
This is mostly used in B2C marketing efforts, as these traits focus on the individual. The B2B counterpart is firmographic segmentation.
Firmographic segmentation is the most basic form of market segmentation for B2B marketing efforts. Firmographic traits of a company include size, location, industry, structure and financial performance. For example, you’ll want to use different messaging when marketing towards a small business than when reaching out to an organization with hundreds of employees.
A subset of demographic segmentation, geographic segmentation entails segmenting customers by their location. You can segment by city, country, zip code or even language region. The most straightforward example of this is trying to drive foot traffic to a brick and mortar store by targeting people who live within a certain number of miles from the store. But even for online businesses, it’s important to analyze which geographic areas your website traffic is coming from. Sometimes these answers may seem obvious, like a company selling cowboy boots targeting states in the south. But you may be surprised what other regions are interested in your product, beyond the most obvious opportunities. Often market research brings about data that cannot be acquired by intuition alone. Who knows, there could be a lot of cowboys in Vermont…
This is the most complex and arguably the most valuable type of segmentation. Behavioral segmentation is the ongoing process of tracking and targeting users’ behavioral trends. As you collect data about your target market over time, you’ll be able to segment your audience into groups based on things like purchasing habits, brand interactions, buying history, website visits and interactions with competing brands. This form of market research is very valuable because it brings to light users with intent to buy, allowing you to target your most interested audiences.
This form of segmentation attempts to understand the consumers’ motivations. It’s not the what, or where, but the why that psychographic segmentation strives to make sense of. Why do customers buy your product, or choose your competitor's product over yours? Is it their values? Their political beliefs? Their interests? This sort of segmentation is extremely valuable for media companies, for example. News stations will market towards those with aligned political beliefs. Gossip magazines will target those interested in celebrity content. This form of segmentation can be difficult to nail down, but is very powerful.
Now that we’ve got an understanding of the different types of segmentation, let’s discuss how to begin segmenting your market.
The first step is market research. You’ll want to cast your net wide with broad targeting, then see what content appeals to different segments of users. Once you’ve identified segments based on engagement with your different categories of content, you’ll understand what sorts of products or services they are interested in. Then you can hit those segmented audiences with more specific retargeting ads.
It’s important to set a measurable goal when testing. Let’s say you’re trying to understand if your products appeal more to women or men. Send ads to both groups equally, and measure performance with a metric such as click through rate or conversion rate. If women seem to drive a higher conversion rate for a particular product, break men and women out into separate audiences and allocate proportionately more ad spend to the female audience. This is one simple example; but there are countless ways to run this same sort of test based on the segmentation factors you believe could apply to your particular campaign.
It’s important to continually analyze these different sorts of user trends, as things can change over time and new segments may emerge. Moving forward, allocate a small portion of your marketing budget to testing ongoing so that you can make sure you're capitalizing on emerging segments and keeping your audience fresh.
If you create strong audience segments and send the right message to each segment, you’re sure to win in performance marketing. With so much data to navigate when analyzing the unique performance of your various market segments, it's best to bring it all together in a powerful tool like MarinOne. MarinOne makes your life easier by enabling you to optimize campaigns in bulk, pivot bidding types on the fly, and get a holistic view of all your paid media campaigns in one place. Start your journey to better market segmentation and great advertising performance with MarinOne today. Our team of experienced marketers is ready to help you achieve your goals.
