As part of our series of interviews in the MSME Digitalization plan in Jamaica, we would like to hear more about Nuh Gluten as our featured MSME company of the week. 

Nuh Gluten was born from an act of love by the owner for her husband who cannot eat gluten.  Her mission was to create delicious gluten-free cakes so people, like her husband who cannot eat flour, can still enjoy desserts and cakes.

It was our pleasure to interview the company’s owner, Yaneika Walker-Tomlinson and to learn how she created her artisan bakery that develops and makes fully non-gluten products.  

Nuh Gluten comes at a time where more and more people are discovering the need to look for alternatives to wheat as a result of allergies or other health conditions.  There is no reason that everyone should not be able to enjoy a cake or a dessert and to satisfy their sweet tooth!  

QUESTION: What does your company do?

ANSWER: Nuh Gluten is a gluten free artisan bakery. We produce gluten free cassava cakes from locally grown and manufactured cassava. This means we don’t use imported cassava flour.  It is all local.

Q: When did you start the company?

A: My company started in 2018 and we decided to start the business as my husband has atrial tribulation and cannot eat gluten because of this condition.  So I started experimenting and I came up with the gluten-free cassava flour.

When we were out, we would realise that there were very few gluten-free cake options.  There aren’t many desserts apart from ice-cream that are gluten free either so I began making these cakes and I now have my gluten-free cakes in three cafes around Kingston; Island Coffees Café Devon house, Ocho Rios-Island Village Plaza and Wholesome Café in the Digicel Building on Ocean Blvd.

The cakes are gluten free and flexible as they come in a variety of flavors. I have Jamaican Fruit Cake, Rum and Raisin, Banana Pumpkin Seed but the cassava flour can be used with traditional flavors like carrot cake, chocolate cake.  They come at a reasonable cost also.

Q: Tell us a bit about the company’s name –  Nuh Gluten.

A: Well, when I was researching about a possible company name, I wanted a name that was authentically Jamaican. I didn’t want to use No Gluten, I wanted a name that would represent Jamaica and the Patois language so that is how I came up with Nuh Gluten.

Q: Has the market in Jamaica grown for gluten-free products?

A: Well, what I have realized over the years and since I began the business is that most of the people that look for gluten-free products have rheumatoid arthritis and other illnesses as the gluten causes inflammation. 

Some people go ahead and do their own research about the problem. It is more like a self-diagnosis but they come to that conclusion.

People who are receiving cancer treatment also look for gluten free products and eat “clean”. Most of my customers would like to eat clean and they don`t want to eat any type of food that will cause inflammation in their bodies.

The market is definitely growing.

Q: Tell us a bit about what process you went through to when you started your business.

A: Firstly, I started alone.  I went through all the steps of the formal process to register my business.  I went to the company’s office to register the business and this was a pretty easy process.  

I decided on our how I was going to get my product to the market which was through distribution and person to person selling.   I began visiting cafes as they were already established so it was the best way to get the cakes into the cafes. 

Nuh Gluten is an artisan business and it is based at home.  But, I have purchased the Food Handlers Permit and I have a background in catering. I have a Certification in Catering.  So I have the equipment and the knowledge to know what I am doing.

Q: Has anything changed since you started the business? What are these changes?

A: When I started, I began with fruit cake only and I soon realised there was a need for more cakes. That let me to add the other flavours.

A lot people tend to gravitate to eat and then in some areas, the demand lowers so I have to go out and look for new places to sell my cakes.

I really had to do a lot of market research to understand where my customers were and then look for a café in that particular area to fill that demand.

Q: Why is it important for you to be on line as a small business owner?

A: For me, as an artisan who works from home, I don’t have a store front so to have a website, will give me that exposure for people to see me, to see the product and to get to know it. 

In this day and age, the first thing a person does when verifying a business is to go online and if you are not online, you don’t exist. 

It is very important to be online nowadays.

Q: Do you advertise your product on other digital platforms or with traditional media sources?

A: I don’t really.  I started an Instagram page but I didn’t keep up it up to date or upgrade it.  I am weak when it comes to marketing the product. My strongest point is producing the product and talking to people.  With the marketing side of the business, I could definitely get some help from someone.

Q: Do you work alone or do you have more team members?

A: I work alone but when the workload is heavy, I have casual workers that come in and help out. I take them on under-contract. I don’t want to hire people and have to pay over-head so with contract workers, it works out fine and we are able to reach our product production goals.

Q: Do you have a lot of completion in the creation of gluten free cakes?

A: There isn’t a lot of competition in general terms. There are other companies that make or are dabbling in gluten free products but they also make products with wheat. They also make desserts using regular flour.

I don`t do that and that sets me apart from the competition. Because of my husband’s heart condition, I don’t use any wheat flour in my cooking. I have a completely gluten free kitchen.  

Q: Based on your experience, what would be your top three tips you would give to maybe a new generation who wants to become a business owner, start their own business, or is in the process of a startup.

A: Firstly, understand and be knowledgeable about the field you are going into. Secondly, do your market research, because you might have a product but if there is no customer base to purchase your product, you are not in business.

Lastly, your team, whatever you do, you have a have a team.  While, I don’t have employees on a full time basis, I don`t do this alone. 

And always have a plan! You can’t build a business with a plan!

Q: What do you most enjoy about your business?

A:The greatest thing for me about my business and what I most enjoy is to see the smile on people’s faces when they eat the product. The can`t believe it doesn`t have any flour in it.

This is what I most like about it; the joy people feel when they try my product, especially for the first time.  The understand that it is just as delicious as cakes made with regular flour.

Q: What has been your greatest challenge?

A: I would have to say our greatest challenge is finance and getting the products to the market.  I am working on getting the products to the market through marketing but if you don`t the financial backing, to get the product where you would like it to be, it is very difficult or won’t be as effective.

If you would have asked me that question before, I would have said business knowledge and finance but I am currently studying entrepreneurship so that is helping me with business knowledge aspect with how to run the business, how to structure the business and all that. So, now it is a financial thing.

Q: Where do you see your business in the next 5 years?

A: In 5 years, I see my business in more store front businesses, cafes and supermarket shelves.  

I am not interested in having my own store front business as that would limit us to just one space but I would like to be on a lot of supermarket shelves and possibly even start exporting to other countries.

Q: Do you have even motto that you live by?

A: Well, our company’s motto is “Gluten Free – Delicious Treats without Wheat”. This is simple but sums up what we do and what we are about.

Every week, we highlight a company from Jamaica, within the framework of the MSME Digitalization Plan, whose trajectory, achievements and experience are an inspiration to all of us. It is an honor and a privilege to be able to bring these great stories together and learn from them.

The post Interview with Nuh Gluten – MSME Digitalization plan in Jamaica appeared first on Kolau Blog.

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You’ve likely heard that if your website isn’t on the first page of Google, it’s almost as if it doesn’t exist. While it might seem like an exaggeration, it’s actually the truth. According to a Chitika study, the results that appear on the first page of Google get 91.5 percent of the traffic. Moreover, according to the data provided by StatCounter, Google is the most used search engine worldwide.

To increase visibility on Google, it’s essential to know how the search engine works. In order to get your page to fall somewhere on the first page of results on Google and, therefore, gain more customers through the search engine, you have to better understand and use the most effective web positioning tactics.

What does Google Offer you to Promote your Business?

When someone searches for something through Google, several types of results appear. In general, you’ll find ads, organic results, and Google Maps results on the first page. 

• Ads: Paid results that appear at the top and bottom of the results pages. They can show products with images and their respective price (known as shopping ads), or imitate search results (known as text ads). To create ads on Google, a Google Ads account is necessary.

• Google Maps results: After the ads, you’ll see Google Maps results. These will come up if something matching your search inquiry matches (or is related to) a certain location near you. To appear in the Google Maps results (and get a good position within those), you’ll need a verified Google My Business account with client reviews about your business.

• Organic results: These are websites that have been positioned in Google naturally (without paying for placement). They appear in the middle of the ads and below the results from Google Maps.

The digital marketing tactics that are used to position a website through Google ads or within the organic results are known as SEM (search engine marketing) and SEO (search engine optimization), respectively.  

How to Gain more Customers through SEO or Organic Positioning

SEO is nothing more than an abbreviation of Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a technique that helps you place among the first organic results of Google. More specifically, SEO is “the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of your website traffic through the organic results of search engines,” according to Moz.  

Due to the success of SEO practices, it’s become a priority for most businesses that are looking to establish a strong online presence. In fact, a HubSpot survey revealed that 61 percent of marketers say that improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top priority. 

To add to this, MarTech reported that between 70 percent and 80 percent of users who use search engines only look at the organic results, making SEO practices even more important.

There are two types of SEO tactics that can be used to improve the organic positioning of a website in search engines: 

• SEO on the page (on page): This consists of optimizing your web pages to ensure that the Google robots read it and understand perfectly what it each one is about so they can find quality indicators and give it a good position within their search results. To apply on-page SEO successfully, you have to know what Google is looking for when it crawls a web page.

• Off-page SEO: This includes all the actions that an SEO professional performs outside the web page. Basically, it’s about knowing how to collaborate with other websites or blogs to get them to add a link to their pages that takes their visitors (and the Google robots) to your website without appearing artificial or contrived. Google takes into account these links and calculates the popularity or authority of your website which can influence positioning.

If you’re considering improving your visibility on Google, you need to use both of these SEO tactics properly.

Optimizing your Web Page

In order to start applying on-page SEO in your pages, you have to first do a keywords study. Keywords are phrases that your potential customers will type into Google to find you. As a marketer, you have to add these phrases to your website to get Google to relate it to potential searches and show your site within the results for those phrases.

Put yourself in your clients’ shoes and try to think about what they would type into Google in order to find your specific products or services and write down your ideas. There are several online tools to help you do this including Google’s autocomplete service, the Google Ads keyword planner, and the third-party site Ubersuggest.

Each of these tools can help you find more ideas for keywords and find out the volume of searches they have and the difficulty to position yourself with them.

How to Choose Keywords

To choose the best keywords, in addition to describing your product or service, you should try to pick the ones with high search volumes and low competition.

For example, if you own a flower shop and you want to find the ideal keywords to position your web page about bridal bouquets you have to choose the right keywords that will present your page to the people searching for that particular product. By putting yourself in your potential client’s shoes you can assume that they’d type “bridal bouquets” into Google. This means that “bridal bouquets” would be an ideal keyword to target.

Thanks to Google’s autocomplete function you can discover that people also usually look for other specific phrases like “bridal bouquets with sunflowers” or “bridal bouquets with orchids.” As the owner of a flower shop, these are likely two products that you offer. With these ideas in mind you can go to Ubersuggest and check the volume of searches for these words and see how difficult it might be to position yourself within their results.

In the results you see that the word “bridal bouquets” is the one that has the highest volume of monthly searches, but will also be hard to position yourself within it. On the other hand, “bridal bouquets with orchids” has a much lower search volume, but, it isn’t as difficult to position your page within its results. Finally, “bridal bouquets with sunflowers” is the clear winner because it has the same difficulty as “bouquets with orchids” but has a bigger search volume.

Once you have chosen the keywords to add for each of the web pages, you have to know where to place them. SEO experts agree that there are certain places that Google zeros in on when crawling a page. Those specific places are where you should add your keywords. Add your keywords: 

•     At the beginning of the page title
•     In the URL of the page
•     Within the first paragraph of the page
•     In at least one subtitle of the page
•     In the title of the images you show on your page
•     On the labels <alt> of the images you show on your page
•     In the meta-description of the page

Google also looks at whether your pages contain internal links that allow navigation from one of your pages to the other (like menus or links within the content that show your page is well-built). It also looks for external links that take your visitors to third-party websites. A study by Moz shows that, while they may seem harmful, external links have a positive influence on your positioning.

It’s also important that you compress photos that you add to your website with tools such as TinyPNG to make sure the loading speed of your page isn’t too slow. According to a study by Akamai, if your page takes more than three seconds to load, 40 percent of visitors leave it which negatively influences your positioning.

Finally, make sure that your website has a responsive design. This simply means that it adapts to the size of different mobile screens. In 2015, Google began penalizing websites without responsive designs for mobile phones by excluding them from searches done from smartphones.

Create Optimized Valuable Content

In addition to your corporate website or your eCommerce site, having an integrated blog and a detailed content strategy can help you improve the positioning of your site and attract more potential customers. 

Websites with blogs tend to have 434 percent more pages indexed which significantly increases the chances of someone finding them in a search. Similarly, a Hubspot study revealed that marketers who prioritize blogging are 13 times more likely to achieve a positive ROI. 

Think about what doubts or concerns your clients may have and what you could solve through an article or what topics related to your area of activity could interest your target audience. You can use Google’s autocomplete feature to find ideas for new topics and keywords. For example, if you are the owner of a mattress store, you could write an article about “how to choose a mattress” or “how to clean a latex mattress.”

Make sure your articles are long and provide valuable information. A SerpIQ study and a Hubspot analysis agree that articles over 2,400 words earn better positions and more organic traffic. Include both images and videos as well as internal and external links to better your positioning, too.

