Holidays are some of the best opportunities for brands to turn visitors into long term customers — unfortunately, most brands miss out because of lack of planning. To help, we’ve outlined some of the most important US holidays to consider when creating a marketing plan, as well as a few tactics to best leverage these days.

Why Holiday Sales Are Great For Brands

People search for things to buy during the holidays. This creates a unique opportunity for your brand to connect with new users that are more open to trying new products. Even better: you can test different offers and angles on cold traffic to see which offers prove most enticing.

What Sales Should We Offer?

The best sales are straightforward; the most popular are sitewide sales and product bundles. If you offer a sitewide sale, A/B test callouts for specific percentages off and the total potential savings — you might find that your customers respond better to one.

Example

Percentage Savings

“Save 20% site-wide through November 21st!”

Dollar Savings 

“Now through November 21st, save up to $75 on your order!”

What Holidays Should Have Sales?

Below are the top US holidays in 2021 we recommend including in your marketing plan to capture more sales, develop timeless brand awareness, and keep relevant with your customers. While this list isn’t exhaustive, it provides a foundation for your annual marketing plan to ensure you’re ready for the most popular holidays.

1. New Year’s Day: January 1st
2. Memorial Day: May 31st
3. Independence Day: July 4th
4. Labor Day: September 6th
5. Veterans Day: November 11th
6. Thanksgiving: November 25th
7. Black Friday: November 26th
8. Cyber Weekend: Nov 27-28th
9. Cyber Monday: November 29th
10. Christmas Day: December 25th
11. New Year’s Eve: December 31st

Special holidays for your product or industry

In addition to the 11 national holidays we’ve listed, there are an ever-growing number of industry-specific holidays celebrated across social media: National Ice Cream Day, World Pharmacist Day, Houseplant Appreciation Day, Pie Day (not to be confused with Pi Day) — if there’s an industry for it, there’s probably a day for it.

These “holidays” can be especially effective because brands compete on a smaller scale — against other ice cream brands prepared with an advertising strategy, for instance. It can also be easier to get people excited about your product on an otherwise ordinary day.

In many instances, there can even be an opportunity to become an organizer or leader within a community/vertical for that given holiday — especially for small businesses.

Our recommendation: prepare an ad strategy for any “holidays” celebrating your products.

How expensive are paid ads during the holidays?

The end of the year is a great time for many e-commerce brands looking to grow and expose more customers that are actively in the buying phase to get hooked on your brand. While year-end holidays are some of the most expensive (increase in CPMs by 20-35%) times to run paid ads this shouldn’t deter you from continuing to grow and expand your customer base.

When you’re building your annual marketing plan, you’re identifying new ways to grow. Remember to look at the holidays that best relate to your brand and add them to the schedule. It might be the next best way for you to add a new stream to your brand’s annual revenue.

We spend a lot of time building out COLD Traffic (i.e. Top of Funnel campaigns). Our top of the funnel campaigns usually spends around 65-70% of the total budget on most accounts we manage.

So, today we’re diving into how to choose the right audiences for your TOF (aka Cold Traffic) campaigns.

Data shows that nearly 100 million hours of video are consumed each day on Facebook. 100 million hours!! Not only that, videos on Facebook generally achieve 135% more organic reach than photos, showing that users enjoy watching videos on this platform specifically. Because Facebook influences more than half of consumer’s online and offline purchasing behavior, it’s important to get in front of these potential prospects as quickly and as often as possible. This way to do this is through creating a profitable paid ad strategy.

There are a few key strategies to create profitable Facebook ads for lead generation businesses. With the right strategy for your videos, you can boost your business and grab a foothold in the marketplace. Here are 6 crucial steps you should take to make sure you generate those leads and close those deals.

Choose Your Budget

Begin with the end in mind. Know how much you want to spend. There are a few ways to go about this, with the two most common being a combination of a maximum daily spend and a set campaign budget. Setting a daily budget helps stretch your advertising dollars over a longer period of time.

When you select your budget in Facebook, you’ll be able to see your potential reach. There are several metrics, but here are the most important ones.

