Category Archives: Guest Post

How to continue revenue growth once you’ve saturated your target market: A look into big data analytics for smarter marketing decisions

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This is a guest post by Jana Fung, Marketing Manager at MixRank.

Say you’re running a campaign that has been experiencing profitable returns: your ads and targeting are relevant to your audience, and you’re seeing a steady influx of profitable conversions. As time goes on, your campaign will inevitably begin to saturate the market. You’ll see conversion rates start to dip while costs slowly rise and traffic remains stagnant.

So, how do you scale the campaign back up to drive more traffic and prevent the decline of lower profits?  One strategy that’s been pretty successful is to expand your ad groups by adding synonymous keywords that will do as well as your existing keywords.  And although this strategy is proven successful, it is only a short-term fix that will not resolve the underlying issue that your target audience has been exhausted of what you’re selling.

Today I’ll discuss a strategy that uses big data and allows marketers to develop new successful campaigns as well as inject fresh life into the old ones.  This marketing strategy involves scaling campaigns laterally across audiences.  Similar to scaling on semantically related keywords, scaling your audiences involves expanding your target audience, based on the audience’s core attributes: their fundamental desires, needs, and problems.  So, if your product solves a problem for a specific group of people, expanding on related audiences will help you find more people like them who also have a need for your product.

To do this, marketers can manually research the market or even buy expensive market research reports to outsource the daunting data mining process. But, an efficient and cost-saving way to do this is by using big data analytics solutions, like MixRank.  MixRank is an intelligent search engine for ads, indexing millions of contextual and banner ads across the web.  The keyword search function allows marketers to find semantically related ads, offering marketers an easy way to scale their audiences and reach an entirely new market.

I’ll walk you through a simple use-case: say you’re targeting the keyword “buy luggage.”  Simply type that keyword into the search bar to view semantically related ads.

Buy luggage search

In the search results, you’ll see several ads.  Check out this example on the first-page results that shows an audience you could be targeting if you were selling luggage (Airport Security):

airport security results

You’re probably thinking: why would an “Airport Security” ad show up in the search results for the “buy luggage” keyword? A key feature about MixRank’s search engine is that the results are all contextually related ads on a broad match-type, so ads will therefore rarely have an exact match to the keyword you enter. With this feature, marketers save valuable time uncovering new audiences, and as an added benefit, marketers can also save over 40% on ad spend.  Below are the suggested maximum CPCs for the keywords in question (data pulled from Google’s Traffic Estimator):

Buy Luggage: Suggested Maximum CPC of $0 .75

Airport Security: Suggested Maximum CPC of $0.41

Now this leaves you to pause your current campaign on the decline, and start 2 new campaigns for about the same cost. This strategy not only ensures you reach a completely new audience, it also provides a clever way to optimize your ad budget, gaining more traffic at a lower cost.

This is just one of the many ways marketers are turning to big data analytics to make smarter decisions and grow their online marketing campaigns.  What big data analytics tools have you used to grow your marketing campaigns and accomplish steady and consistent revenue growth?

About the Author

Jana Fung, guest author of this post, is the Marketing Manager of MixRank. She has managed successful demand generation programs for over 5 years. She is optimistic about the growth of online advertising and has a passion for helping online marketers with their campaigns. If you’re a MixRank fan or just want to say hi, she’s interested in connecting with you! Follow her on Twitter @jana_fung

About MixRank

MixRank.com is a spy tool for contextual and display ads. With MixRank you can see exactly where your competitors are buying traffic and which ad copy is performing best for them across over 100,000 sites. You can use MixRank to watch your competitors spend money testing different ads and traffic sources, see which ones worked best, and use that data to build your own campaign.

[Email] Text Versus Images — The Debate Ends HERE!

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Guest Post By Josh Krafchin

Since the beginning of time (about 15 years or so in this case), email marketers have been debating whether a designed image-laden email outperforms simple text. But all the results and a/b tests in the world won’t tell you what path to choose for your next email blast. The effectiveness of the medium is completely dependent on your target audience, product, and historical sending pattern.

When to send text-only emails:

If you’re not a designer or coder: Eliminating days of design back-and-forth and rounds of email inbox QA allows you to focus on the message and conversion. What good is an announcement email if the event has already passed? Text gets the job done – check out some examples of solid text-only emails.

For personal feel: While sometimes people include images in the email body, they’re more likely to add them as attachments or (preferably funny) hyperlinks. That means we’re trained to associate images in email with marketing. If you want to connect on a personal level to your audience, use text.

When to send fancy HTML emails:

You have a physical product: If you’re selling anything that can be photographed, images become far more important. Free shipping headlines boost open rates, but hi-def hot red heels and buzzing chainsaws get the click-throughs.

You’ve always sent graphical emails: Consistency is key in email. A readership who has come to expect a certain format delivered with a certain frequency is highly valuable. Keep sending graphics but consider a text-only email as a change-up for a special announcement that falls outside of your normal content approach.

Your boss thinks graphic emails are better: Then go for it – just make sure she gives you the budget/resources to execute well.

When in doubt: Go with text. It’s easier to execute, more likely to reach inboxes as intended, and can be highly effective if you have good content.

At the end of the day, remember that effectiveness boils down to your target audience, product, and historical sending pattern. Testing is the only sure way to know what works for YOU. These guidelines are based on real-world experience sending to millions of email addresses and should be considered baselines – here’s to creating a new email conversion champ!

Josh Krafchin is cofounder of Clever Zebo, a team of web marketing experts helping growing businesses get more customers online.