The Internet revolution has changed everything about the way people observe and consume the information around them. With “Google It” as the automatic response for everything from solving a dinner party debate to self-diagnosing an illness, people are more empowered than ever to get the information they want, exactly when they want it.

Consumers are incredibly informed, armed with peer testimonials, articles, and public reviews. Outbound marketing just isn’t cutting it anymore. Inbound marketing has taken its place, and for good reason. Here are just a few examples of why inbound strategies are better for business, providing substantial, measurable ROI for marketers.

Inbound Marketing Versus Outbound Marketing

First, let’s define the key differences between outbound and inbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing

This holistic marketing strategy is designed to earn (not buy) the customer’s attention. Rather than broadcasting your message aloud to the public, inbound marketing is all about slowly and steadily bringing people to you through quality content. Some of the most effective inbound tactics include:

• Blogs
• Podcasts
• Videos
• White papers
• Social media
• Webinars
• Landing pages
• Search engine optimization (SEO)

By providing value-added content that remains accessible for a long period, brands can earn people’s attention and, ultimately, their loyalty. Better yet, because this opt-in environment often takes place on digital platforms where user interactions can be tracked and measured, the ROI of inbound marketing is much easier to calculate than outbound.

Outbound Marketing

On the other hand, outbound centers on buying advertising space on TV, radio, direct mail, newspapers, billboards, banner ads, and event sponsorships to reach large groups of people who may find the content appealing. This approach typically catches the customer off guard because the ads intrusively present themselves when the consumer is doing something else.

Due to the inability to accurately track how many people saw the content, the ROI of this approach is difficult to measure. Without straightforward data, marketers are typically forced to make assumptions about the impact the advertising has on consumer purchasing decisions.

How to Calculate the ROI of Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing can be a game-changer for your business, but how do you know if it’s worth the investment?

First things first, let’s define ROI. ROI stands for return on investment and is a metric used to calculate the profitability of an investment relative to its cost. In the case of inbound marketing, ROI measures the effectiveness of your efforts in generating leads, converting customers, and ultimately driving revenue.

To calculate the ROI of inbound marketing, you’ll need to crunch some numbers. Here’s a simple step-by-step process to get you started:

1. Set clear goals. Before diving into calculations, identify your objectives. Whether it’s increasing website traffic, boosting lead generation, or improving sales, having specific goals will guide your analysis.
2. Track costs. Determine all the costs associated with your inbound marketing campaign. This includes expenses for content creation, social media management, email marketing tools, and any other resources you use.
3. Monitor metrics. Keep a close eye on relevant metrics such as website visits, conversion rates, email open rates, and social media engagement. These metrics provide insights into the effectiveness of your inbound strategies.
4. Calculate revenue generated. This includes all the revenue that can be attributed to your inbound marketing efforts. Think sales from leads generated through your blog posts, social media campaigns, or email newsletters. It can also help to assign a monetary value to each conversion, depending on the specific inbound tactic used.
5. Compute ROI. Once you have the numbers, it’s time to calculate. Subtract the total costs from the total revenue generated, then divide that number by the total costs and multiply by 100 to get your ROI percentage.

Here’s the formula: ROI = ((Revenue – Cost) / Cost) x 100.

If your ROI is positive, that’s a good sign! Your inbound marketing efforts are profitable. If it’s negative, take the opportunity to analyze what’s not working and make adjustments accordingly.

Remember, calculating the ROI of inbound marketing isn’t a one-time thing. It’s an ongoing process that requires continuous monitoring and adaptation. Approach inbound marketing as a marathon, not a sprint. Be patient and stay focused on providing value to your audience.

Why Inbound Marketing Wins

As consumer experiences become increasingly personalized and curated, the argument for inbound marketing grows stronger by the day. Here are three reasons why it’s such an effective approach in modern marketing.

1. It Strengthens Brand Messaging

In the digital era, quickly telling people what they want or need is no longer effective. A much stronger approach is to carefully craft a message that speaks directly to the consumer, sparking intrigue so that they pay attention by choice and not coincidence or chance.

Instead of having only 30 seconds to share your message, inbound marketing tactics focus on creating quality, long-form content that people can consume at their convenience. This allows you to dive deeper into your brand’s story, showcasing its values, mission, and unique selling points.

