Channel specifics growth skills, Growth Marketing minidegree review, part VIII
By: Damien Alexandre Mussard
Tags: Digital Marketing, Editorial Calendar, Linkedin Ads, PPC Marketing, Seo Tips

This is the eight articles reviewing my journey through the growth marketing minidegree from the CXL institute. This week we will be covering 3 new growth channels.

Without further ado, let’s get into it.

Maximizing audience for your PPC campaigns

By Michelle Morgan and Joe Martinez

The goal of this course is to improve our PPC returns by leveraging audiences across channels and in the search network. I am going to run you through the research part of understanding your target audience.

So, one of the most important things to do is to gather insight about your target audience. There are tools that you can use for that but before digging into these tools, there are other ways for you to begin. You can start by figuring out who is talking to the audience that you want to go after. You should know who is talking to that audience but also know who the decision maker is of saying who you should go after and talk to them. You can also look into your CRM. If you don’t have much data about your target audience yet, you can always create a persona. There are courses and articles on the CXL website explaining how to do an actionable customer persona.

Then, they are the tools. Of course, one of the most useful tools to use if you want to know your audience is Google analytics. You connect to google analytics and you click on Acquisition 🡪 All traffic 🡪 Referral. If there are other websites who are sending traffic to your own website and this traffic is already interacting with your landing pages or webpages, you’ll want to know which one of this referral traffic is important so that you can utilize it in display. Also, if the referral traffic coming to your website is already converting, you can create an audience from this referral traffic and use remarketing to utilize that traffic. Another possibility is to consider looking at it from a display standpoint, doing direct placement for your ads and trying to get in front of these new users. Or you can use it for basic awareness, if you know people coming from these websites are already converting, you want to get more of these users by getting your brand in front of them.

You can also look at the interest overview in the audience section. It is unlikely that you’ll want to reach an audience that loves going to the movies if you are not in the movie business but still, you could always create a movie looking ads that might resonate with them and get their attention. It sounds cheesy but it can work sometimes.

Now that you have a good idea of who your audience is, there is another interesting insight that you want to know about them: what they want. To answer this question, you can resort to site search. If you have a website, there is most certainly a search engine within your website which allows visitors to write what they are looking for, ON your website. This is a very interesting feature, because your visitors don’t know what is on your website, but based on the theme of your website or the industry you’re in, they are most likely going to search for stuff that they think you have. Search site is available below the behavior section of your Google analytics account. So, in order to know what our customers want, we must answer these three questions: what product categories are most important to our current site visitors, what is the user exactly looking for, and you can also potentially find the user’s voice to use them in your marketing asset. Then you can create an audience off of search terms and remarket to those users who searched the terms.

After Google analytics, you can also look into social tools to gather even more data. Facebook for instance, there is a section labelled Audience Insight where you can find data such as relationship status, categories and pages likes, and job titles which you can compare with Linkedin.

SEO driven editorial calendar

By Dan Shure

The goal of this course is to use keyword research and the right content types to build an SEO driven editorial calendar. I will explain to you how to brainstorm topics, which is the first step to create your calendar.

So how do we brainstorm topics to start building our editorial calendar? We start by looking for a seed term. And you should consider 2 criteria for this seed term: it must have a broad intent; it must be of high volume. And then you brainstorm from it. For example, if your seed term is productivity, you could brainstorm the word meeting, scheduling, tools, time management, etc…

Then you want to search for content competitor. A content competitor is a niche site within your industry which posts a lot of content like your own. You want to search for the content competitor related to your seed topic. Next thing you want to do is look at the domain authority of your website (Domain authority or DA is a search engine ranking score invented by MOZ, and you can use their website to know your DA or your competitor’s). Once you have that information, you can then start looking at your content competitor domain authority, and search for similar or lower domain authority. You want to find content that isn’t good, maybe content that is poorly written, outdated, or you can tell that it wasn’t written by an expert. You can even look for a competitor that has an overall terrible website. So if you find a competitor who fits one of several of these criteria, this usually means you have a shot at ranking higher than they do.

There are two tools that are going to be of great use to help you build your SEO driven editorial calendar : Keyword everywhere, which is a google chrome plug-in that I personally already use and it is excellent, we’ll get into it later. And there’s the Mozbar plug-in. Keywords everywhere will show you a lot of keyword volume data in Google. This plug-in tells you the keyword that people search for based on the keyword that you searched for in the google search engine. For example, you can search for SEO, and it will tell you what people are also looking for on google related to SEO. It will also get you the trending keyword, again related to SEO. And you’ll also get long tail keywords. The mozbar plug-in will get you some pretty interesting information as well, such as: domain authority of each ranking result.