Build Links with other websites

Getting other websites to put a link pointing to your website (which is known as an incoming link) can also help you get better positions. Google takes into account both the number of inbound links your pages have and their quality. Google determines the quality of incoming links by looking to see if they come from sites with authority and if the content of these sites is related to that of your page. 

A Backlinko study in which more than 1 million pages were analyzed found that the average page with the first position has more than 35,000 external backlinks. To build links, you must research within Google and find other websites, blogs, magazines or online newspapers to contact and get them to link back to your content. Here are some strategies to achieve that:

• Build links through the press and online magazines: Create an attractive press release (with a link to your website) about an event organized by your company or a newsworthy event related to your business and send it to journalists who write about topics related to your news. For example, if you created an innovative app, you could contact journalists in charge of the technology section of online newspapers or specialized magazines. 

• Build links through guest blogging: Write an article for another blog or web page that you are interested in link building with and contact the site’s administrators. Offer them the content in exchange for them linking back to your website. For example, this psychology journal publishes articles by external contributors.

How to Gain more Customers through SEM or Paid Positioning

While organic SEO techniques are important, SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is also useful. SEM is a set of techniques that you can use to gain more customers through Google by using ads instead of organic results. Search Engine Land defines SEM as “the process of obtaining traffic on your website through the purchase of ads in search engines.” 

Unlike SEO, paid positioning allows you to place your web page on the first page of Google within a few days. To create these ads, you have to first create a Google Ads account.

How Google Ads Works

Google Ads is a pay-per-click platform in which you pay for each click your ad receives through Google.

You define your keywords in Google Ads and your ad will be activated and displayed on the search pages whenever someone searches for your keyword(s). However, even though you’re paying for positioning, there is still a chance your ad won’t be the first one displayed on Google.

Advertisers bid for each of their keywords and Google holds an auction between the ads bidding on the same keyword. Then they decide which ones to show first and which ones later. However, the ad that gets the first position is not necessarily the one that made the highest bid.

There are other factors beyond the bid that Google takes into account during the auction. The quality of the ad plays a significant role here. This includes whether or not the ad text includes the keyword, the click rate the ad receives and the experience that the landing page provides (the page that links to the ad must also contain words that match the ad text and keywords).

Since this is a paid technique, consider how much it costs to advertise with Google. The cost of the click depends on many factors including the ones mentioned above as well as the competition that exists in each specific industry. Generally speaking, the higher your ad quality, the lower the cost. Just remember that the return you can get using Google Ads tends to outweigh the cost. 

Tips to Create Effective Google Ads Campaigns

A Google Ads account is structured in three levels. Campaigns make up the first level. Within each campaign are ad groups which make up the second level. Each ad group has a specific list of keywords. The third level is where you create the ads.

Here are some tips on how to structure your campaigns effectively and how to create ads that get more clicks: 

• Divide your campaigns by location and device: Create a campaign for each location or region in which you want to show your ads and also for each type of device. According to Google, 46 percent of the searches are local, meaning they contain the name of a specific place. If you have a campaign for each necessary location, you can simply add it to the text of your ad to increase your click rate. Furthermore, if you divide each location into different campaigns for different devices (a mobile campaign and others for PCs and tablets) you can analyze the performance of each device separately and then add more budget to the one that works best to optimize performance.

• Create a budget shared among all campaigns: If you don’t have a very high budget and you create several campaigns for different locations and devices, it is possible that your budget will run out quickly. This means campaigns that get more clicks won’t meet  their full potential. The solution is to create a shared budget so that these campaigns with higher click rates can keep going despite low funds.

• Create specific ad groups: Each of your ad groups defines a category of products or one of the services you want to advertise on Google. Keep in mind that 50 percent of Google searches are made up of four or more terms. People do not usually type a singular term like “clothes” or “furniture” in Google. They are usually looking for specific products or services like “womens Levi’s jeans” or “wardrobe with sliding doors.” When creating your ad groups, try to be specific so that your ads are more relevant and you can get more clicks.

• Make the keywords appear both in the text of your ad and on your landing page: As mentioned above, having your keywords, the text of the ad and the content of the website that you have linked with your ad connected to each other will help your campaigns be more successful. In addition to making your ad more relevant to users, it will increase your quality level and, as a consequence, you can obtain better positions with a lower cost per click.

• Make the text of your ad highlight the benefits more than the features: Do not limit yourself to listing the characteristics of your product or the services you offer. If you run an accounting firm, there will be many companies that are “experts in accounting” and offer consulting services, business management, payroll, etc. Get away from your competitors by highlighting what makes you different or the benefit your clients can get by hiring you. For example, tell them you can build up their company in just 24 hours or that hiring you is a guarantee that they will only have to worry about growing their business and not about their accounting needs.

• Take advantage of all available characters, capitalize the first letter of the words in the title of your ad and add numbers: It has been shown that these tactics help your ad catch the eye. By taking advantage of all the available characters you can make your ad take up more space on the screen and, therefore, be more visible. Capitalizing only the first letter of all the words in the title makes it easier to read and, finally, adding numbers is also eye catching. To fit numbers into your add consider adding the year your company was established or offer a discount in number form.

• Add extensions to your ads: Ad extensions, as you can see in the following image, expand the information you can give through your ads, allowing them to take up more space on the search pages. According to Google, this can help you get more clicks, increasing your click through rate by 10 to 20 percent. Based on that, extensions should be seen as more of an obligation instead of an option. 

SEO or SEM?

Both SEO and SEM are two online marketing strategies that, if applied in the right way, can help you get more customers providing a good return on your investment. You do not necessarily have to choose between using one or the other. Frankly, if you use the two combined techniques you can increase the chances of winning more customers in Google that much more.  

Remember that SEO results are seen in the long term, so, while you work on your organic positioning strategy, you can use Google ads to gain visibility in the search engine immediately through SEM.

By considering all of the tips here and using them throughout all of your marketing plan, you can increase your visibility on Google and attract more customers. In turn, this will help increase your bottom line and keep your business thriving. 

The post How to Increase Visibility on Google appeared first on Kolau Blog.

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If you use the internet at all you’ve come across advertisements with images or videos. These types of ads are found on every website from YouTube to your favorite digital newspaper. While the owners of the site do have something to do with these ads, Google AdSense is the force behind their creation and presence on the internet. 

Google AdSense is a well-known platform that most businesses use to promote their products or services, but not many people know that individuals can use this tool to create ad space on their own webpages in order to make additional income. Luckily, once you see the step-by-step process and how easy it is to implement you’ll be able to start making some extra money doing what you enjoy through Google AdSense.  

What is Google AdSense and How Does it Work?

Google AdSense is an ad publishing application available through Google that allows you to place ads on your webpage in order to earn extra income. This tool is available for all websites including blogs and individual YouTube channels. Google defines it as “a simple and free method for any website publisher to earn money by publishing segmented Google ads on their websites.”

The Difference between Google Ads and Google AdSense

Google Ads is Google’s pay-per-click advertising platform that is directly related to AdSense. In effect, AdSense wouldn’t exist without Google Ads. However, they’re not really the same thing. 

The main difference between the two platforms is in who uses it and for what.

Google Ads is used by advertisers who want to promote their products or services, to create ads that can appear both on Google sites (including YouTube) and on webpages and third-party applications that have enrolled in the Google AdSense program.

Google AdSense, on the other hand, is used by website owners or content creators who want to monetize their sites by adding advertising spaces on their website. This will allow them to use the ads advertisers created through Google Ads and get paid for doing it.

It’s a system comprised of three actors: 

1. Advertisers
2. Google
3. Owners of websites, blogs or YouTube channels

Google acts as an intermediary taking a commission for their service – while advertisers pay Google to advertise on their partner websites. Finally, Google pays site owners (their partners) for showing the ads. The ads are automatically distributed based on the criteria defined by the advertisers and owners of the websites along with Google’s own criteria. 

In terms of these criteria, advertisers can tell Google where they want their ads displayed in terms of websites (according to the content, the interests of the visitors or the type of visitors they receive) or they can select specific sites manually through Google Ads.

In a similar way, the owners of the websites that host the ads can also tell Google what kind of ads or specific advertisers they want to block or exclude from their site through Google AdSense. Ads that are directed at specific people or places are known as segmented ads. 

Google takes these criteria, what advertisers are willing to pay and the quality score of the ads into account and conducts an auction to decide which ads to show on each site.

AdSense Payments

As we said, advertisers pay Google and Google pays the owners of the websites, blogs or YouTube channels that host the ads. The payment depends on either the number of user clicks on the ads or the impressions that have been generated (the times an ad has been shown on a website).

The pay-per-click or pay-per-impression system is up to the advertiser when they create their ads and bid for their rate (what they are willing to pay for one click or for every 1,000 impressions).

 As indicated in Google’s help center and in the terms of the YouTube Partners program:

Owners of websites registered with AdSense receive 68 percent of revenue and Google retains the
remaining 32 percent.  

In the case of wanting to monetize a YouTube channel, the owner receives 55 percent of the revenue.

Imagine that you’re the owner of a recipe blog and created an ad space through AdSense which shows ads related to your content. A dairy brand created a banner through Google Ads to advertise its latest product and established that the advertisement should be displayed on webpages whose central theme is cooking. In addition, the brand determined that it’s willing to pay $0.50 for each click the ad gets.

If Google shows this ad on your blog and one of your visitors clicks on it, you would take 68 percent of the $0.50 which would be, exactly, $0.34.

Not all ads have the same price so your income will vary from one day to another according to the advertisers’ budgets, the number of visitors that visit your site and click on the ads and the type of ad. To get a clearer idea of how much you can earn per month with Google AdSense you can research real data on costs and click-through rates for your particular kind of website.

Now, imagine you’re the owner of an American digital magazine about cars and you receive about 100,000 monthly visitors. Most likely, car brand advertisements will appear on your site. Take into account the CTR (click-through rate) and the average CPC (cost-per-click) of automotive industry advertisements.

A WordStream study analyzed the CTRs and CPCs of Google Ads in the United States in 2018 by industry and reported that the average CTR that ads on the Google Display network (comprised of more than two million sites registered in the AdSense program including YouTube) tend to receive for the automotive industry is 0.46 percent while the average CPC of display ads in this industry is $0.58. 

Using that data along with this example, the 100,000 monthly visits your magazine receives and the average 0.46 percent click rate means that the ads on your website will get about 460 clicks per month. Considering that each click costs an average of $0.58, you could earn approximately $266.80 per month with AdSense.

The more visits your website or your YouTube videos get, the more likely it is that people will click on ads and, therefore, the more you can earn with AdSense.  

In a similar way, the more advertising spaces you add to your site, the more likely you are to get clicks. However, if you add too many, you could ruin the user experience of your site and cause the opposite effect as visitors may get upset and leave your site; you have to find a balance. Still, there are many factors that influence the process and estimates of earnings are subject to variations.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of AdSense

If you’re still on the fence about using AdSense to monetize your content, consider the advantages and disadvantages of the service so you can figure out if it’s worth it for you.

Advantages of AdSense

• It’s a free service: You don’t have to pay to sign up for AdSense. You just have to register and add advertising spaces on your site to house the ads.

• It’s easy to use: The AdSense interface is intuitive and the process for incorporating ads is relatively simple. You can also post ads on different websites from a single AdSense account.

• Google does it all for you: No need to go looking for advertisers or to promote your advertising spaces. Google does it automatically through its auction system so that your website will show the ads of advertisers who are willing to pay more and those who offer the best user experience among those who participate in the auction.

• You can block ads or advertisers: Since it is an automatic system, Google is free to publish any type of ad on your website. However, there are options that give you some control. If there is a type of advertisement that you don’t want to appear on your site, you can choose the category you want to avoid. For example, you can block ads about vehicles, fashion, religion, or politics and block the URLs of those specific advertisers. You can also review the ads individually and choose the ones that will be published and those that won’t. This can all be done through the blocking controls page in your AdSense account.

• Wide variety of formats and customization options: When it comes to incorporating advertising space on your website, you can choose from a wide variety of ad sizes and formats. You can also customize your visual appearance to match the color scheme of your website.

• Google pays monthly: As long as you accumulate a minimum of $100 per month in earnings, Google will pay you monthly by direct deposit.

Disadvantages of AdSense

• The ads could be annoying for your visitors: According to a survey carried out by HubSpot, 64 percent of users believe that ads are intrusive or annoying. If you add too many advertising spaces on your site, your traffic could be adversely affected which will hurt your ability to generate revenue.

• If you break the rules, you are out: The policies of the program are strict. If you don’t comply, Google can close your AdSense account. They’re not very tolerant of users who violate the rules.

• You will not get rich overnight: As you have already seen in the previous section, there are many factors that influence the results. Most notably, your website has to generate a lot of traffic to obtain a good amount of income. Earning money with AdSense requires effort, web optimization, dedication and constant analysis. Sometimes you have to try several options and formats until you find a combination that works. 

• Ads that Google publishes may not match your ideas or values: Although it’s possible to apply a filter to block certain types of ads, there are some limitations. The machine is not perfect and you’ll have to deal with these issues.