• Reach – The number of unique individuals who saw your ad
• Impressions – The number of times someone had the opportunity to see your ad
• Cost per result – How much it cost to reach the goal (clicks, messages, etc.)

As you start out with your advertising, you may not know how many people you should be reaching and how much it ought to be costing. Spend a few minutes looking online for industry averages. You’d be surprised at how many agencies, service providers and individuals like to share their results. In broad brushstrokes, depending upon your industry, cost per leads can vary to as low as $11 to as high as $100.

With those ranges in mind, think of what you want to accomplish with the budget you’ve set. Remember, video advertising in general is more expensive, but that also is because it drives more attention, consideration and conversions when you reach the right audience.

Plan Ahead

Did you know that it can take up to 48 hours for Facebook to approve an ad? If you don’t plan ahead and your strategy is to quickly boost a video advertisement the day you post it, then you might not get the results you expected. (Especially if your content ends up taking more than 24 hours to get approved.)

Additionally, you might not be letting your ads run long enough. It’s fine to do a single, one-day advertisement if you’ve primed your audience to buy. However, if your one-day advertisement is the first time they’ve seen your brand, service or offering, you likely won’t be able to convert as many people into leads as you’d like.

Furthermore, remember that 85 percent of Facebook users watch video without the sound on. You need to plan to have your video ad make sense. This can be accomplished with text overlays or by using subtitles. No matter what, in order for your video to shine and generate leads, you have to think about how your content will look and how you will support your message through paid ads.

Pick Your Campaign Objective

You’ve budgeted and planned ahead. As part of that planning, you should have thought about what the objective of the ad campaign would be. While the end result is to generate leads through your fantastic video content, there are lots of ways to accomplish that task. Within Facebook ad campaigns, there are three overarching objectives – awareness, consideration and conversion.

In an ideal world, you would run video ads that support each objective in order to move people through the purchase funnel. Let’s talk about the tactics within each. Choosing the right objective for the right video can help improve your lead generation numbers and reduce your cost per lead.

Awareness

Awareness campaigns help generate interest by letting people know what products and services you offer. Facebook has two ways to create campaigns with awareness objectives.

• Brand awareness
• Reach

Each option has different ways the algorithm targets your audience. However, both types of awareness campaigns support single video ads. These campaigns are great for general brand lift.

Consideration

Consideration campaigns are designed to get people thinking about your business and wanting to look for more information about what you do. For video ads on Facebook, there is a consideration campaign designed entirely around lead generation. These lead ads include forms that your customers can fill out. This is perfect for creating a profitable Facebook ad campaign.

Conversion

A conversion campaign encourages people to purchase or use your product or service. People can fill out forms and not be ready to buy. Sometimes you need to let your video ad help seal the deal and convert those on the fence into your camp.

Set Up Your Website Correctly

It can take several hundred digital touchpoints to convert someone from consideration to conversion. One of the most painful things to watch is businesses who spend lots of time and money on video ads not take the extra step to ensure their website is ready to help them convert their leads into sales later. The two most important tracking tools to do this are Google Analytics and a Facebook Pixel.

The Facebook Pixel is especially crucial when setting up Facebook ads. These tracking cookie are all over the internet. By setting up these cookies on your website, you are learning who your customer is and what their behavior is. These cookies can be used to later remarket to people who have already interacted with your page, ads or website. This is really powerful and important stuff, so don’t think setting up a campaign on Facebook is enough.

Adjust, Adjust, Adjust

Once your Facebook ad campaign kicks off, check in on it. After 500 impressions, your ad will be given a relevance score. The closer to 10 that number is, the better the ad is performing with the audience you chose. Anything under 7 should be adjusted. That adjustment could be audience, creative, copy or call to action. A Facebook video ad campaign shouldn’t be set and forget. (The need to adjust to get things right is another reason to follow No. 2 and plan ahead so you have time to make changes.)

Review Metrics

Along with the relevance score, you need to check in on how much of the video ad has been watched. It’s important to see where people drop off. Is there a jarring cut? Change in the music? Do people lose interest? What percentage? Perhaps you want to remarket to people who started, but didn’t finish your video. Without reviewing the metrics, you won’t know if your video content is hitting the mark and ultimately making you money.