Whether it’s through engaging blog posts, informative videos, or fun podcasts, inbound marketing offers a richer experience to potential customers. It’s like having a never-ending conversation with your audience, where every interaction reinforces your brand’s message and builds lasting relationships.

2. It’s Measurable

Another great advantage of inbound marketing is that every action can be tracked, measured, and analyzed. This real-time data enables marketers to assess the current environment, keep a watchful eye on competitors, and determine whether or not target audiences are responding to their efforts.

Today’s marketers have an arsenal of tools to measure every click, scroll, and conversion. Website analytics platforms like Google Analytics let you observe the behavior of visitors on your website, from how long they stay to the actions they take. Email analytics services such as Mailchimp provide insights into open rates, click-through rates, and subscriber behavior.

Of course, we can’t forget about social analytics. Platforms like Rival IQ offer valuable insights into your social media performance. With our comprehensive dashboard of data, you can analyze which posts sparked the most engagement, see how your performance stacks up against competitors, and fine-tune your social strategy for maximum impact.

With these tools at your disposal, every piece of content you create becomes a valuable data point. Whether it’s a social media post, blog, podcast, or another digital outlet, you can dissect and drill down into exactly what works and what doesn’t.

Start analyzing your social media with a free Rival IQ trial.

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3. It’s Actionable

Finally, one of the most valuable aspects of inbound marketing is its actionable data, which reveals customer behaviors that you can carefully monitor to better understand the customer psyche.

When someone lands on your website, what do they do first? Do they click on the CTA button you want them to notice, or do they bypass it altogether? Do you see a surge of clicks to your “About Me” section? If so, that may indicate there isn’t enough descriptive information on your homepage. Continuously tracking actions prompted by your inbound efforts provides you with a wealth of information and insights.

This actionable approach sets inbound marketing apart from its outbound counterpart. Unlike outbound tactics, where marketers essentially put content into the world and hope for the best, inbound marketing allows teams to make real-time changes based on audience feedback and changing trends. Digital platforms enable quick thinking and adaptability — if something isn’t working, you can quickly tweak your approach.

Wrapping It Up

In today’s world, the ability to listen and swiftly respond to consumer signals sets smart inbound marketers apart from the pack. Do these examples align with your experience? Have you found inbound marketing to be measurable and actionable, delivering high ROI for your brand? We’d love to know — please tell us about your experiences in the comments.

This post was originally published in 2016 and has since been updated.

The post What is the ROI of Inbound Marketing? appeared first on Rival IQ.

Thanks to Facebook’s powerful targeting capabilities, marketers can instantly reach current and prospective customers. From basic demographics to specific interests, there are endless possibilities to connect with the audiences that matter most to your brand.

The question becomes, who are you targeting, and what’s the rationale behind it? Here are a few tips to keep in mind when developing an effective Facebook advertising strategy.

Set Goals For Your Facebook Ads Campaigns

Before you dive into the deep end, it’s important to define your Facebook advertising goals and ensure they align with your overarching business goals.

Even if you create the best ad in the world, it won’t do you any good if you don’t serve it to the right people. The campaign purpose you select will dictate your targeting approach.

For instance, if you want to increase likes and brand awareness, you may want to cast a wide net using targeting criteria, such as location, age range, and gender. On the other hand, a more precise purpose, like increasing membership registration, often requires targeting a tighter, niche audience to generate more valuable leads. Narrowing criteria may include tactics like zip code targeting, interests, and users who follow particular groups.

Luckily, Facebook Ads Manager makes this easy for you. The platform caters to six different objectives for your campaign, which you can easily choose right at the start of your ad creation process.

Define Your Core Audience

Before you can begin targeting, though, you need to first define your ideal customer.

Start by asking yourself: who are the people I’m trying to attract to my brand? Using basic demographics, like age range, gender, race, geographic location, income level, education level, economic status, interests, and more, begin shaping the profile(s) of your target audience.

Create Persona Profiles

Then, use basic demographics to construct a more specific persona profile. For the purposes of this guide, let’s create two hypothetical profiles: one for a fictional company and one for their ideal target customer, or persona.