• You earn money but you also lose users: Each time a user clicks on one of the Google ads displayed on your website, even if you make money, this user leaves your page to visit the advertiser’s page.

How to Monetize your Hobbies with AdSense

Whether you use your own website, a blogging platform or a YouTube channel to convert your hobby into money with Google AdSense, the first step is to create an account. To do this, go to the AdSense page and sign up by filling in the required fields.

Once you have created your AdSense account and accepted the policies of the program, you have to activate it. Remember, your website or blog must include original content and comply with Google’s policies to be monetized.

To do this, you have to sign in to AdSense and add your information including your name, postal address, phone number and payment information. From there, Google will receive your request to create an account and ask you to link your website or YouTube channel to the account.

Steps to Monetize a Blog or Website with AdSense

If you have your own website or a blog and wish to monetize it through Google ads, you must link your website to your new AdSense account. To do this, click on the “Sites” section in the left-side menu in your AdSense account and then click on the “Add site” button.

Next, add your site’s URL to generate an HTML code. You will have to copy this piece of code and paste it between <head></head> (the HTML tags of your website) in order to link your AdSense account to your website.

If you use WordPress and don’t feel comfortable editing the HTML code of your website, you can also use a plugin like Header Footer Code Manager to add the code snippet in a simple way from the WordPress panel. 

Once you’ve added the code, check the box in your AdSense account and click “Done.” Google will quickly contact you via email to verify that the activation was done properly. 

When the connection has been made and you have your website linked to AdSense, it’s time to choose the types of ads that will be displayed on your website. To do this, click on the “Ads” section on the left-side menu and then on “Ad units.” If you click on the button to add a new ad unit, you will see three options to choose the type of ads you want to show.

These options are text and display ads ( banners usually located in the header, the sides or the bottom of the page), in-feed ads (those among the lists or previews of recommended articles) and in-article ads (those integrated between the paragraphs of your content).

Once you have chosen the type of ad you want to show on your website or blog it takes you to the ad configuration screen.

Here, AdSense will ask you to name the ad unit and to choose the size and dimensions of the space. You can also customize the ad style so that the color scheme matches that of your website.

Once defined, click “Save and get code” to generate another piece of code. You must copy and paste that piece of code into the HTML code of your site where you want the ad to appear. Again, if you use WordPress, you can use a plugin like Ad Inserter to do it in a simpler way from the WordPress panel itself without having to edit the code directly. 

In case you want to block certain categories of ads or specific advertisers, you can go to the section “Blocking controls” and “All sites” in the left-side menu. There, simply select the type of ad content you want to block through the different options offered.

Steps to Monetize YouTube Videos with AdSense

As for YouTube, the configuration is simpler but there are requirements that your channel must meet before you can start earning money. According to the description of the YouTube Partner Program, you must have a minimum of 1,000 subscribers and a total of 4,000 hours of public viewing accumulated.

If your channel doesn’t meet these requirements, you won’t be able to get money through your videos. However, you can leave your AdSense account set up and linked so that, when they are met, the monetization is activated.

If you’re interested in creating YouTube Ads to promote your videos and get more views and subscribers, check out our guide to YouTube Ads.

Keep in mind that Google will only accept your monetization request if you have all the rights to everything that appears in your videos—both images and graphics as well as the music you use. If you use royalty-free music, you must provide links to the song in the description of the video with the type of license that applies. 

To activate the monetization of your channel, you must go to “Creator studio” and click on “Channel” in the left-side menu. There you will see an option to activate the monetization.

After clicking on “Activate,” follow the steps indicated by the platform accepting its policies and linking the AdSense account that you created. In this case, the link is automatic and it’s not necessary to insert an HTML code.

Once the channel is linked to your AdSense account, choose the monetization preferences to indicate what kind of ads you want to show in your videos.

The options are display ads (banners that appear outside the video on the right side), overlay ads (floating ads as a horizontal banner at the bottom of your videos), sponsored cards (displayed on your videos to show products related to your content) or skippable video ads (those before, during or after the reproduction of your videos).

In case you want to block certain ad categories or specific advertisers, you must do so from your AdSense account through the “Blocking Controls” in the same way as indicated in the previous section but in the YouTube tab.  

Now that you know what AdSense is, how it works, its pros and cons and how to convert your hobbies into benefits, through Google advertising, you can start earning money through your own webpage.

As you have already seen, the configuration and start-up of the system is relatively easy, but remember, generating income through AdSense is not as easy. Still, with high-quality content and a good SEO strategy, it’s only a matter of time before you start reaping the benefits of AdSense.

The post What is Google AdSense and How to Monetize Your Hobbies  appeared first on Kolau Blog.

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Wondering how to use YouTube Ads for ecommerce? Video marketing is a great way to boost sales for your online store. However, a lot of businesses stay away from it because it seems complicated or they question if the strategy is worth all of the effort. To help you better understand video marketing and everything it can do for your business, you have to consider this technique from all angles.   

For starters, consider these facts:

• 80 percent of your online visitors will watch a video, while only 20 percent will actually read the content. (Online Publishers Association)

• Online shoppers who viewed a video were, on average, 1.6 times more likely to make a purchase compared to shoppers who did not view a video. (Invodo)

• Those who use video marketing get 66 percent more qualified leads per year and a 54 percent increase in brand awareness. (Aberdeen Group)

• Video has helped 76 percent of marketers increase their traffic and sales. (Wyzowl)

Even if they take a little more work than writing content, the positive effect video marketing can have on your online store is worth it. To better ensure success and make things easier, come up with a solid video content strategy and learn how to use YouTube ads to boost your business.

How YouTube Ads Work

Video ads that appear on YouTube are created through a Google Ads account—Google’s advertising platform. To understand how they work, you need to understand how Google Ads works.

To summarize, online advertising is based on a pay-per-click basis, which is nothing more than a digital auction system in which each advertiser determines how much they’re willing to pay for each click on their ad. From there Google decides which ads are shown first. You can also pay for every 1,000 impressions of an ad or for each video view, depending on the type of ad and the bidding system available.

However, several factors come into play in this auction and the advertiser who pays the most is not always the one that gets the best position. The quality of the ad, the experience of the landing page and the number of clicks the ad receives also influence the result of this auction. This means that if one ad has a higher quality score than another, it’s likely that it gets better positions (or appears more times on a site) for a lower price.

Regarding video ads on YouTube, the main payment systems they use vary according to the type of video ad you use. Besides the aforementioned pay per click (PPC), there is also pay per view (PPV) and pay per thousand impressions (PPM).  

With the PPV system, you will only pay when someone shows interest in your video ad, (if the person sees 30 seconds of the video or if they watch the full video if it’s shorter). With the PPM option, you will pay when your video ad has been shown 1,000 times.

If you notice, when a video ad is shown on YouTube before another video is played, there is sometimes a kind of interactive button in the bottom left-hand side of the video.

You can use interactive elements like this to include a call-to-action button with a link to your web page. This is a great way to get traffic to your eCommerce site or to your YouTube channel. You can also use this to gain subscribers and continue developing your video content strategy or to show tabs with details of your products.

Keep in mind that each time someone clicks on these interactive elements, you’ll pay for the click, regardless of whether they’ve completed viewing the video or not. In other words, if they’ve seen 30 seconds of your video ad, you’ll pay and if they click on an interactive element you will pay again.

Types of Video Ads on YouTube

There are two types of video ads that appear on YouTube that you can use to influence potential customers. These are TrueView Ads and Bumper Ads.

TrueView Ads

With TrueView ads, you can advertise on YouTube with videos longer than 30 seconds. There are two types of TrueView ads: in-stream and video discovery. Although it’s always best to experiment to find out which is the most effective option, in-stream ads are usually more beneficial for promoting online stores.

# 1 TrueView In-Stream Ads

These are the infamous “skippable” video ads that appear before, in the middle or after a YouTube video. The user can choose to watch the ad or not by clicking the “Skip ad” button that activates after five seconds. This type of ad can be one of the most profitable due to the fact that you pay only when the user sees the full video or 30 seconds of it or when they click on an interactive element.

A Google study showed that users who see TrueView in-stream ads for more than 30 seconds are 23 times more likely to visit or subscribe to the channel, watch more videos or share the video of the brand. On the other hand, those who don’t see 30 seconds of the video are still 10 times more likely to perform any of these actions.

In the case of an eCommerce business, in-stream ads can be very useful for attracting traffic to your website and generating sales opportunities since it’s possible to include a customized call-to-action button that appears as a floating element over the video ad through the new TrueView for Action feature.

With this button you can get your potential customers to perform a specific action while viewing the video ad, such as buying something, getting a discount or discovering a new collection of products.

For example, this cosmetics brand used a TrueView one and a half minute in-stream ad to show the effect of its product, an eyelash extension serum. It also directs its potential customers to an offer page through the call-to-action button “Get offer.”

In addition to the call-to-action button, there are also two other interactive elements that you can add to your in-stream ads that can increase traffic and sales opportunities in your online store. These are the purchase cards which allow you to display tabs with information about your products and the automatic end screens which allow a static image to be displayed for a few seconds once the video has finished. This can also have a button that invites users to take some kind of action.

In order to use the purchase cards, you have to create a Google Merchant Center account and upload the images and information of the products you wish to advertise before creating the campaign. Then you must link your Merchant Center account to your video campaign in Google Ads.

Here is an example of an in-stream ad from a furniture store that uses purchase cards to show the different sofa models it sells and the prices.

# 2 TrueView Video Discovery Ads

Video discovery ads show your video as if it were another video on YouTube’s results pages or on the main page of the YouTube mobile app. It can also appear as a related video on the right side of the screen when a user is viewing a video on their computers.

This type of ad works only through the pay-per-click system. Therefore, if your ad appears as the first result of a search on YouTube and someone clicks on it, you will pay for that click regardless of whether the user watches your video or not.

They are usually effective when used to promote longer videos such as how-to videos or product demos. It’s not a type of advertisement designed to direct traffic to your website or to get direct sales. Instead, it’s a way to increase your channel’s visibility as well as your subscriber base.

If you are developing a video content strategy on YouTube (with videos that are not purely commercial and add value to your potential customers) and you want to create a community around this content, this type of ad is the most appropriate.

For example, the shoe brand Toms has developed a brilliant video content strategy on its YouTube channel. In the following image, you can see the themes sorted through playlists.

Toms could use TrueView Discovery ads to get more views and encourage the discovery of the brand through useful or entertaining content (not strictly commercial) with the goal of creating a community around them.

Bumper ads

Bumper ads are the shortest video ad with a maximum duration of six seconds. They are shown before, in the middle or after a YouTube video. Unlike TrueView in-stream ads, the user can’t skip them, so they’re forced to watch them until the end. According to Google, it’s a perfect type of easy-to-remember ad to reach users who are watching videos through their smartphone. 

A study conducted by a partnership between YouTube and Netflix comparing the performance of different video ad lengths showed that:

bumper ads increase ad recall by 56 percent, brand awareness by 19 percent and interest in the product by 300 percent.  

They are especially useful for branding campaigns. If you are trying to bring more attention to your online store or to a new product, this format can work well. If your goal is to persuade your potential customers to make a purchase decision, then TrueView in-stream ads with longer videos will work better.

Below you can see a good example of a bumper ad for the English tea brand PG Tips.

The tea brand takes advantage of these short six seconds to provoke the desire to drink tea in a simple and brilliant way. For this, they use a funny mascot and a play on words that catches people’s attention, “Tea-licious!” It makes the ad entertaining and easy to remember which can increase brand awareness. 

As you can see, a great part of the success of this type of advertising is to find a direct and striking way to transmit a single message in a very short time.

How to Create a Perfect Video Ad for eCommerce

Part of the success of a YouTube Ads campaign has to do with the targeting strategy you use to make your ads appear in front of the right people. The other part has to do with the content of the video or “how” you transmit the message through the images and the sound. Here are some tips so you know what your video ad should have in it to increase your chances of success.

• Don’t tell with words what you can tell with images: The whole point of a video is transmitting a complete message through images. Try to make your ad as visual as possible and make sure it has an engaging narrative. For example, the multinational company specializing in DIY accessories and decorations, Leroy Merlin, created this silent video ad as a Valentine’s Day campaign in which its protagonists create a narrative through their actions and gestures with the support of some text labels.

• Use contrasts and include elements of surprise: Try to use exaggerated color contrasts, movement and sound. For example, a sudden silence or a change of pace in the movement of the images can catch a viewer’s attention. The Russian car company Opel used this shocking ad of a crash test based on a strong sound and visual contrast to catch users’ attention.

• Show the benefit of your product in the first five seconds: If you use TrueView in-stream type ads, those first five seconds are crucial for a user to decide if they want to keep watching your ad or skip it. Develop your story quickly avoiding long and empty introductions to prove that your eCommerce business or your product is just what the viewer needs. For example, the insurance company King Price, aware that users could skip their ad easily, used a quick and eye-catching animation to communicate the benefit of their service in the first three seconds. This captures the attention of users before the real ad starts.  