Keyword everywhere tool

You can also use buzzsumo and enter your seed topic into their question analyzer tool, which crawls and aggregates topics from question-and-answer websites in forum, in relation of course to the seed topic terms that you entered. This will allow you to find more seed topics.

The next step is to create a spreadsheet where you enter your seed topic, the search volume, the saturation, the business value, and the expertise/knowledge, resources available. Then you have to do some research about your competitor’s content, by using tools such as buzzsumo, SEM rush, and gather data such as domain authority, content quality, site quality.

Do not forget that the seed topic must be turned into specific topic. For instance, productivity is too broad a topic but productivity tips is more specific. The criteria to consider to find specific topics are the following: relevance, domain authority, quality, site topical authenticity. You can use the previous spreadsheet to gather those data.

Linkedin advertising

By AJ Wilcox

As B2B marketers, we are faced with some challenges that we have to address. We have offline conversion event, which means when someone fills out a form online, they become a lead and then goes on to a sales rep who is going to communicate with them over email or phone or maybe even a fax machine. As you can imagine, this is hard to track with a pixel.

The second problem we are being faced with is a delayed sales cycle, which means a dollar spent today may generate a lead that won’t close for at least six, twelve, sixteen months. In my review of this course, I will explain some of the basics you need to know about Linkedin as a growth channel.

By the way, Linkedin isn’t the only option you have as a B2B marketer. There is also twitter but the targeting is weak. You also have Facebook, which is better than twitter, but the problem is the amount of people who put their company info into their personal profile is very low. These two are still relatively low cost.

As you know, Linkedin is a social media for professionals, so of course the targeting here is much more precise than Twitter and Facebook but the cost for the advertising is quite high. However, if you know how to make the most out of it, the ROI can be quite high as well. Linkedin is also great for something else, since it is more personal than email, most executives will pass the key to their email account to an admin but it happens less often with Linkedin. So, chances are that if you get a lead from a CEO on Linkedin, you will be talking to a CEO. Linkedin will also get you the largest deal you can get, where google ads will get you the deal faster.

The companies who are a good fit for linkedin advertising can be broken into three different categories. The first category is the kind of company who is doing lead gen and has a high lifetime value, at least above 15 K. Which means if you can get at least 15K from a product or service, then Linkedin is good for you. The second category is recruiting, if you are recruiting white collar talent, Linkedin is the go-to place. And then there’s higher education, if you are recruiting for a PHD or an MBA program, then you can also use Linkedin.

The success of your Linkedin advertising campaign can be determined by considering these three criterion:

Audience: is about who is going to be seeing your ads. As always, you want to really know who your target audience is before you start running any ads.

is about who is going to be seeing your ads. As always, you want to really know who your target audience is before you start running any ads. Message: is how people see the ads, you must work on your ad copy, figure out the type of ads you are using.

is how people see the ads, you must work on your ad copy, figure out the type of ads you are using. Offer: this is very important, if your offer doesn’t really resonate with your audience, then nobody will be clicking on your ads. For instance: “Here, talk to our high-pressure sales reps’ ‘ no one is going to have incentive to click on that.

As you probably guessed, Linkedin has several formats of ads that you can use to reach your target audience, such as text ads, sponsored content, sponsored inmail, lead generation form ads, that latest can be added on in sponsored content and sponsored inmail. You also have Linkedin video content, the cost of that kind of ads is much higher than the other type of ads, the bidding starts at six cents per 3 seconds view!

About the retargeting, there are quite a lot of option that you can choose if you want to target a specific audience:

Professional : you have job title, job function, seniority, skills, group.

: you have job title, job function, seniority, skills, group. Company: category/industry, company size, company name

category/industry, company size, company name Education: School name, degree/fiel of study

School name, degree/fiel of study Demographics: Gender, Age, Geographic

Gender, Age, Geographic Combination and exclusion: combination allows you to be more focused on the criteria of the audience that you want to target. Exclusion helps you exclude an audience based on a specific criterion. For instance, you don’t want your competitor to see your ads.

I hope you learned a thing or two and enjoyed the reading.

If you want to know more and really get into the details of these courses, I highly recommend to take the CXL course.

See you next week for the ninth article.

Correction by Corentin Guichard