Company Profile

Brand: “The Future is Fitness”
Fictional Company: “The Future is Fitness,” a women’s only gym in Portland, Oregon that primarily teaches body resistance training and yoga.
Profile: The gym prides itself on being environmentally conscious and hires trainers with exclusive credentials, resulting in a steep monthly price tag.
Goal: Double membership in the first quarter
Advertising Strategy: Locate adult females in the greater Portland metro area looking to lose weight and tone their bodies. Encourage them to sign up for a trial membership.

Persona Profile

Target Customer: “Jane”
Basics: Jane, aged 45, is a single mother of two (one in middle school, one in high school).
Profile: When she has free time outside of her desk job as a software engineer, she loves to contribute to her community garden, go on local hikes, volunteer at the schools, cook new recipes, and gather with girlfriends for wine night or book club.

Why Jane? Jane’s profession suggests she may have the right income to justify a monthly gym membership expense. Her hobbies indicate she is social and enjoys a balanced lifestyle, open to physical activity as well as enjoying food and drink. These are qualities that may make a women’s only gym appealing to Jane. Advertising content encouraging a free trial in her area that aligns with her interests may inspire her to click and sign up.

Jane’s persona may seem oddly specific, but profile development is a best practice many successful brands use. While not every target customer will exactly match “Jane,” this exercise helps marketers think about a living, breathing person on the other end of the ad, rather than just a list of qualities. Persona profiles help steer companies like “TFF” in the right direction to target people who align with the brand’s values and indicate high revenue potential for the brand. Don’t forget that you can create more than one persona profile if appropriate for your target demographic.

Take A Detailed Targeting Approach

Facebook has the most sophisticated targeting tools on the market. It’s a great place to discover and reach new audiences with your message. Keep your “Jane” persona in mind as you experiment with interest-based targeting.

Start by putting yourself in Jane’s shoes. Think about all of the specifics we created in her profile, and consider what she might talk about or “like” while using Facebook. Self-reported data, such as Jane identifying as a woman in her profile, and the content of her status updates and comments all contribute to Facebook’s interest data about Jane.

Just because she may want to get physically fit doesn’t mean Jane will actively talk about it online with family and friends. This missing data point means that she wouldn’t likely be shown TFF’s ads if they only targeted women in Portland who are interested in weight loss. However, if you creatively think about the other topics she may be writing about or subscribing to on Facebook, like raising children or gardening, TFF may be able to serve her the ad if they target women in Portland with similar interests to hers.

Use Personas to Set Up Your Facebook Campaigns

With your target persona(s) in mind, it’s time to create your audience in Meta Ads Manager. Start with the basic demographic information, such as location, age, and gender of your persona. Facebook recommends starting with those broad details to ensure your audience size is large enough — between two and 10 million people — for optimal results.

From there, you can get more detailed about the traits you want your audience to have. This could be anything from their interests and occupation to their education level and relationship status. Use your persona to guide you but also be sure to keep an eye on Facebook’s audience meter. This will let you know whether your audience is too narrow, too broad, or just right.

Don’t hesitate to create multiple audiences and campaigns. This strategy may seem like a long stretch at first, but by keeping tabs on which audience segments are responding to your ads, you can adjust ad spend and shut off underperforming audience segments. After you list out the demographic information for your target audience (location, gender, age, language), try creating different Facebook audience segments based on interests.

As an example, for Jane’s persona, try creating an ad set that targets each of the persona’s interests:

1. Gardening
2. Volunteering and/or Community Issues
3. Wine

By creating an ad set for each of these interests, you can learn if gardeners are more expensive to target, more or less engaged, or more likely to convert than wine enthusiasts and volunteers. It allows you to adjust how you’re targeting gardeners to get a better response or turn off that segment of the campaign altogether.

When you use one target audience that includes all three interest groups, over time Facebook’s algorithm will figure out which segments are most likely to achieve your objective (you set the objective when you create an ad) and only show your ad to that group. Facebook will ‘optimize out’ some of your interest groups and assigned demographics. Optimization is ideal for conversion, but it doesn’t allow you to learn if a segment, or interest group, say, gardeners, is a segment of the market you should focus your advertising on. Since this optimization is working behind the curtain, it prevents you from making critical testing decisions, like testing new ads to increase the engagement of gardeners or cutting them out altogether.