• Don’t show your logo at the beginning of the video when you use TrueView in-stream ads: According to a Google study, although adding your logo or mentioning your brand name audibly at the beginning may increase brand recall, it will increase the likelihood that users will skip your ad. On the other hand, the study shows that using a floating logo somewhere on the screen that isn’t integrated with the product decreases the likelihood that users will notice and remember it. Therefore, try to show your brand logo naturally, either in the packaging or the body of your products.

• Create your videos according to the profile of your target audience: It’s important that you know your objective clients perfectly. Know their gender, how old they are, what they do, what their interests are, their concerns, etc. To capture the attention of your potential customers, your video should relate to them and show the solution to their problem or fulfill a need. For example, if you have a sports equipment online shop and want to promote a new collection of running shoes for women, show the type of woman that would buy these shoes in your video ad. The well-known beverage brand Mountain Dew shows its different customer profiles in its advertisements including athletes, hip-hop stars, welders and construction professionals and teenagers.

• Use humor to grab the audience and emotion to get them to remember your ad: Selecting the right tone for your video ad can also influence its success. Google’s studies show that humorous ads tend to be seen longer and get more engagement. On the other hand, ads with an “emotional” tone are associated with greater brand recall.

• If you use TrueView in-stream ads, make sure that the videos are one minute long: According to a Wyzowl survey, 50 percent of consumers believe that a minute is the ideal duration for an explanatory video while 33 percent chose between one and two minutes and 17 percent said less than one minute.

• If you use a voice-over in your video, make it informal and have it match your audience: The same Wyzowl survey reveals that 83 percent of consumers believe that a chatty, relaxed and conversational voice that talks to them as if they were friends or family is more communicative and persuasive than a formal voice. More so, 69 percent believe that a female voice over is more effective for selling products aimed at women. In the case of a product aimed at men, the study shows that there is more flexibility in terms of effectiveness of the type of voice with 53 percent of consumers believing that a male voice over would be the most effective to sell a product for men.

• Test with music: Google data shows that some genres work better than others to catch users’ attention in the first five seconds but there is no formula for success. Google found that people are more likely to skip ads that feature calm, relaxing, or action-oriented music and instead tend to watch those that include comedy or funny music.

• Use Google Brand Lift to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and create your ads based on the results: Knowing the preferences of your target audience is key to improving the effectiveness of your ads. Brand Lift allows you to conduct small surveys of users with a format similar to that of video ads, through which you can obtain data to measure brand recognition, ad recall, interest and purchase intention of your potential customers. You can use this data to create more effective ads.

How to Create a Video Campaign with Google Ads

Now that you know what you need to produce an effective video ad for your eCommerce site, think about how you have to set up the Google Ads campaign to get your ads displayed to the right people.

Keep in mind that to start the campaign you must upload the videos you want to use as an ad on your YouTube channel and link this channel with your Google Ads account.

# 1 Structure the campaigns according to your marketing goal, the language and the device where you want to show your ads

Once you’ve created your Google Ads account, add a different campaign for each goal. For example, you can create a campaign for brand awareness and another to create sales opportunities. You should also create individual campaigns for each type of device you want to show your ads on and, if you create video ads in different languages, you should also create a campaign for each language.

This way you can have absolute control over what is shown and where its shown for each campaign. For example, if you have campaigns separated by device you could optimize your ads by showing a video in a square or vertical format in mobile campaigns to gain more space on the screen instead of showing a standard horizontal video on all devices.

# 2 Choose a targeting method

Targeting methods let you tell Google what criteria it should follow to show your ads on one site or another or to some people or others. There are several options to target your campaigns that you can use depending on the knowledge you have of your potential customers, the type of products you sell or the type of strategy you want to use.

Here’s a selection of the targeting methods that can be most effective in YouTube ad campaigns for eCommerce sites: 

• Audiences based on intention: This method has great potential because it allows you to show your ads to people who have conducted searches on Google with certain keywords. For example, if you have an online flower shop, And one of your potential customers searches for “where to buy a bouquet of roses” on Google and later decides to watch videos on YouTube, this targeting method with the defined keyword “buy a bouquet of roses” will trigger your video ad since this person has already shown interest in your product based on their Google search.

• Video remarketing: This is one of the most effective segmentation methods for eCommerce sites. It allows you to show your video ads to users who have interacted with your videos on YouTube or visited your online shop without completing a purchase. You can remind them of the benefit of your products through your video ads and persuade them to take another look at them. For example, two Google case studies about Intel and Zendesk demonstrate how these brands have achieved a 30 percent increase in their conversion rate and an ROI of 1,317 percent, respectively, through remarketing.

• Select placements manually: If you know exactly what videos your potential customers usually watch or the YouTube channels they follow, the most effective way to reach them is to add the URLs of these videos or channels manually to get your ads to appear there. This gives you maximum control over the sites where your ads will be displayed.

# 3 Set up your budget

When you set a budget in Google Ads, you can choose between defining a total budget for a specific period of time or defining a daily budget. If you plan to carry out a long campaign (more than a month) and you have not yet planned an end date, it’s best to establish a daily budget.

In case it’s a short campaign that lasts only a few days and you are clear about how much you want to spend, you can define the total budget for the campaign by establishing a start and end date for it. If you want to know more about how much to spend on Google Ads, check out our guide about how much does Google Ads cost.

However, you can modify this budget whenever you wish. If you start your campaigns for the first time, you can define the same budget for all of them and later you can increase the budget for campaigns that have obtained a better click rate or have generated more conversions and decrease the budget of those that haven’t worked so well. 

Now it’s your turn. Create eye-catching videos that surprise and captivate your potential customers within the first seconds, choose the type of ad that best suits your marketing goals and take into account these tips to create an effective YouTube Ads campaign that allows you to boost sales in your eCommerce site.

The post Guide to YouTube Ads for Ecommerce appeared first on Kolau Blog.

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You’ve more than likely received direct mail magazines in your mailbox. They’re full of glossy pages featuring ads and coupons for local businesses.

Maybe you’ve used them and maybe you haven’t, but according to the United States’ Postal Service’s 2018 Household Diary study, 53% of households read them plus 21% of households scan them. This means many people are looking and engaging with local magazine advertising.

Direct mail magazines aren’t the same as your traditional magazine. While traditional magazines are full of content like articles with ads dispersed throughout, direct mail magazines are usually only made up of ads. People only look at them to find coupons or see what’s going on with local businesses.

Why is Direct Mail Magazine Advertising Effective?

You may think print advertising is dying or already dead, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. In fact, print advertising stands out among all the emails and internet ads.

People who open their mailboxes have no choice but to deal with a direct mail magazine. They have to look at them and decide what they want to do with them. According to USPS’s household diary study, businesses spent about $210 billion in advertising mail.

Not to mention, according to MarketingSherpa, most people trust direct mail advertising.

83% of people born between 1925 and 1945 trust
direct mail ads.  

It’s not just older people who trust them, though. 70% of millennials also trust direct mail ads. This is very different for online ads, especially pop-up and banner ads.

While print ads and mailed catalogs are the first and third most trusted form of advertising respectively (with tv ads in between), only 25% of people trust pop-ups and only 39% of people trust mobile and banner ads. MarketingSherpa’s respondents listed reason as to why they distrust pop-up ads, including a fear of being hacked or catching a virus. With paper and physical ads, that fear is completely nonexistent.

In 2018, 281 billion emails were sent by and to 3.82 billion worldwide email users every day. On average, that’s about 74 emails per person. How many of those emails get opened? About 15.75%. That’s a lot of emails. It’s hard to stand out among such a large crowd.

According to USPS, the most a household receives a week is around 16 pieces of advertising in the mail and, as we’ve seen earlier, the engagement rate is much higher for direct mail than the open rates show us for email.

It’s easy for people to hit delete on emails without opening them or to ignore ads completely. People have gotten so used to online ads that marketers have come up with a term called banner blindness, in which consumers both consciously and unconsciously ignore banner ads. Just look at all those ads below.

There are three fully visible plus one cut off on a single page. You have to work much harder to make a banner ad stand out, meaning not only does it have to be beautifully designed, it’s targeting needs to be extremely accurate to grab attention.

In a world full of digital advertising, print ads and magazines are a breath of fresh air that can reach people where online ads can’t. 

That’s not to say you should forget about digital marketing completely. Jerry Carlson, who runs a direct mail magazine called Buy Local Only that is distributed throughout Oregon, said though direct mail works for any kind of business, startup companies that need to explain their service or product to people should couple their print advertising with digital marketing. For example, using print ads to drive people to your website is a good idea.

Local Magazine Advertising Tip #1: Targeting the Right People

Like with most marketing, advertising in direct mail magazines is all about picking the right publication that helps you target the right kind of people. If you’re a local business, advertising to the community around you can do you a lot of good. Advertising in the right magazine is important too. Often, the magazine you choose affects which potential customer gets targeted and how.

Quarterly Magazine is a direct mail magazine that distributes throughout the Putnam County and Westchester County New York. Allison Palais, the owner of the magazine, said direct mail advertising is very effective but, “you have to know who to mail to and who to put as an advertiser in that direct mail.”

Palais’ magazine is made up of four books, which in total go out to about 100,000 homes. When choosing a magazine, pay attention to how they target consumers and if the magazine is in contact with the right households for your business.

Quarterly Magazine emphasizes the benefits both advertisers and consumers get from using direct mail magazines. Notice how the bottom right option says “Shop Local” and “put money back into your community.”

People like to support local businesses they feel are part of their community. Choosing a magazine that also understands the importance of community marketing and how to execute it will benefit your business and its relationship to the households surrounding it.

It may be tempting to only target middle-class or upper-middle-class neighborhoods, but it’s important to take into account where your business is located and who is most likely to walk into it. Don’t just market to neighborhoods with more money, especially if they aren’t your frequent customers.

Jerry Carlson posts videos about marketing tips on his website. In one of these videos, he emphasizes the importance of sending out ads to people within two to five miles of your business, regardless of income status. According to the book Killer Business Plan by Peter and Lydia Mehit, 85% of your customers come from one mile of your business, 10% come from three miles, and 5% come from five miles.

Despite this, according to the USPS’s Household Diary Study, households with income of more than $100,000 receive the most advertising mail at about 16.2 pieces of advertising a week. In comparison, households with an income of less than $35,000 receive only 7.5 pieces of advertising mail a week.

It makes sense to target households with higher income if your business is located in the middle of an upper-class neighborhood, but otherwise, it would be unreasonable to expect most of your customers to come from those households. The median household income in 2017 for the US is about $60,000. This means the majority of advertising mail is going to a small minority of households. 

Also, consider that the number one reason direct mail advertising gets ignored is that the person receiving it feels they already receive too much mail. The second reason is that they receive the ads too frequently. Seeing as upper-income homes receive more than twice as many ads as lower-income homes, focusing more on the people most likely to enter your business could solve this issue.

Where are your regulars from? Where do the majority of new customers come from? When choosing a magazine company to advertise in, look at where they distribute and if those areas match up with the ones you have determined are important.

Local Magazine Advertising Tip #2: Don’t Sacrifice Quality

If you’re trying to get the best price out of magazine advertising, you might focus on finding the cheapest direct mail magazine out there. However, taking the quality of your magazine into account is important. Part of the appeal of print ads is how they look and feel in your hands.

Carlson notes that one of the hardest parts of direct mail magazine advertising is how other magazines try to “out cheap” each other, which inevitably results in lower quality ads. He said cheap products will only result in them being thrown away. That’s the opposite of what you want to happen.

Ideally, your chosen magazine should entice the recipients. It should be nice enough that they don’t mind keeping it on their coffee table or they are willing to keep coupons they’re interested in hung up on their fridge.

Not only that, the quality of the magazines you choose to advertise in can affect the way your business is perceived. You want your business to appear trustworthy and professional and choosing a magazine that guarantees quality is a part of ensuring that appearance. Attractive ads, good quality paper, and honest deals and offers are a good way of making sure your business retains a good reputation amongst your local customers.

Allison Palais describes how the high quality of her magazine makes it “desirable” and makes her recipients happy to open it.  She said, “[Women and the elderly] love opening up my magazine… It’s a really pretty magazine. It’s very glossy. It’s nice feel to the touch and so people like to handle it.” That’s exactly how you want the recipient of the magazine you advertise in to feel.

Looking online, the first page of one of the featured magazines certainly reflects the quality.

It gives you certain expectations right off the bat about what the ads will look like. You can tell when a magazine puts effort into and prioritizes quality.

Also, remember that some households tend to receive a lot of direct mail ads. You want the magazine you choose to stand out amongst all the other mail they receive. If the magazine is high-quality with glossy pages and beautiful photos and ads, it’ll be noticed before the magazine made of flimsy paper and washed-out colors.

Local Magazine Advertising Tip #3: Designing Your Ad and Utilizing Advertising Bait

Many magazines will create your ads for you, but if you decide to create your own or want to evaluate the quality of the ads they’ve created, there are some things you should pay attention to. First, pay attention to your headline. Jerry Carlson recommends making your headlines “short and sweet,” keeping the number of words between three and five.

Make sure your ad includes a call-to-action, meaning it instructs your potential customer on what you want them to do. For example, phrases like “Join Now” for things like gym memberships are a good example of a solid call-to-action. Below is another great example from Buy Local Only Magazine.

