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The #1 Mistake Most Marketers Make When Running Paid Ads

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The #1 Mistake Most Marketers Make When Running Paid Ads

Your ability to track conversions is one of the most important foundational pieces of knowledge you can have in the world of paid advertising. 

Biggest Mistake Marketers Make With Paid Ads

The number one mistake we see marketers make across all advertising networks is incomplete or non-existent conversion tracking. Google and Facebook are the closest things to artificial intelligence that humanity has publicly accessible to us. They are trillion dollar machine learning mechanisms. Believe it or not, they’re working towards trying to accomplish your goal!

We want to make sure you have the principles that help you contend with any ad network regardless of what new ad networks pop up or what changes are made.

If all we do is teach you how to push the buttons and build the specific conversion actions inside of a certain ad network…that’s going to be antiquated information the second we publish this video.

Key Terms For Running Paid Traffic

Every landing page on your site should have a specific goal. What do you want each page to accomplish? This is true even if you’re not running paid ads.

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On most pages, you should have a primary call to action. The primary call to action is the thing you want your potential customers to do. It is your conversion action. So the primary call to action is the same as the conversion action.

From a content marketing perspective, the call to action is the thing you want your customers to do. From a paid traffic perspective, the conversion action is the way you track it. 

Example: 

Call to action: Sign up for a free action plan

Conversion action: Fill out the contact form

A transitional call to action requires a smaller commitment from your customer. If the primary call to action requires a lot of time or money from your customer, include a transitional call to action. I would add these to the more important pages in your sales funnel.

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A lead magnet is a great way to capture the lead and makes a solid transitional call to action. 

With a primary call to action and a transitional call to action on the page, you have the opportunity to capture the most traffic. And identifying those conversion actions helps tell the search engines what kind of traffic you want.

Examples Of Primary Conversion Actions

Different users engage in different ways. 

  • Some people want to chat. 
  • Some people want to call. 
  • Some people want to fill out a form. 
  • Some people love quizzes or surveys. 

Everyone will engage in different ways. It’s up to you to figure out what your target audience wants. It won’t always be just one thing, so offer a few different ways for people to take that next step.

Pro Tip

ALWAYS direct conversions to a custom thank you page. (More on that in just a moment…)

Form Submissions

If you don’t have forms on your site you should. These are one of my favorite ways to engage users because it allows you to capture the most information. But you have to be careful. Keep forms short in the beginning. Only ask for the absolute amount of information you need for them to convert.

Asking for the phone number keeps lead quality high. If you only ask for only the email address, you might end up chasing phantom leads. 

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According to HubSpot, every field you add to a contact form decreases the conversion rate by 11%. So start by running paid ads to a short form.

Also, avoid using captcha codes. They frustrate users. If you get lots of spam leads, add it. But wait until you have data to back up that decision.

If you’re using a CRM (Hint: you should be), use embedded CRM forms whenever possible. If you use integrations, they’re more likely to break.

Pro Tip

If you get an insane amount of leads that aren’t qualified, add form fields to the contact form to help qualify them.

Appointments

If your primary conversion action is a tour or demo, remember these three things:

1. Have consistent availability

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2. Meet your customer where they are

3. Have a very clear offer

If you don’t have availability, don’t offer a tour or demo. You should have at least two slots available every day if this is going to be your primary conversion action. This makes it easier to meet the customer’s needs. 

Also, when it comes to having a tour or demo, the offer should be very clear. Will the tour be virtual or in person? Is there something the customer must do before they show up? How long will it take? Do they need to be in front of a computer?

For appointments, you need to collect the phone number so you can follow-up. You also need the email address so you can send the confirmation email for them to add the event to their calendar.

Phone Calls

When you use a phone number on your website, it needs to be visible. We like to put it in the header, in the top right. That’s where most people go for contact information. But don’t use a button or an image, use text. The click to call button works great on mobile, but not desktop. And when you use an image, you can’t use call-tracking software.

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Why should you use call tracking software? When a call takes place, the software can tell you:

  • Where the call came from
  • Whether it was answered
  • How long the call lasted

And, it can record the call. With all that information, you can weed out the poor quality leads and define what a high-quality lead looks like.

Pro Tip

Use call tracking software to track, record, and score your calls. 

If you’re in the Saas or eCom space, you may not want to take phone calls. I get it. Not every business does. But in many cases, this puts you at a disadvantage.

When in doubt, check your competitors. If they’re taking phone calls, you should too.

Then, make sure you answer the phone. We had a client who didn’t answer 30% of the calls we generated for them! They kept wanting more traffic, but their entire sales process was broken. They didn’t need more traffic, they needed to pick up the phone!

When it comes to tracking conversions, make sure you only track quality calls as leads. If you’re using Google’s threshold rule for call tracking, but it doesn’t match how you score a quality lead, Google will get a false positive and start sending you MORE poor quality leads.

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Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are solid predictive indicators of intent. What is a lead magnet? A Lead Magnet is a nearly irresistible offer made in exchange for a customer’s email address and/or other valuable marketing information.

A lead magnet gives people who aren’t ready to convert an opportunity to engage with you. The point of the lead magnet is to build relationships and start conversations. So give massive value up front. Nothing is more frustrating than getting excited about a lead magnet, downloading it, and finding out that it sucks. 

Finally, make sure not to let the lead magnet outshine the core offer. I like to put them at the bottom of the page or have a pop-up.

How To Avoid Wasting Ad Money

The entire network of paid advertising platforms want you to win. How do you help them help you? How do you tell Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Facebook, etc. your goal?

Tell them what conversion event you want. If your strategy isn’t properly outlined or you’ve missed the technical implementation, then you’re sending these super smart, trillion dollar machines a false positive. What happens then? They fly off in the wrong direction with your ad money!

Your conversion strategy is critically important. The technical implementation of your conversion events is critically important.

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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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