Create Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences

In addition to being able to refine your audience by demographics, location, and interest, Facebook also offers two additional targeting features that take your current leads or customers into account: Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences.

With Custom Audiences, you can reconnect and engage with those who have previously shown interest in your business. This is done by connecting or uploading a specific data source to find that existing audience on Facebook, allowing you to target and show ads to:

• Website visitors
• App users
• Users on your customer list
• Users who have engaged with your profiles and content

This feature is incredibly powerful for nurturing leads and building loyalty. By engaging with your existing customers or visitors on their preferred social media platforms, you not only strengthen your brand’s presence but also uncover opportunities to increase order frequency, improve customer lifetime value, and inspire greater loyalty.

Once you’ve got a solid Custom Audience strategy down, try creating a Lookalike Audience. This is a feature in which Facebook analyzes your Custom Audience to create a new audience that resembles those Facebook users who have already shown an interest in your business. This process takes six to 24 hours, with the Lookalike Audience refreshing every three to seven days to keep up with any changes to your custom audience.

Craft Content for Your Target Customer

Deeply developed persona profiles help you create content that resonates with your target demographic. There are plenty of advertising mistakes that beginners make and missing the mark on content is a big one.

As you write copy and develop visuals for your target audience, create content that speaks directly to Jane (and others just like her). For example, if TFF targeted Jane by sending the ad to women who love hiking, smart ad content may mention getting fit in the gym to prepare for a challenging local hike. Critical thinking about creating a message for ‘Jane’ will make the content more relevant and increase the chance that she’ll engage with TFF.

For instance, while the two brands below both sell workout equipment, their ad copy and visuals are different. Clearly, their target audiences differ, as well, with Aviron focusing on people who struggle with staying engaged with their workouts and NordicTrack targeting those who value unique and personalized experiences.

As always, testing ad variations and optimizing the top-performing one for each character profile is the most effective method to get the biggest bang for your buck. Don’t be afraid to try different creative, images, and targeting to see which combinations perform best. A comprehensive approach and A/B testing help you determine which combinations people respond to best and produce results.

Improve Results With Ad Relevance Diagnostics

If you want to improve underperforming ads, reviewing Facebook’s ad relevance diagnostics can be a big help. The idea here is that the more relevant an ad’s content is to its audience, the better it will perform. By reviewing your ad relevance diagnostics, you can determine whether a poorly performing ad can be improved by adjusting the quality of the creative, the post-click experience, or your audience targeting.

With this diagnostic, Facebook reports your performance in three areas:

• Quality ranking
• Engagement rate ranking
• Conversion rate ranking

So, for instance, your ad might receive an average or above average score in quality and conversion rate ranking, but below average in engagement rate. According to Facebook’s nifty chart for interpreting these results, this would mean that the ad isn’t generating interest. Their recommendation for better results? To improve the ad’s relevance to your audience or by targeting an audience that would be more receptive to your ad.

All in all, don’t get discouraged if you’re not meeting your advertising objectives. Using Facebook ad targeting and diagnostics features is a great way to create targeted ads that appeal to your audience personas and optimize your campaigns to get the results you want.

Have you created a target audience persona profile for your ideal customer(s) and had great success with Facebook ads? Or, has a company ever effectively targeted you as a customer? We’d love it if you shared your experiences in the comments.

This post was originally published in 2017 and has since been updated.

The post Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Ads Targeting appeared first on Rival IQ.

This spring, resolve to optimize your content to boost your SEO ranking and drive better and more qualified leads to your website. Here’s how.

Don’t Treat SEO as an Afterthought!

Too many marketers have a backwards approach to SEO. Instead of developing a strategy and implementing it from the beginning of the writing process, they write first and then cram in the “right” keywords later.

Consumers discover new brands by searching for answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. However, the language we use to describe our brand offerings often differs from how our target audience seeks answers online.

To resolve this disconnect, take these initial steps in order to create content that matches their search criteria:

1. Define the needs and wants of your audience. Consider what you bring to the table, and how it addresses what people need. Then, break down why they need this help in order to create likely search scenarios (which leads us to number two…).
2. Predict the keywords and phrases they may use in their search.