“Join Now” is straightforward and catches the eye due to the size and color of the letters. It’s not an overcrowded ad and it organizes the information communicated very well.

Emphasizing a deal or discount (in other words, your bait) in your headline is also a good idea. Coupons are a great way of catching someone’s attention when they’re flipping through a magazine and they’ll likely bring in new customers as well.

You want to give potential new customers a reason to remember you, save your ad, and go into a business they’ve never been to before. Coupons can also help give customers who have stopped buying from you a reason to return. 

Coupons bring people in who may become recurring customers, but, as we mentioned earlier, honesty is important. If you’re offering a deal, make sure you’re clear about what your potential customer will have to do in order to get the deal.

If you offer $10 off a meal but don’t mention they have to spend a certain amount of money, you’ll risk losing credibility and trust. You may get that customer in that first time, but they won’t return if they feel tricked. 

In the picture from Quarterly Magazine above, we can see an offer for a $25 bonus, but it’s clear that the gold you bring in needs to be worth over $200 and it cannot be combined with other offers. The offer is the biggest, rightfully so, and though the the other words are smaller, the offer is still clear about the requirements. The reader doesn’t have to search for the “exceptions” either.

When it comes to advertising in general, it’s a good idea to focus on what you can give your potential customers rather than the features of your product or service. With coupons, the benefits are clear.

However, if you run a business that can’t give a definite price–for example, if you own a clinic or home renovation business–you may not be able to use coupons the same way. This is when it might be tempting to list the features you offer, but you should try and frame them as a benefit to your customers.

For example, if you run a dental clinic, don’t just say you offer teeth-whitening. Tell them how whitening their teeth will improve their situation.

Ads are very visual but when it comes to creating print ads you tend to have a lot of freedom. Images are perhaps less important than the call-to-action or the deal you’re offering. When choosing your imagery, make sure it looks good as a whole, taking into account the size of your ad, where the words are going, and your color scheme.

Take good-quality pictures if you’re going to include them in your ad. Relate the picture to your ad, if possible. For example, if you’re offering a deal off burgers, showcase some of your delicious-looking burgers.

The ad below comes in one of Buy Local Only’s editions. It’s a good example of how professional photos can make a big difference when it comes to making your ads visually pleasing.

Without the photo of the woman, the ad itself would be much less interesting to look at and wouldn’t grab attention in the same way, despite being a whole page long.

We’ve written another article about how small businesses can use bait to attract new customers. In it, we talk more about highlighting benefits over features and how honesty and transparency are crucial to effectively executing free bait. Check it out if you’re interested in learning more.

Local Magazine Advertising Tip #4: Pair it with other kinds of marketing

Like Carlson said, it’s hard for startup companies with a lot of explaining to do to market themselves only through direct mail magazines. These companies absolutely should give direct mail magazines a try as they’ll make the business discoverable to local residents (something they’ll definitely need if they’re a new company).

Using print ads to refer consumers to your website in order to expose them to more information about your company is a good tactic – if you want to know more about how to create a specific web page related to your ads, check out our article about how to create an effective landing page.

“That’s something a lot of our home improvement contractors report to us,” said Carlson. “A lot of people are getting to their website after they see their ad in the magazine.” It’s not until after they see something they like on the website that they decide to give these home improvement contractors a call. This is not uncommon. In fact:

95% of people will check your online website before taking action.  

So it only makes sense to pair your direct mail advertising with digital marketing tactics. At least include a URL on your print ad to lead your potential customer to your website if they choose to look for you online. 

In the ad below the emphasis is on the phone number, not the website, but the website URL is there nonetheless in case someone wants to go to it.

Source: Buy Local Only Magazine Oregon City & Canby edition

It’s good practice to include a website URL, even if you prefer they call you. Many people want to research a business before they contact them. 

This ad for Harry’s Razors, however, instructs people to go to their website only.

Source: Nickgray.net

This is an example of how you can use print ads to bring people to your website. Harry’s also offers a reward (a free trial) for signing up, which is a great incentive for them to go to the website.

If you choose to lead people to a webpage customized for the print ad they’re looking at (making the webpage more relevant and personal to the consumer), you could also utilize retargeting tactics online.

After someone has visited your website, you could begin retargeting them using digital ads to remind them what interested them about your business and encouraging them to finally contact you if they didn’t do so during their first visit to your website.

Sweepstakes are commonly used in direct mail ads. A good example is this ad from the January/February edition of the Buy Local Only magazine for West Linn and Lake Oswego:

This is a great call-to-action. “Enter To Win” grabs the attention. It’s offering a chance to win a significant prize, emphasizing benefits over features. It’s smart to instruct consumers to stop by “The Dairy Dept” to drop off the entry coupon, but if this were an unknown, brand new company, people may not find their chance to win enough reason to stop by.

What if your sweepstake ad instructed people to go online and sign up through email instead? This would give interested consumers a chance to learn about your company and it would give your business a chance to retarget them or begin an email campaign.

What is the future of direct mail advertising?

With technology taking over so much of our daily lives, it’s hard to predict what the future of print and print advertising will be. However, statistics show that direct mail magazines aren’t slowing down any time soon and that their effectiveness is nothing to ignore. With so much online clutter, it’s no wonder print ads stand out the way they do. They’re tangible. Consumers find them trustworthy.

When asked about the future of direct mail magazines, Palais said, “I don’t think direct mail magazines are going to go anywhere. I think we’ll be fine.”

Certainly, for local businesses targeting and connecting with the community around them will influence their business. Hopefully, this article gave you some helpful tips on how to go about starting your direct mail magazine advertising plan.

The post 4 Best Practices for Local Magazine Advertising appeared first on Kolau Blog.

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If you are in the tourism and hospitality industry and are looking to boost your business and increase your bottom line, a better marketing strategy can help. Whether you own a hotel, restaurant, travel agency, or a transport company there are things you can do to help gain visibility, attract customers, and build a loyal following. These four tourism marketing strategies can help you figure out the best way to enhance your business and stay present in the industry.

The travel and tourism industry is one of the largest in the world and has experienced stable growth over the last five years. It’s also a very fragmented industry. According to a report by IBISWorld, it’s estimated that the four main companies in this industry represent less than 10 percent of the total market share.

Many segments of the industry are dominated by small businesses and this facilitates access to all those who wish to build their own business. Given this opportunity, implementing the right tourism marketing strategies is crucial to stand out from the competition and to establish yourself as an authority in the industry.

With all the available opportunities for growth and development, creating a solid marketing plan with the four following strategies can be your key to success and the difference between breaking even and making a profit.

#1 Apply storytelling on your social media posts

According to HubSpot, consumers today (among them, tourists) process more than 100,500 digital words a day. Every time they want to know something they ask Google and they can compare prices instantly in three clicks. It’s not that everyone wants to ignore your marketing messages, but given a large amount of information they are exposed to, it’s inevitable that your efforts can get lost in the shuffle. Therefore, it’s necessary to find new ways to communicate to get their attention and get them to interact with your brand.

In a TED Talk, Simon Sinek, founder of Start With Why, said:

People don’t buy what you sell, they buy why you sell it.

When designing your marketing messages on social media it’s not effective to only describe the characteristics of the products or services you offer.

To effectively capture the attention of your target audience and generate more engagement, tell them why your service is made for them while also explaining what they will experience if they decide to buy your product or use your service.

In this sense, stories have enormous power. They generate empathy, transmit confidence, are easy to remember and, most importantly, are easy to share. Storytelling is a technique that allows you to link your product or service with a concrete, symbolic and emotional experience through a story and take advantage of its full potential.

When coming up with stories about your business, try to link them to your product or to the daily activities of your business in subtle ways and put them in your company’s social media posts.

Here are some examples of tourist establishments that use this technique in their Instagram, Facebook and Twitter posts:

If your content on social media doesn’t get “likes” or isn’t shared on Facebook or similar platforms, another proven resource that can help you is creating a mascot or character associated with your brand that acts as the protagonist of your stories.

For example, the travel company Travelocity has associated a traveling gnome with their brand. He appears as the protagonist in several of their publications. In addition, this travel company has created additional social profiles for the character including a fan page on Facebook, a Twitter account and an Instagram account through which they offer exclusive discounts to their followers.

In this way, they manage to promote their trips in an entertaining way that captures the attention of the users, generates engagement and manages to create a community of fans around their character and, therefore, around their brand. On Twitter alone, they’ve got more than 210,000 followers.

#2 Use augmented reality to offer memorable experiences

Within the tourism sector, offering an incredible experience is essential to get customers to remember you, recommend your brand or use your service again. Using new technologies such as augmented reality in your marketing strategy can help you create innovative and memorable experiences for your visitors and, at the same time, differentiate yourself from your competitors.

If you’re not familiar with the term augmented reality, TechTerms provides a very simple definition:

Augmented reality, commonly abbreviated as “AR,” is computer-generated content overlaid on a real-world environment.

Surely you’ve heard of Pokémon Go, a mobile augmented reality game whose launch in 2016 was a massive success. This game uses the GPS of your mobile to locate, capture and engage in battles with virtual creatures (Pokémon). By activating the camera, players can see these creatures through the screen as if they were in a real location. This is augmented reality.

The potential of this technology in the tourism industry is enormous and many tourist establishments are already using it to offer different experiences to tourists.  According to a Zenith analysis, in 2018 the pervasiveness of smartphones will reach 66 percent, which means that more than half of the world uses a smartphone.

Hotels were one of the first industries to apply this technology to their marketing actions. For example, the Casa Madrona Hotel in New York used this technology to show tourists walking the street the impressive balcony views of one of its 360-degree suites, as you can see in the following video:

Augmented reality also offers great possibilities for the transportation industry. With a travel app with augmented reality, you could point the camera to a transport vehicle and discover your route, the next stop and places of interest you pass through, something very useful if you are a foreigner.

For example, the transport company, Tunnel Vision, created an app that transforms the New York subway map into an interactive guide in different languages, as you can see in the following video:

According to an analysis of augmented reality published in Harvard Business Review, the three elements that allow the massive adoption of augmented reality apps are:

1. Relevant content
2. A realistic and compelling interaction of the virtual with the physical environment
3. A unique value that goes beyond what other technologies offer

To design a successful augmented reality app that offers a memorable experience, you must make sure it has these three elements.

#3 Create valuable content and optimize your website for SEO

According to a study by Aberdeen, conversion rates are six times higher for those who adopt content marketing than for those who don’t.

Since content marketing is incredibly important, to ensure you get the best results, consider hiring an SEO specialist to help you design a tailored strategy for your business is recommended. That being said, there are things you can do on your own. Here are a few basic tips to help you create a content and SEO strategy for your tourism marketing plan.

• Include a blog on your website and publish content that provides valuable information for your target audience: According to Ascend2, 72 percent of marketers say that creating relevant content was the most effective SEO tactic. Constructing high-quality content that provides valuable information about topics related to your tourism business (such as travel tips or interesting places to visit) can help you increase the authority of your website and, therefore, improve your positioning on Google.

• Choose long keywords (more than three terms) that have a high search volume and a low level of competition: According to WordStream, 50 percent of Internet searches have four or more words. You must make sure that the keywords you insert in your content are long and describe your business, products, services or—if it’s a blog post—the subject you are dealing with. Look at the number of times users search for them. This should be a significant figure relative to your pages’ click rates.

• Take care of SEO on your website: There are several factors that influence to a greater or lesser extent the positioning of a website on search engines like Google. SEO experts agree that for Google to position your page or your post for the keyword you have chosen, you must add it in the beginning of the title of the page, in the subtitles, in the first paragraph of the content, repeat it several times throughout the content, in the URL, in the “Alt” tags of the images and in the meta tags (the summaries that appear in the Google’s results pages).

• Create long and interesting content: Content marketing has changed a lot since Google no longer recognizes short articles with superfluous content. Instead, it gives the first positions to websites that publish pages with long and substantiated content that provides interesting information about a topic. Several studies agree that longer pages or posts tend to get a better position on Google which translates into more traffic. For example, HubSpot discovered that the posts that got more organic visits were those that contained between 2,250 and 2,500 words.

Source: HubSpot

• Create localized content: The tourism sector is a local industry so you can take advantage of this feature to create localized content which will allow you to reduce competition and attract only your potential customers. If your tourism business is located in London, try to create content that deals with topics related to travel and tourism applied to London making sure to include the term “London” in your keywords. For example, a tourist guide agency in London can create a post about “hidden places in London that you have never visited.”

#4 Manage your reviews on TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor is the largest travel review platform in the world and has more than 450 million users and more than 570 million reviews. If you are the owner of a hotel, a restaurant, a theme park or a provider of tourist activities you should know that reviews play an important role in the tourist’s decision. A survey carried out by PhoCusWright reported that 70 percent of travelers read TripAdvisor reviews before choosing a hotel and that 53 percent do not decide to make any reservations before having read reviews.

While it’s true that reviews can be as beneficial as they are harmful to your business, if you manage them well you can avoid having your image seriously affected by a bad review. Responding to negative comments in an assertive and polite manner is the best way to do this. The PhoCusWright survey also revealed that 87 percent of users believe that an appropriate response to a negative review improves their impression of the establishment.