Conclusion

A profitable paid ad strategy for your videos requires budgeting, planning and reviewing. It’s not enough to set up a last-minute campaign and hope things will go off without a hitch. Start taking advantage of the video real-estate landscape Facebook has to offer and watch paid video ads take your business to new heights.

Everything you should know about content marketing to grow your business and reach your goals

Have questions about content marketing? Then you’ve come to the right place. This comprehensive guide takes you from inspiration through distribution to answer every question you’ve ever had about content marketing (and some you’ve never thought of).

Definitions and driving forces:

• What is content marketing?
• Why do I need a content strategy?
• What is content marketing strategy?
• What types of content do I have to choose from?
• How do I distribute content?
• How does social media fit into content strategy?

Getting started or improving performance in content marketing:

• Where can I research content topics?
• How often should I post to my blog?
• How often should I release videos?
• How often should I post to social media?
• How do I post content to social media?
• How do I organize my content marketing?
• How do I track results?

Definitions and driving forces:

What is content marketing?

Marketing trends come and go. In the 1930s, radio ads were the hot new thing. In the 50s, it was TV ads. Marketing has pretty much always evolved to take advantage of the latest technology. You might call content marketing the marketing tactic for the internet age.

But you came here for a definition, not a history lesson. Content marketing is text, videos, audio images, or other content, thoughtfully distributed with the goal of building customer relationships and, ultimately, driving sales.

You build customer relationships by providing interesting and engaging content that your audience is eager to consume. As they consume your content, customers come to trust your business and see you as an authority in your industry. As a result, they feel comfortable giving you money in exchange for a product or service.

The best thing about content marketing is that rather than being annoyed by the commercial break, customers seek content to consume. According to Demand Metric, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing while bringing in 3 times as many leads. So you spend less money and get a better result.

But content alone is not enough. The best content in the world is useless if nobody sees it. So you also need to distribute it to your audience.

Where and how you do that is all part of your content marketing strategy.

Why do I need a content strategy?

There are two kinds of businesses: businesses that don’t bother to create a content strategy and businesses that are top performers in their industry.

If that seems like an extreme statement, consider this. The 2018 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends Report from the Content Marketing Institute found that 62% of top performing companies have a documented content marketing strategy.

If you don’t have a documented content strategy you’re going to miss opportunities, miss customers, and generally just miss out.

How do I make a content marketing strategy?

A content marketing strategy tells you what content to create and what to do with it once it’s made. Developing a content marketing strategy starts with goals. Think about the effect you want your content to have. Are you trying to boost sales? Increase customer loyalty? Make more people aware of your product?

To measure your progress toward those goals you need to identify trackable metrics. How many people are clicking your link, reading your blog, leaving comments, sharing your posts and videos?

Make sure that every piece of content is effective by codifying your unique value. What sets you apart from other companies in your industry? What is your brand story? How you tell this story depends on who your audience is.  

Create customer personas to help you understand who your audience is. That way you can ensure that every piece of content you make appeals to the people you’re trying to reach. Personas will also help you decide where to distribute your content for the greatest impact.

Compiling all this information into a document that everyone on your team can access puts you on the road to being a top-performing company.

What types of content do I have to choose from?

Almost anything can be content. A blog post? Content. A video? Content. That funny gif you shared on Twitter? Content. All of it is content. The trick is to choose the format that fits your message and your audience.

Longer-form content is good for conveying complex messages or big ideas. It includes videos, blogs, newsletters, infographics, podcasts, e-books, webinars, case studies, apps, white papers, and slideshares. So, yeah. Pretty much everything can be content.

Short form content is better at conveying a single clear idea or topic. It includes charts and graphs, lists, mind maps, templates, quizzes, and polls.

Super-short content is good for reinforcing an idea you’ve already presented in long-form somewhere else. It can also help solidify your brand voice. Flash form content includes cartoons, illustrations, GIFs, memes, quotes, user-generated content, and timelines.

It’s almost impossible to assemble a truly comprehensive list of content marketing formats, because anything that entertains, educates, or informs your audience counts as content.