For this example exercise, pretend you’re a baker operating out of an adorable shop in downtown Austin, Texas. You specialize in all sorts of baked goods, but you’ve received feedback that your cupcakes are what people are writing home about. Take these insights about your business to come up with categories of likely search terms and corresponding search queries.

Here is an example of how you can organize this breakdown:

• • Upcoming Event: Whether it’s a birthday party, wedding or corporate gathering, party planners take to the Internet to search for the best dessert options in town.
    • Possible queries might include:
      • “Independent bakery in Austin, Texas”
      • “Affordable cupcakes”
      • “Custom cupcakes”
      • “Best party dessert in ATX”

• • Craving: When a craving strikes, it’s generally a race to find the tastiest treat in the shortest amount of time.
    • Possible queries might include:
      • “Cupcakes near me”
      • “Best cupcakes in Austin, Texas”
      • “Local dessert options Austin”

• • Education: Sometimes someone is just looking for a good old fashioned DIY tutorial. Whether you supply recipes or tips on your blog, or want to remind them you can take the hard work off their hands, there are several ways to use education to lure researchers to your website.
    • Possible queries might include:
      • “How to decorate with frosting”
      • “Best recipe for homemade cupcakes”
      • “Cupcake recipe”

Once you define what your potential customers are looking for and how they are looking for it, you can design a relevant content strategy that meets their needs.

Amp Up Your Pinterest Game

It’s a common misconception that Pinterest is just another social network like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the other usual suspects. However, Pinterest is much more commonly used as a vehicle for search. As such, take an active approach to pinning images from your website and blog that will guide users your way.

As blogger Jenna Kutcher recently shared, the biggest differentiator between Pinterest and traditional search engines like Google is it is an organic discovery platform. Think about it: when you Google, you have to take the first step to type in a search query, which assumes you have to start with a specific intention or goal in mind. While Pinterest users may know what they’re looking for before starting to scroll and pin, they often mindlessly browse and stumble upon ideas they didn’t necessarily expect to find. Casual browsers are lured by visual cues and engaging captions to discover ideas, products, and services they may find useful.

To this end, make sure every piece of content on your website includes a dynamic visual you can pin to your boards and share with prospective audiences. Best of all, because 80% of pins are repins, once a few people start saving your image, their followers, and their followers’ followers will likely follow suit.

Incorporate Long Form Content

While the goal of your website is to create a concise, polished presence to introduce your brand to the world, long form content (1,000+ words) actually tends to rank best in organic search results. One way to incorporate these pieces into your website without sacrificing homepage brevity is to carve out a section of your website for a blog.

Whether you are the sole writer or one of many contributors, having a designated area for helpful ideas, recommendations, tutorials, and more is a great way to increase SEO exposure. Our favorite blogs feature clear writing, varied topics, and always align with the voice of the brands they represent.

Backlinks to relevant content on your website maximize exposure for the helpful content you’ve already created. Similarly, be sure to credit outside sources when referencing external material–you never know who will help amplify the reach of your post. Lastly, no matter what kind of content you provide, always include a call to action or a question to increase engagement and encourage visitors to follow through.

These simple changes will help take your SEO from good to great. When you’re ready to measure the success of your SEO game, check out this on-demand training webinar from Rival IQ co-founder Seth Bridges.

What’s the most effective change you’ve made to optimize your SEO lately? We want to hear about it on Facebook!

The post Spring Cleaning Series: Optimize SEO to Boost Your Website Traffic appeared first on Rival IQ.

Part of our goal of empowering marketers to take full advantage of your social media analytics means inviting you to go beyond our software. We created the Rival IQ API to play nicely with a wide variety of apps, like Google Analytics, Tableau, Google Data Studio, and tons of others. Read on to learn more about how to put your Rival IQ API to work.

First of all: what is an API?

API stands for application programming interface. Clear as mud, right? APIs help applications (like Facebook and iCal, or Google and Rival IQ) talk to each other on the back end without the user having to leave the application they’re currently working in. Each application stores its information on servers, and APIs are the messengers that run between those servers. These messengers allow a wide variety of different software applications and platforms to seamlessly communicate.

For example, if you’re on the hunt for a cheap flight on Kayak, you’d select your destination and dates and hit search. Kayak connects to APIs from its airline partners to search each airline’s available flights using your parameters, and brings that information back to you without you ever having to leave its site. Without API integration, you’d have to search each airline’s website separately for information (and a healthy dose of frustration).