However, you have to be very careful not to create the opposite effect. In order to respond successfully to a negative review you should:

•      Respond as quickly as possible
•      Do it politely
•      Thank the user for sharing his opinion
•      Apologize, if necessary
•      Demonstrate that your company takes user comments seriously
•      Demonstrate that your team will be fully involved to improve the service
•      Try to offer a solution whenever possible

Here’s how the Gray Line San Francisco tour company responded cautiously to a negative review on TripAdvisor, following these recommendations:

Even so, you shouldn’t see criticism as a threat since the opinions of your customers can provide you with valuable information to implement improvements in your business and thus offer a better experience to future visitors. You should also know that, according to the PhoCusWright survey, 66 percent of users tend to ignore extreme comments when they read reviews, so while positive reviews predominate, you shouldn’t worry too much about the destructive ones.

Taking into account that the reviews are, many times, a key factor in a tourist’s decision when booking a table in a restaurant, a room in a hotel, a tour or when buying tickets for a theme park, not having a full profile on TripAdvisor means closing doors to a community of more than 450 million users willing to discover new sites and miss a great opportunity to promote your company and generate more sales.

There are also other review platforms that are gaining popularity, such as Yelp, which currently receives about 130 million unique visits and has more than 70 million reviews.

Unlike TripAdvisor, Yelp is not intended exclusively for the tourism and travel industry (there are reviews on all types of businesses), but it has an important base of reviews on restaurants, hotels and other companies operating within the tourism sector. If you want to discover how to incorporate this platform into your marketing plan, read How to increase reviews on Yelp.

The implementation of these four tourism marketing strategies will help you increase the visibility of your business, attract your target audience and get a better return on your marketing investment. Although these techniques can be applied in most cases within the tourism scope, take into account the needs of your business and choose those that best suit it.

The post Tourism Marketing: 4 Strategies to Attract More Tourists appeared first on Kolau Blog.

I can’t remember how many times I’ve had to search online for a product or service I otherwise didn’t know how to find. When I needed to find a hotel to stay in or when I searched for a local flower shop, I went straight to Google. It was the ads that pointed me in the direction I needed to go. When it came to the flower shop, I found and picked the company I would use in less than fifteen minutes. I based my decision on their ad, then on their website and then on their prices. It was the ad that got my attention first. Thanks to marketing automation, I discovered a shop I never would have come across otherwise.

In this day and age, a company is unlikely to survive without some practical knowledge in online advertising. A good-looking webpage for your business and attention-grabbing ads are important for attracting online customers but even more important and, maybe, more mysterious is how to find potential customers online in the first place. After all, the internet is impossibly big and not every person who sees an ad is necessarily interested.

Not all paid ads result in a click. According to Moz, it’s about 3.4%. But that number jumps to 65% for consumers already looking to buy a product and consumers who click on paid ads are 50% more likely to purchase than those who only click on organic results.

It’s also important to make a consumer aware of your business. 78% of mobile searches, for example, end in an offline purchase. If your ad is targeting the right people, offers the consumer what they’re looking for, and is well-made and interesting to look at, it is more likely to be clicked on.

Let’s go back to the flower shop example and look at what appeared on Google.

One of them advertises same day delivery, targeting consumers who are in need a gift immediately. The second ad mentions their deal of “$10 off Same Day Delivery” and the word local. Consumers looking for a good deal or those looking for someplace local might be attracted to that ad.

Using numbers is a good way to attract attention. It also has high ratings and a lot of reviews, giving it credibility. Not every flower shop is going to have that many reviews and so it gives the company a competitive edge.

Advertise what makes your company different and what makes you stand out. The more niche you are, the easier it will be to find the right kind of customers and narrow down the best keywords to use in your campaign.

Businesses can use search engines like Google to hone in on customers with the most potential—those who are already looking for their services. If you own a flower shop and a potential customer looking for an anniversary present finds your website or ad through Google, you can guess you’ve chosen the right keywords to attract the right person. If you’re attracting people looking for gardening supplies and you don’t sell gardening supplies, you need to take another look at your chosen keywords.

Sometimes unexpected keywords do better than other seemingly more common ones. How do you know which keywords will attract the right kinds of customers and how do you keep those customers loyal in such an impersonal space as the internet? Keep data on which keywords work best but also think of your customer as an individual and not an archetype.

It’s important to understand your potential and current customers as individuals in order to “maintain a very good relationship with… existing customers and also to be able to anticipate their future needs,” according to Raluca Dania Todor, a marketing professor at Transilvania University. The highly personalized nature of online marketing is one of the reasons it works so well.

Think to yourself: what does this person want and what would be useful for them? It’ll help you figure out what kinds of keywords your kinds of customers will be using and it’ll put the focus on personalization.

It may seem impossible to provide this highly personalized experience to every customer, which is why Todor also emphasizes the importance of using marketing automation. Marketing automation is actually a great way to quickly get to know your customers and maintain relationships with them. It collects information that would otherwise be difficult to get and offers ways for you to use that information for the company’s benefit.

What is marketing automation and how does it work?

In their book Marketing Automation Foundation: Eliminating Unproductive Marketing, Steve Thomas and Brian Thomas define marketing automation as

a category of software designed to support marketing processes.

To elaborate, it’s software that makes necessary processes for online marketing easier to manage and it makes buying and selling online more efficient. The purpose is simple but significant. The implementation and strategy is maybe the more overwhelming part.

To use marketing automation to its full potential you have to learn how to choose the best and most attractive keywords and how to best budget for pay per clicks. Fortunately, marketing automation is a great tool for collecting information you need to find these things out.

You can see if a keyword isn’t working or if an ad isn’t getting attention. Then, you can tailor your keywords or bidding times to reflect the information you’ve collected. Eventually, you’ll have collected the right information to really put the software to use. Really, marketing automation is all about collecting data and learning how to use it for the good of your business.

Marketing automation software, like Customer Relationship Management (the main software tracking and keeping current customers) and Lead Management (the software helping businesses acquire new customers), collect information, analyze customers, and tracks sale processes.

This is how you can learn about your customers quickly and tailor their online experience to maximize the chances of a sale. The data tells you what they’re looking for, what they need to complete the sale, and if it’s easy and personalized enough for them, the customer will likely return.

Depending on which one you choose, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software can be on the pricier end. Thankfully, there are many options both for small businesses or startups with a limited budget and for growing businesses that require more advanced software. Hubspot’s CRM software, for example, is free though not as advanced as other options such as Salesforce.

Salesforce leads the CRM market with about 14%, according to Brianna Butler and Megan Carignan in their essay “Developing a CRM Strategy for Small Businesses.” It’s on the pricier side compared to some other software, ranging from $5 to $300 per month for each user, but it’s also more advanced and meant for larger companies. Small businesses should look for less expensive CRM software tailored to their needs.

Often times, CRM software will include functions for lead management as well which makes it somewhat easier to manage and more affordable. CRM and lead management make it easier to automate campaign management because it tracks what times are best for advertising and what keywords are most effective. Get rid of keywords that attract the wrong people or no one at all and increase bids on the ones that attract the most and best customers.

Using Pay-per-click

Bids refer to how much money you would like to put into a particular ad to make sure it’s listed on the first page of a search engine. Pay-per-click (PPC) is a major part of automated marketing and online marketing in general. When someone clicks on your paid ad, you pay some amount of money to the PPC platform. So if someone clicks on your Google ad, whatever you bid goes to Google. Automation software will track which costly keywords aren’t being clicked on or attracting attention and which successful keywords might require a higher bid.

Automated marketing can ensure your ad appears on the first page by setting your bids to increase as necessary, though you can set a limit in case it exceeds your budget. Being on the first page is definitely an advantage. You’ll get more traffic and look more relevant. Getting your ad on the first page is only one step of the process though. There are certain tactics you can use to attract attention to your ad. As mentioned earlier, not a lot of people like to click on ads unless they’re already looking to buy. In addition, they only click on the ones that look like they’re worth it.

What are the benefits of Marketing Automation?

First, let’s talk about what makes marketing automation so effective. Search engines have become an indispensable bridge between customers and businesses. With the right combination of automated marketing strategies, sponsored results catch potential customers in their best moods. They’re already looking for your business, or they’re at least interested in similar services or products, and you’re meeting them halfway.

A study done by Dr. Artta Bandhu Jena and Snehasis Panda found that only 15% of companies were unsuccessful while using marketing automation compared to 65% that were somewhat successful and the 20% that were very successful.

Remember: marketing automation is a tool that must be used correctly to yield the best results. A good marketing strategy and a grasp on how to use the information you gather from automation software will help make you more successful.

According to Steve and Brian Thomas’ book Marketing Automation Foundation: Eliminating Unproductive Marketing and Todor’s essay, at its best, marketing automation:

Possible Challenges of Marketing Automation

Introducing marketing automation to your business can be a big decision and there are some challenges that can arise, especially for small businesses.

Of the companies that Jena and Panda studied who did not use marketing automation, 43% of them cited a limited budget as one of their reasons. We’ve discussed earlier in this article the options available for small businesses with a limited budget, such as Hubspot’s free CRM software. Since, if you’re a smaller company, your business is still growing, it’s best to stick with more simple options that cost less and upgrade later when it’s more necessary.

Others cited a lack of skilled manpower as one of their reasons for not using marketing automation. As marketing automation becomes more common and necessary, more resources pop up for beginners (for example, this article). Not every business owner is an expert in marketing automation but many of them seek experts to help them use it nonetheless. This is a solution for the 45% of businesses that cited a lack of time for implementing automation software as well.

Studies have shown that in the long run marketing automation is more beneficial to businesses than not, despite the possible obstacles. Often, marketing automation is, in fact, necessary for businesses to be more easily discoverable online and to survive in competition with bigger businesses.

Thankfully, there are options for businesses with limited budgets even when it comes to finding experts to help manage your marketing automation. It’s best to find a combination of automation software and expert advice that works for you and your businesses.

Using Automated Features on Google Ads

Google is the single most used search engine in the world. According to StatCounter, between Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Baidu, YANDEX RU, and DuckDuckGo, Google is used 92.74% of the time. Trailing in second is Yahoo! at 2.32%. Businesses need to try to understand how the Google Ads program works. At its center, Google Ads is dependent on PPC and uses all the automated marketing strategies and programs we’ve discussed so far. Keywords, campaign management and bidding choices all influence how well Google Ads will work for a business.

A study done by Saida Zainurossalamia Za and Irsan Tricahyadinata from Mulawarman University found that using Google Ads increased the number of visits on websites, increased the number of customers and increased the sales for the businesses they studied. Some businesses, like IT WORKS, increased sales by 200%. Though IT WORKS is likely part of the “very successful” category compared to most companies who were “somewhat successful,” their success shows the possibility of marketing automation through Google Ads. Google Ads is a necessary program for those who are interested in getting started in marketing automation. Internetlivestats.com reports that more than 3.5 billion searches happen on Google a day. The numbers show it’s in your business’s best interest to be discoverable on Google.

Source: internetlivestats

They also noted that certain strategies were necessary for success, including choosing the right set of keywords, increasing Ad rank, creating attractive advertisements and letting “AdWords [now Google Ads] automatically set the bid to increase conversion to achieve the set goals.” This means letting automated marketing increase bids for keywords that are working well or increasing bids to ensure your ad is on the first page. Clearly, the most successful companies used marketing automation and used the best marketing strategies available to them.

Google’s Ads Help website lists common ways to use their automated rules, including scheduling ads, controlling keywords and budgets, and scheduling and adjusting bids.

The common rules listed are some of the most important automated marketing strategies discussed in this article and Google’s explanations are useful if you’re struggling to figure out the technicalities of automated marketing. Once you’ve got the technical part down, you can apply the strategies that will help you use automated marketing to its full potential, specifically through the most used search engine in the world. If you’d prefer not to have to learn the technicalities, there are marketing experts who can help you manage your marketing campaigns and automation software.

Marketing Automation as an ever-changing practice

In 1998, Professors Randolph Bucklin, Donald Lehmann, and John Little predicted marketing decision-making would be automated by the year 2020. They were right in a lot of ways—parts of online decision-making have become automated. It might have all occurred faster than they expected, though. Here we are in 2018 and a lot of what they predicted for 2020 is now old news. It has taken over most of the online marketing and is becoming essential knowledge for marketers and businesses alike to be familiar with.

Marketing automation is constantly changing and improving. To succeed, businesses need to keep up and continue adapting to the online world. Getting started can be the hardest part but once you’ve done so, it’ll be easier for you to keep up with the inevitably changing times. Hopefully, this article has provided you with marketing strategies that will help you take full advantage of marketing automation and given you enough resources to get going.

Remember: much of marketing automation is gathering information and using it correctly. The information will direct you in the rest of your marketing automation decisions. What keywords do you keep and which do you get rid of? How much should you bid for your pay-per-clicks? What are your potential customers looking for? You decide what decisions your automation software will take!

Were these marketing automation tips useful? If you liked this post, take a look at our article on How to Create Effective Google Display Ads, which will help you strengthen some of the strategies you learned here. Check it out!