If you try to make content in all of the formats listed above, you’ll likely overwhelm your audience. Also, your marketing team might stage a coup.

You’ll get the best results by choosing two or three formats and doing them really well. Once you’ve mastered your messaging and customer interaction around one format, you can add another format to the mix.

How do I distribute content?

Where you distribute your content depends on who your audience is, the type of content you’ve created, and what your goals are.

The best content is created with the distribution channel in mind. For example, if you’re making a video, the length and tone might be different if you’re creating a video for an email to existing customers versus one that will be publicly shared on your Facebook page.

The go-to distribution channels are your website, your blog, marketing emails, and social media platforms. Choose your distribution channels based on who your clients are. If you’re selling designer sunglasses, LinkedIn probably isn’t your platform, but Instagram might be.

Find out: How to distribute your videos for maximum growth

While choosing the best distribution channel is important, don’t make the mistake of distributing on only one channel. Ideally, your content appears in some form on the go-to channels that fit you, like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram.

You’ll probably make some adjustments to fit the platform, but the extra work spent repurposing one piece of content means more eyes on it—and ultimately higher return on investment.

Where does social media fit into content strategy?

If you keep your content confined to your website or blog, you’re limiting its reach. Social media is where content goes to make new friends.

Guess what the most popular social media channel in the United States is.

Go ahead.

You said Facebook didn’t you? #facebookmarketingislife #remarketingcentral

In 2016, you would have been right. But in 2018, the Pew Research Center found that YouTube is actually the most popular social media site, with 73% of U.S. adults using the platform.

Facebook was a close second with 68% The next most popular were Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat. LinkedIn was on the list at 25% and Twitter at 24%.

Before you run to post your video on YouTube, hang on a second. The most popular site isn’t always the best option. Theoretically, more popularity means more eyes on your content. It also means more competition from other marketers.

If you’re posting only on YouTube and Facebook, you’re hitting a wide swath of the American public—but that might not contain your ideal customer.

Different platforms have vastly different demographics. Pinterest users are overwhelmingly female at 70%. Snapchat users are young, with 85% percent are between the ages of 18 and 34. LinkedIn users are business professionals.

Instead of distributing to everyone and hoping the right people see it, distribute on the platform with the highest concentration of your target audience.

Getting started (or improving performance) in content marketing:

Where can I research content topics?

Great content starts with a great topic. You need something that resonates with your target audience. Something that makes them sit up and take notice. Something they’ll go out of their way to consume.

So it’s no surprise that selecting content topics is the task voted Most Likely to Cause Marketers to Bang Their Heads Against the Wall. But the right tools can help you avoid those headaches.

Before we get into tools, let’s relieve some of the anxiety you’re feeling. If you think you’re going to come up with a completely unique topic that nobody has ever talked about before, you’re wrong.

Everything has been talked about before. Absolutely everything. The goal isn’t to come up with something completely unique. It’s to say it in your voice colored by your brand story.

Okay, now to the tools.

Google Analytics. The perfect tool for researching keywords and search terms that will help your content show up in Google searches. That’s a useful insight since Google is the top search engine in the world with 1.6 billion unique monthly visitors. The next runner up, Bing, only gets 400 million.

Google Trends. While we’re tapping the rich resources of planet Google, don’t forget Google Trends. This handy dashboard shows you what’s trending on Google. You can even search for specific keywords or phrases and see how popular they’ve been over time.

Ubersuggest. This helps you discover keywords and phrases related to your topic. Results include search volume, competition, and cost per click.

BuzzSumo. This website helps you find the most shared, trending, and highest performing content for specific topics across the web. This is a paid service, so expect a monthly fee.

EpicBeat. Similar to Buzzsumo, EpicBeat lets you see shares comments and engagement for popular posts on different topics. They have limited free functionality, but you can upgrade for full access.

Ahrefs Content Explorer. See how content has performed across different social media channels with this powerful content research tool. You’ll pay for this one, too.

Quora. A free membership site where anyone can post questions and anyone can answer. Search by your topic to find out exactly what questions people are asking about it.

Answers.com. Like Quora, you can type a keyword or phrase in the box and get questions from real people on that topic.

Answer the Public. This is a weird one, but you can’t beat it for ease of use and volume of ideas. Type your search into the box and get a graphic with dozens of questions asked by the internet hive mind.

All those tools are useful, but don’t forget your greatest resource—your customers. Pay attention to the questions they are asking. Your sales and customer service teams probably have a short list of questions that they hear all the time. Find ways to answer those questions with your content.

How often should I post to my blog?

Your blog is often the cornerstone of your content marketing efforts. It’s where you post videos, engage with customers, and share the special bonus content you’ve created.

According to Hubspot, B2B marketers who use blogs get 67% more leads. And companies that blog get 97% more links to their website.

The general rule is 11 or more posts per month will maximize your results. Anything less than that, and you’re getting small improvement for each additional post.

Super-small companies (10 employees or fewer) see a jump in traffic with each additional blog post per month. Even one or two additional posts can increase traffic by 50%.

The outlier here is large companies with more than 201 employees. They see very small change when they increase from one post to 10. But by posting 11 or more times a month, they can increase traffic by 4 times.

So, if possible, post about 3 times a week to get the most out of your posting schedule.

How often should I release videos?  

There’s no hard and fast rule for how often you should release videos. It depends on how you’re using them. If your videos are part of your sales funnel, you might create 8 or 10 and push them to potential customers through email over a period of weeks. If you create videos for your blog, you might need one per week.

But remember that they take little longer than a blog to produce, so you may want to make several in advance.

How often should I post to social media platforms?

Every social media platform has different methods of sorting posts. Those algorithms impact the lifespan of posts on the platform. Generally, marketers talk about the half-life of a post, the length of time it takes for content to reach 50% of its total lifetime engagement.

Twitter posts have the shortest half-life at 18 minutes. Pinterest has the longest with a half-life of 3.5 months. In between, you get Facebook at 30 min. Instagram at 19 hours. And YouTube at 6 days.

How often you post depends on how your audience responds to your posts, but the following are a good starting point.

Twitter: 10-20 times per day

Pinterest: 10-15 times per day

Facebook, Instagram: 1 time per day 

LinkedIn: 1-3 times per workday (skip Saturday and Sunday)

YouTube: 1-3 times per week

And remember, you don’t have to post on all of these platforms. Pick the one or two that are most popular with your target audience and concentrate your efforts there.

How do I post content to social media?

Posting several times a week or even just once a day can get time-consuming. Fortunately, there are tools to help you.

Facebook has a built-in scheduling tool that allows you to plan your posts weeks and months ahead of time.

Most other social media platforms haven’t bothered to add this feature. But that’s not a problem since dozens of social media management platforms exist that can be linked to your social accounts for scheduling and analytics.

Some popular favorites include Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Buffer. They offer similar services at a range of price points and functionality levels. Explore and find the one that’s right for you.

A note of caution when scheduling posts: things change. Markets shake up. Major tragedies happen. News breaks.

If something major is affecting your industry, it’s a good idea to take a look at your scheduled posts and make sure they’re still on message before they go live.

How do I organize my content marketing efforts?  

It seems like a new content management tool pops up every day. Some are better than others for specific tasks, but ultimately it comes down to preference. Which tool you choose depends on what you need the most help with and the size of your budget.

HubSpot. Markets itself as all-in-one inbound marketing software. It allows you to plan, create, and track the performance of content across your website and social channels. There is a free version with limited functionality, but the paid versions offer a formidable suite of services that include blog and content creation tools, social media, email marketing, and more.

CoSchedule. A marketing calendar at heart. With drag and drop functionality and the ability to collaborate across teams, this calendar lets you plan blog and social content in one place. Paid plans range from individual to agency versions.

MailChimp. Designed for email marketing, MailChimp also helps you make weekly digests, segmented email lists, and RSS campaigns. A/B testing is built in. The free version has a lot of functionality but limits the number of subscribers and emails you can have per month.

Buffer. This popular social media management tool includes a social media calendar, analytics, and the ability to manage all your social media accounts from one dashboard. The free plan is fairly robust but lacks a calendar. It also limits you to three social accounts.