The post Marketing Automation for Beginners appeared first on Kolau Blog.

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If you run a business and are looking for better ways to increase your bottom line, reach a larger customer base, and outdo your competition, you may want to consider guerrilla marketing. Guerrilla marketing isn’t a new concept but there is still some confusion about what it really is and what benefits it can have for your company.

To help you figure out if this marketing technique is good for you, consider the facts surrounding it and see if it fits your needs.

How did guerrilla marketing come about?

The term “guerrilla marketing” was coined and popularized by psychologist and marketer Jay Conrad Levinson in 1984 in his book “Guerrilla Advertising.” This term was inspired by guerrilla warfare, a form of irregular warfare that is related to the small tactical strategies used by armed civilians which include ambushes, sabotages, raids and elements of surprise. You could say that guerrilla marketing uses the same type of tactics but applied to the marketing industry.

Before guerrilla marketing became popular large companies used to depend on large budgets and very expensive marketing actions. Small companies struggled to compete with them, so Levinson proposed using the brain instead of force or—in this case, money—to win the battle.

Ok… but what is guerrilla marketing?

Some call it “non-traditional marketing,” others call it “extreme marketing” and some even use the term “invisible marketing.” Although there are many definitions for this, all agree that it is an unconventional form of marketing that offers low-cost or free opportunities that can yield maximum results.

It takes energy, time and imagination to surprise consumers and create a personal and memorable impression of your brand in an attempt to get them to talk about it.

As the digital marketing consultant Heena Shah explained, guerrilla marketing works on the basis of these three effects:

• Surprise effect: Surprise the public by capturing their attention with unconventional methods.

• Diffusion effect: Expand the message to a wider audience.

• Low-cost effect: Minimize marketing costs by influencing a large number of people.

Main techniques of guerrilla marketing

There are multiple techniques, both online and offline, that could be included within the guerrilla marketing methodology. Here are the well-known ones along with real examples of success stories.

#1 Ambush Marketing

This tactic consists of kidnapping or co-opting another advertiser’s campaign to create awareness of your company or brand.

A classic example of ambush marketing is the action put in place by Rona, a Canadian paint and hardware company that took advantage of an Apple advertising campaign to gain visibility.

In 2010, Apple placed an advertising panel next to the Jacques Cartier Bridge in Montreal to announce its iPod Nano line. At that time, the iPod Nano was one of the most popular MP3 players on the market.

The ad showed the colorful players forming a rainbow with traces of paint. Rona took the opportunity and placed their own advertising panel just below Apple’s to promote their company’s new paint recycling program with the slogan, “We collect leftover paint.”

Credit of the image: Coloribus

The idea was simple and brilliant and remains one of the best examples of ambush marketing.

#2 Wild Posting

This is an advertising tactic that consists of placing a large number of posters side by side in multiple locations (mainly in dense urban areas) to attract pedestrians’ attention. It’s a cheap form of advertising that offers a high degree of exposure, especially in the entertainment industry (album releases, concerts, appearances etc.) or for local businesses.

For example, this technique was used to promote rapper Post Malone’s gig in Nashville, Tennessee:

Credit of the image: altterrain

This technique was also used by the pizzeria Urban Pie in Seattle, Washington to create the appearance of a large ad by using four smaller posters and repeating the composition along the wall.

Credit of the image: altterrain

#3 Undercover Marketing

This is an old technique but it is still used today, especially online. It includes actions such as product placement or branded content, widely used in film and television. It’s advertising that doesn’t look like advertising through the subtle integration of products into content without people noticing they’re placed there intentionally.

The most common cases online have to do with influencers, especially YouTubers (YouTube content creators) who make videos talking about the benefits of products or services that they supposedly bought, encouraging their viewers to buy them in a subtle way by totally integrating them into their content.

For example, YouTuber Jack Douglass of Jacksfilms created a sponsored video for Loot Crate called “The Worst Ice Breakers” using his YIAY (Yesterday I Asked You), one of his usual video formats in which he poses a question to his followers inviting them to leave comments on a topic and then creates a video where he collects them.

To integrate the product into his video, he invited his followers to share their best strategies to break the ice. Then, towards the end of the video, he showed his new Marvel ice cube maker—the product Loot Crate sent him—in a way that fit the content and the tone of the video without seeming like an advertisement for the product.

As for offline undercover advertising, one of the first brands to ever use this tactic was Sony Ericsson. In 2002, the company launched a new mobile phone model with a peripheral digital camera, called the T68i.

Since it was a novel product at that time, it was difficult to promote its benefits through traditional advertising. For this reason, Sony Ericsson hired 60 actors and distributed them in 10 big cities. These actors posed as tourists, couples, and seemingly normal people. They asked strangers to help them take a picture with the new Sony Ericsson camera phone.

Thanks to this, everyone began to talk about their experience with that innovative product and the T68i ended up becoming one of the best-selling mobile phones in several countries.

#4 Viral Marketing

Every day you hear about videos, tweets, photos, and similar content that spreads like a virus and reaches a large number of people in a short time. This phenomenon is closely linked to social networks which allow people to share all types of content in one click. Here, videos are the most susceptible content to be shared. According to Smallbiztrends, social videos generate 1,200 percent more shares than text and images put together.

All brands, both large and small, try to find the magic recipe to create viral content every day to try to get consumers interested in their products or services. Although there is a strong component of luck involved, creativity is key. Behind the success of these campaigns, there is usually a viral marketing strategy consciously designed.

According to Steve Olenski, one of the most influential marketing writers, the key elements of a viral marketing campaign are:

• A strong emotional resonance: The most effective viral campaigns usually inspire strong emotional reactions in viewers.

• A great name or a good cause: One of the biggest viral campaigns that everyone remembers is the Ice Bucket Challenge prompted by the ALS Association in 2014 to raise awareness about the degenerative disease. The Association challenged users to record themselves pouring a bucket full of ice water on themselves and uploading the video on social media tagging their friends to join the challenge and help spread awareness about ALS.

• A unique vision of today: A video that shows an unconventional vision of the present, often putting the focus on social injustice, has a good chance of going viral. If you want to get people’s attention, choose a cause that matters to you and link your brand to this cause.

• A deep familiarity with your audience: To design a successful viral campaign, you must know your target audience very well including where they are and what they are looking for.

• Simplicity: Despite the large budgets that many brands invest in the production of viral videos, many of the videos that achieve this effect are made by ordinary people with their smartphones in spontaneous moments. Getting your video to go viral can be simpler than you think.

• Reach your audience: It’s not enough to just upload a video on social media and wait for the phenomenon to happen. As Olenski says, “nothing goes viral on its own.” You must direct the message to your audience so they can share it. This can be done through paid social media ads, SEO, ads on the Google Display Network, or other techniques that can help you get your content to the right people. Just give it a little push.

#5 Ambient Marketing

This marketing technique consists of choosing a public space where there’s a large influx of people and transforming the space to transmit your advertising message through it. It’s about placing an ad in an unusual place where people would not normally see an ad. With this type of marketing, the idea is to provoke a reaction of surprise and curiosity in people.

For example, Kit Kat transformed a bench into a Kit Kat chocolate bar in a shopping center to attract people’s attention.

Also, IWC, a luxury watch brand, used this technique by incorporating custom designed handles on buses so users could see how the watches look on their wrists.

#6 Experiential Marketing

This tactic is about giving your target audience an experience instead of just sending a one-way message. In this way, your audience can interact with the product or service you offer and associate their emotional responses with your brand. According to a study carried out by Event Marketing Institute, 65 percent of the brands that use this tactic say it correlates positively with sales.

Although experiential marketing usually takes place in person like in sponsored events or commercial spaces, its impact is often reflected in the digital world since people often share these experiences on social media. According to an Event Marketer survey, 98 percent of consumers create or share social or digital content of sponsored events or experiences.

For example, the toothpaste brand Sensodyne wanted to launch one of its products in a memorable way. Together with the English agency Hotcow, they decided to launch an experience that lasted a whole day in a London park.

They built an installation with three differentiated zones. Zone 1 was called Sensitivity Zone and offered a 10-minute dental sensitivity test performed by professional dentists. Participants were eligible for prizes by participating in a game called “How sensitive are you?” which involved passing a metal ring through metal wires without touching them.

In Zone 2, a 13-foot-tall molar was installed to encourage visitors to take pictures with it and publish them on their social media profiles. Zone 3 was an attempt to achieve a Guinness Record by giving the world’s largest oral hygiene lesson. It involved 232 people who left with a wider knowledge of oral care.

Credit of the image: HotCow

The result was 150 mentions in the media, a reach of more than 4 million people, distribution of over 6,000 Sensodyne samples and the administration of 200 dental sensitivity tests. A strategy that without a doubt led to a successful campaign that significantly increased the visibility and recognition of the brand.

How to implement guerrilla marketing in your SME

According to a study by Capgemini, 82 percent of consumers always buy from a company who they are emotionally invested in and 81 percent of customers who are emotionally connected with a brand will share it with friends and family. Many of the tactics employed in guerrilla marketing seek to create this emotional connection.

While the best-known examples always appear to be large brands with large budgets, the reality and the philosophy of guerrilla marketing is that it’s not always necessary to invest a lot of money to get attention. Sometimes a small low-cost idea with a different perspective and a potential of medium-high success can bring great benefits to your SME. The essential ingredient here is creativity, not money.

Before getting down to work, it’s worth remembering these words from Levinson:

Did you like this article about Guerrilla Marketing? If you want to discover more marketing strategies, take a look at our 10 Creative Black Friday Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses and create the most prolific sales campaign of the year.

The post What is Guerrilla Marketing? appeared first on Kolau Blog.

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Did you know that more than a billion domestic animals live with families in the United States, Europe, Latin America and Japan? In countries such as the United States, they also account for as many pets as there are inhabitants (305 million vs 324 million) and the pet health, food, and wellness industries made over 56,000 million euro within the United States. Before we start talking about marketing for veterinary clinics, let’s see some interesting data.

The pet food companies are making the majority of these profits. In Europe, for example, pet food accounts for 50% of the total pet care costs (15,000 million euro) followed by accessories, services, and medicine. This industry is experiencing a sweet existence at the moment, as more and more pets are being treated as members of the household, having their needs attended to and taking up a larger piece of the family budget.

Starting a few years ago, the industry’s profits have been steadily increasing. In the United States, they have surpassed their previous rates. In 2010, the industry generated a profit of 36,504 million euro and reached 59,300 million euro in 2016. The Americans have also drastically increased their expenses. In Europe, the industry has also surpassed previous profit margins with a profit of 24,000 million euro in 2010 vs 30,000 million in 2015. In Latin America, the industry has grown from a profit of 3,879 million euro in 2011 to 8,966 million euro in 2016. These subindustries form part of the “animal universe” that covers veterinary clinics, specialized stores, the food manufacturers as well as food products, pharmaceuticals, and other proposals that are being developed to better serve these “pet enthusiasts.”

Veterinary clinics form an essential part of this entrepreneurial ecosystem. In the United States, they have reached a profit of around 33,000 million dollars (Statistical Data) and the desired trend is that this number will remain steadfast until 2020.

Without a doubt, attracting further clientele is vital for these centers so it’s important, as well, for these institutions to become conscious of the need to utilize marketing strategies for veterinary clinics that will attract newcomers and cause current clients who trust their business to come back in the future.

Marketing for Veterinary Clinics – 5 Strategies

#1 Marketing for Veterinary Clinics Strategy – First Check-up is Free

If what you want to do is attract those individuals who do not yet know of your professional domestic animal services, what better way to do so than to offer a free check-up. Perform a physical examination of the pet where the owner can see how his best friend is being treated, the equipment that you are using, the installations in place, the professionalism given by the vet and the accompanying staff, as well as the timeliness at the time of the appointment check-in, among other things.

It’s a very interesting strategy because, in the end, you are treating and caring for a very important part of a person’s life.

Owners consider their pets to be part of their households more and more and dedicate more time and resources to their wellbeing. This is one of three trends that causes the professionals at Milwaukee Career College to stand out. This specialized learning institution provides veterinary training. In a recent report, they stated, “market growth will be fuelled by an expanding pet population and changing attitudes that see owners treat their pets as companions or family members. Due to this new trend, the pet health market has fared the economic recession well, with owners reluctant to cut back on pet spending.”

Advanced Veterinary Care Centers (VCA), a renowned veterinary hospital chain, has been using this marketing strategy for years. Through their website, they invite all animal owners to request and take advantage of a totally free physical exam. To accomplish this, within the picture it can be seen that they have incorporated a registration form that can be easily filled out in order to receive the coupon for the medical exam.

#2 Marketing for Veterinary Clinics Strategy – Attentive Phone Assistance 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for Emergencies

The “humanization” that is being produced within the universe of dogs, cats, and other types of domesticated animals carries with it an important concern for their health and wellbeing. Because of this, within the last several years, veterinarians are providing 24-hour service for those accidents or incidents that can happen at any time outside of normal working hours for these businesses. If the competition is adding this in to add value to their company, how can you stay behind this trend?