Trello. A robust project management tool, Trello works equally well when the project is your content. Trello helps you track where content is in the creation pipeline. And it’s free.

How do I track results?

Many of the tools mentioned above include some sort of analytics reporting to help you track how your content is doing. Social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube have built-in analytics dashboards, as do Hootsuite and Hubspot. A few other tools can give you even more insight into how your content is performing.

Crazy Egg. This tool gives you visual reports to track where visitors go on your website, what they click on, and how they move through your site.

Google Analytics. This is the go-to reporting system to help you see how customers are interacting with your content.

Kissmetrics. Helps you measure engagement, track the effectiveness of different marketing channels, and even send emails based on user behavior.  

Whatever tools you use, make sure you are tracking your results. Using that information, you can refine your content marketing strategy and boost your ROI.

2018 Update Of The Latest Innovations From Google

1. Gmail can now autocomplete entire emails (!) with a new feature called Smart Compose — just keep hitting the tab button, and Google will autocomplete your message. You can switch it on right now as part of the new Gmail experience Google is rolling out.

2. A new Google Photos feature called Suggested Actions can spot friends in your photos and offer to share those photos with those people with the press of a button.

3. Google Photos is more powerful now. You can instantly turn photos of documents into PDFs. You can also remove color from your photos — even just in certain areas — or re-colorize your old black-and-white photos of your relatives.

4. Google Assistant has made a major breakthrough, according to CEO Sundar Pichai. Soon, it will sound much more natural — in fact, the new voice of Google Assistant, coming later this year, is none other than the R&B star John Legend.

read more about smart compose

6. Google is rolling out something parents have been craving since the advent of personal assistants: a politeness feature, in which you essentially get credit for saying “please” when you ask Google Assistant for something. It’s designed to teach children to not be bossy when asking for things. When you say “please,” Google will respond in kind — and even compliment you.

7. Pichai unveiled a wild experimental Google Assistant feature called Duplex: You can ask Google Assistant to call a business on your behalf, and Google’s AI will schedule an appointment for you. Yes, this is totally real. Google demoed two phone calls on stage to give people a taste.

8. Google’s new version of Android, called Android P, focuses on “digital well-being.” Basically, Google wants you to spend less time on your phone and more time with your loved ones, so Android will give you information about how you use your phone and even create controls to limit screen time, particularly with apps like YouTube.

9. If you subscribe to multiple publications, like newspapers and online magazines, a new feature called Subscribe with Google will let you access all your paid content anywhere, including on Google Search, Google News, and the publishers’ sites.

10. Google is preparing for Android phones without buttons. The new Android P has a new navigation system that makes multitasking easier by emphasizing gestures over virtual buttons. It looks very similar to iOS on the buttonless iPhone X, where there’s a swipe icon at the bottom of the phone to help you navigate and multitask.

11. Android P has a “shush” mode. If the feature is turned on and you put your phone facedown on a table, it will automatically activate “do not disturb” mode.

12. Another smart feature in Android P: If you’re looking at the screen and rotate the phone, either on purpose or accidentally, a button will pop up to let you also rotate the screen. Otherwise, you can keep the display the way it is.

13. Google showed off some very cool technology for Google Maps designed to let you use your phone’s camera to navigate around town using Street View. If you waved your phone in front of you, you’d see the Street View version of what you’re seeing. If you needed directions, giant arrows — or even animated characters — could point you where to go next. It’s a lot like “Crazy Taxi,” but in the real world.

14. Google announced a cool new feature for its futuristic camera software, Google Lens. Now, if you point your phone’s camera at a book, you can highlight the text with your finger and copy it to your phone. Yes, really.

15. Google Lens also has a new feature called Style Match. If you point your phone’s camera at an outfit — or accessories or furniture — Google can use its object-recognition and machine-learning prowess to help you buy that item online, and it can even show similar styles you might like.

Resources:

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-io-announcements-highlights-2018-5

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-io-live-blog-updates-coverage-2018-5

https://markets.businessinsider.com/stocks/googl-stock

https://google.com