For small and medium-sized businesses, this means having a special telephone line the owners of your patients can call when necessary. If you count on various professionals within your staff to work in shifts, as other sectors have done with excellent results, you can achieve your goals of providing exceptional healthcare to all of your patients. This resource is essential to reaching your target so that people can know you and rely on you. They will greatly value the peace of mind of having a vet they can call and that they trust in case of an emergency.

If you would like to know more details regarding how you can implement this idea within your business, we invite you to get to know the Pender Vet animal hospital in Virginia. Among its facilities, there is a special area for clients to receive care 24 hours a day from Monday through Sunday uninterrupted. They count on a special telephone line to attend to those demands that require special attention, and they are able to incorporate and maintain clientele on a long-term basis because of this.

#3 Marketing for Veterinary Clinics Strategy – In-Home Grooming Services for Pets

Along with point two, this is the other strategy that is being observed among clinics that attend to companion animals. It’s another plus for those looking for comfort and efficiency for taking care of the needs of their best friend. In this case, the investment will depend on the resources that the SME currently has; if the budget is tight, it’s enough to have a vehicle with a first-aid kit in order to attend the patient but if there are further economic resources available, there also exists the option to equip the vehicle with more equipment and medical materials. It’s recommended to advertise the business on the vehicle through the use of a logo, slogan, or the global corporate image for the business.

It’s easy to see how clinics all over the world are exploiting this strategy to their advantage. To understand further details regarding this, we recommend that you consult the website of the clinic who has specialized in this segment of the market, the one that specializes in in-home care, At Home Veterinary Care. Without a doubt, they are taking advantage of this niche in the veterinary world. Those that have older pets, those who find it difficult to transport their pet in secure conditions, and especially for concrete cases, such as euthanasia when these faithful companions lives are coming to an end benefit from and seek out these services the most. This can have an impact on veterinary rates but it’s important to take into account that the in-home services will be appreciated as this commodity makes it possible for owners to receive care for their animals within their own home.

#4 Marketing for Veterinary Clinics Strategy – Specialization: Treating a specific type of pet or focusing on certain treatments

Cats are the most common “furry friends” within homes all over the world, followed by dogs. In Europe, there are more than 99 million felines living with families and 85.9 million within the USA. This is ahead of canines which reach 81 million within the Old Continent and 77.8 among the American population. After these, there are birds, small mammals, fish, and reptiles.

Among these last groups, it’s important to distinguish the case of exotic animals, which are becoming more and more frequent among homes.

It’s interesting to study the district in which you have established your clinic or where you would like to place it. From the information that can be gathered relating to the existing types of pets and getting to know the competition that’s around, to becoming familiarized with the specialized subsections of the market, understanding your area is key.

D&B Hoovers, a database directory with information from more than 85 million companies, 100 million professionals, and 1,000 industrial segments, shows that within the “Veterinary Service Overview” that “specializing towards a particular type of animal or treatments and particular care can be very efficient business practices.”

There are many successful stories regarding animal specialization. From Stahl Exotic Animal Veterinary Services (SEAVS), located in Fairfax, Virginia, that is dedicated exclusively to caring for birds, small mammals, fish and reptiles, among other, to a complex in Long Island called Long Island Veterinary Specialists which contains a specific diagnostic section and provides this particular type of care for “companions.”

#5 Marketing for Veterinary Clinics Strategy – Social Media for Veterinarians

Sites such as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube contain a multitude of individuals that are enthusiastic about the animal world. Those that have pets at home are more likely to find help through these media outlets. It’s because of this that every veterinary clinic that wants to be where both their current and potential clients will be circulating needs to understand that those sites form a part of marketing strategies. Danielle K. Lambert (Snout School, Portland) is a social media specialist for hospitals and for animal care centers who has edited a very interesting guide: The Veterinary Social Media Survival Guide.

These are five of the most interesting tips to keep in mind in order to have an efficient and active social media presence:

• PINTEREST: Visual information is well-received by internet users. Within the guide that we referenced, it is encouraged to make photos and computer graphics that go viral and can generate a lot of interest among owners. Choose from things like the best parks that they can take their “furry friends” to, or advice regarding how to best care for their best friends. Even showing pictures of some of the canines and felines, among others, that regularly visit our facilities can draw interest.

• FACEBOOK: It’s important to have a fan page on this site. This is considered “quintessential” among these communication channels. We can post photos and videos of special “clients” with links to your business’ website. It’s essential to interact with the audience and to take advantage of this opportunity to answer any possible doubts, question, and concerns that may come up, as this can help to bring in more clients. Danielle distinguishes three types of posts that are better for engaging with customers: tell a true story regarding a patient’s experience, with text and images to make it more real and to be closer to the readers; ask a question regarding a topic, while including text or images that have audiovisual content; and celebrate. What should you celebrate, though? Well, dog day or cat day or animal day, in general,  can be celebrated. Special veterinary occasions, as well as the birthdays of pets that visit your clinic can be celebrated, too.

• TWITTER: Networking through microblogging can be truly interesting, but at Snout School they warn that time and effort must be dedicated in order to truly get the most out of it. You can share articles and information of interest to your followers and it can also serve as a means of communication through which you can address doubts or discuss the veterinary consults that clients would like to make. You will be able to provide services through tweets in accordance with the resources that you invest into this outlet.

• OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA SITES: Danielle K. Lambert points out that, while Google+ and LinkedIn don’t necessarily provide spaces of interest to small and medium-sized enterprises, it’s important to keep in mind that simply being on these sites will aid your efforts. It’s not about having an open profile on a certain social media site if it won’t be given the time and effort required to answer concerns, receive feedback, and further establish the company within the online world. With social media networking, it’s always important to value quality over quantity; it can be of more value to be within fewer online communities that you can more easily be involved in.

If you’d like to know more about social media strategies, you can also take a look at our previous post: 5 Social Media Strategies for Small Business in 2017. To finalize this point, we share with you one of the audiovisuals used by Snout School that can help you take off in this land of likes, shares, and comments.

We hope that these marketing ideas for veterinary clinics permit you to advance within your business. These are efficient formulas that have been proven by specialized clinics who provide care and attention to companion animals. As we mentioned at the start, there are now more and more homes with dogs, cats, and other types of mammals, reptiles, and birds, which means that this market will continue to grow, and there is plenty of room for the SME businesses within the sector to improve.

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SOURCES: Fediaf (European Pet Food Industry) American Pet Products Association (APPA), CEESA, Ministery of Agriculture in Spain, Pet Food Manufacturing Association (PFMA), International Euromonitor, and the El País Journal.

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During one of your recent searches, you may have noticed that the text ads, which used to appear to the right of the search results, are no longer there. Google has eliminated these ads, instead adding a fourth ad above the results for “highly commercial queries.”

You might think that because few searchers ever actually clicked on an ad on the upper right side, this does not make a difference. This is both true and false.

True​: Few searchers ever clicked on the ads on the right side of the results. To be precise, less than 15% of searchers clicked on an ad in 2015, as per our findings analyzing impression share of over 1,000 campaigns.

False​: This shift is, in fact, very important. It is a game­-changer and it turns the Ad Rank game for all advertisers in general and for small businesses in particular right on its head. Why? Extensions are now more critical than ever before. We are talking call, callout, review, sitelink and location extensions, which make up to 75% of the ad’s real estate. The AdWords campaigns that disregard these extensions will see a lower click rate and a lower quality score, which eventually will lead to a higher cost per click. Those who do the reverse and optimize the extensions will see more incoming web traffic from paid ads at a lower cost.

To put it simply, no extensions = no good.

All of the sudden, extensions became more than mere embellishment. Use them (extensions) or lose them (customers). That is the reality for a broad spectrum of advertisers, but especially for small businesses. Let us analyze how both groups can optimize these extensions to outclick their competition.

In order of importance:

Location Extension

In 2014, the marketing research company Ipsos surveyed over 4,000 consumers across nine vertical segments. The results suggested that 60% of mobile searches interacted with the location extensions. Taking into consideration that mobile searches now account for over 50% of all searches according to a recent statement made by Google, the location extension is non-­negotiable for small businesses. A Google My Business Account, which takes two minutes to set up, needs to be created for this extension to be shown.

According to Google, adding location extensions to a campaign has proven to grow the click through rate by 10%.

In summary, more people are looking for your business location extension. This extension increases the number of relevant clicks which will eventually lower your cost per click. A win-­win, isn’t it? Location extension ranks #1 for this very reason.

Call Extension

This extension displays the business phone number and (optionally) makes it clickable on mobile devices. Having evaluated over 1,000 campaigns, our finding is that call extensions can be a double-edged sword. However, if done right, the call extension is the second most important extension for small businesses. Here the tips to do them correctly:

● Decide how valuable calls are to your business​. If they are valuable, you can make the call extension show on mobile devices and pay when a searcher interacts with the call button by the ad. If they are not very valuable, or you simply can not be by the phone constantly during business hours, you can still use the call extension only in desktop which makes it non-clickable, and thus, free. It is always advisable to have the call extension running on desktop, at the very least.

● Do you really want a Google-­owned number?​ Google gives you the opportunity to use a Google-owned phone number so that you can track the length of your calls and have more granular analytics. This means that the phone number that appears on your ad is now a Google-owned phone number instead of your business phone number. The risk is that users can write this phone number down thinking that it is in fact your business phone number. After all, it shows by your ad, so it must be your business number, right? But what happens with this Google-owned number when you pause the campaign or you stop using AdWords altogether?

We asked Google and they told us that they will still forward the calls to your real business number for a time after you pause your campaign or remove it altogether, but would not offer specifics as to the length of this time. They told us that very few searchers write down the phone number or even store it anywhere, so the risk of losing leads that are calling a Google-owned number that no longer forwards to your real business number is slim at best.

The benefits of having the Google-owned phone number are more granular analytics, but since you can easily track the number of clicks that your call extension is receiving, we do not see a huge upside to using a Google-owned phone number. This an optional feature, and our advice is not to go for it. To keep your business number in the call extension will give you almost the same granularity when analyzing results and removes the uncertainty of what happens to the Google-owned number when you are no longer using AdWords.

● Tailor the message. ​If calls to your business are more valuable to you than clicks to your website, it is a good idea to adapt the ad message to entice searchers to call, such as “talk to a specialist today.”

Sitelinks

These are clickable extensions that show up underneath the main ad with links to pages of your website other than the homepage. According to Google, adding sitelinks boosts the average CTR on an ad by 10­20% (+20­50% when the search is one of your branded terms)

● You can add up to 6 sitelinks linking to the 6 most pertinent pages for any given campaign or adgroup. Only 4 will display in mobile, however.

● For the length, we have observed that the shorter the sitelink, the higher its click-through rate. Try to make each sitelink 10-­15 characters long. ­The limit is 25 characters.

● Add a description to the sitelinks. Now, adding a description is optional and will likely only show when your ad ranks #1. However, when it does, it increases the size of your ad real estate substantially.

Reviews

The Reviews extension does exactly what it sounds like – allows for the visibility of your business’ reviews as part of the ad. According to Google, review extensions can boost clickthrough rates by up to 10%. They don’t cost extra money because they are not clickable. These show in desktop only, not on mobile or tablet. If you don’t have a review coming from The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post, fear not. You can still use the review extension by adding your Better Business Bureau rating. The BBB has partnered with Google, so you are good to go as it’s been whitelisted as a credible third party source.

All extensions have policies attached to them, one being the number of characters allowed and the gimmicky use of symbols or any use of language that Google deems inappropriate. Review extensions are subject, however, to further scrutiny to certify the review is a tangible review and that is why they are the lengthiest extensions to get approved and start running. Make sure you get the points below exact to avoid the extension being rejected or the approval being delayed:

● Third party credible source – only: No user reviews or paid endorsements

● New(ish)​: Your review cannot be more than 12 months old. While we have seen some flexibility from Google in this regard, it is best to select a newer review if possible.

● Changing the wording: You are allowed to paraphrase the review, but you cannot alter the wording or modify the meaning. It is best practice not to paraphrase and include the review as is whenever possible, but since there is a 67 ­character limit for the review extension, you might need to paraphrase it. Just make sure you don’t add any fluff of your own, such as extra punctuation or exclamation marks.

Callout

These extensions are meant to highlight what makes your business different and distinctive. It is a very useful way to draw attention to its product details and benefits. Textbook examples are, for instance, if your business is open 24 hours, it offers free shipping, or if it allows for same-day appointments. Up to four can show with your ad and are limited to 25 characters each.

They are not clickable, so they are unrecompensed. According to Google, ads with the Callout extension have seen a 10% increase in CTR.

This what Hilton has to say about them:

“The use of callout extensions has meant we’ve been able to let our customers know how much more our hotels have to offer than just rooms. Spas, restaurants and meeting facilities are just a few of the attractive options our hotels have to offer, which may not be seen through a traditional revenue driving campaign. In just one month after implementing callout extensions, we’ve seen a 9% increase in conversion rate.” ­

— James Harrower, Senior Search Manager, Hilton Worldwide

To sum up, extensions are no longer merely decorative. They are instrumental to outclick the competition and are imperative for small businesses, whom many times compete with big budget advertisers for the same pool keywords.

Use them (extensions) or lose them (customers).

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