A few of our favorite uses of the Rival IQ API

1. Google Data Studio

Our new integration with Google Data Studio means you can pull data out of Rival IQ and into Google Data Studio with an easy one-time set-up. With this integration, you can create custom reports that feature your Rival IQ social data alongside, say, information about your open rates in MailChimp or keywords in Google AdWords. For step-by-step instructions on using the Rival IQ API in Google Data Studio, check out this article in our Help Center.

We used the Rival IQ/Google Data Studio integration to map company performance and cross-channel engagement of top car companies in this interactive report:

2. Live-updating Google Sheets

Do you need to access the same stats in a spreadsheet day after day or week after week? Look no further than the ImportData function in Google Sheets, which can pull live social media analytics information out of Rival IQ and into your preferred spreadsheet. Importing this data into Google also gives you options when it comes to data visualization–you can use the built-in charting in Google Sheets, or take full advantage of Google Data Studio.

3. Custom dashboards

Many of our customers build custom dashboards in applications like Geckoboard or Klipfolio to keep a close eye on the metrics that matter most to them. For example, one healthcare customer uses our API to integrate social metrics into their existing Klipfolio dashboards to help them access and present their data consistently. Using the Rival IQ API, this customer can figure out what’s working well on their social channels and where they can improve, without having to manually connect the applications each time they want to access that information.

How do you use Rival IQ’s API?

Check out the Rival IQ API Overview and API Reference documents. For step-by-step instructions on locating the Rival IQ API and your landscape ID, check out this article in our Help Center.

Who has access to our API?

Engage Pro customers have full access to our API, and can start using it right away.

If you’re a Drive or Engage customer interested in API access, contact our support team via The Help Center or email.

Are you using Rival IQ’s API in an amazing way? We want to hear about it!

The post Making the Rival IQ API Work for You appeared first on Rival IQ.

The traditional advertising method is becoming obsolete. Why? Apart from the classic and well-known ad blocking tools, consumers tend to have a feeling of rejection towards this type of ad. Think about the last time some annoying pop-up showed up on your screen or the last time a shiny banner with “120% OFF!” distracted you for a moment. What was it like? It wasn’t a very pleasant experience, was it?

What Does Native Advertising Really Mean?

First, let’s make sure we are on the same page regarding native advertising.

According to Cynthia Clark, Advertising Specialist for Aussie writings, “Native advertising is the stimulating and inconspicuous method of advertising. It blends in beautifully with web content. Lots of companies tend to focus on this type of advertising, rather than focusing on classic advertising methods.”

What are the key characteristics of Native Advertising?

• It blends in with the authentic content of the site/blog/publication
• It’s meant to advertise a product or a company in a nonpromotional way
• It’s friendlier than classic advertising
• Most consumers don’t even realize it’s an ad
• Consumers tend to interpret it as advice or a suggestion, rather than an ad
• Tries to offer value to the customer, rather than just sell a product

Are Brands Using Native Advertising?

As one of the most effective advertising methods on social media, native advertising allows your brand to get in front of an audience who is averse to explicit advertising. Leading brands across industries understand this and have begun testing new ways to make their ads feel more like a native post.

Here are a few examples of industry-leading brands adopting native advertising on social.

Booking.com & Microsoft Store

Here is a look at MSN’s news feed. You can see all the news articles published by some popular publications: The Telegraph, Reader’s Digest, The Independent, ETOnline, etc.

You might not identify them at first, but there are two ads in this feed. Can you find them? It’s kind of hard, isn’t it? That’s what native advertising is all about, blending in “with the locals.”

In the top left corner of the screen, you can see the Booking ad presenting the Alpine Balance Hotel, that’s one of them. On the right-hand side, right below the UKX, MCX, and AXX quotations, is the Windows Store ad. The only way you can tell they are ads is the Sponsored tag right next to the title.

Taco Bell

Taco Bell’s Cinco de Mayo Snapchat Ad is one of the most successful native ad campaigns so far. I think we are all accustomed to Snapchat and it’s funny lenses, right? We’ve all used one of those, at least once or twice. Taco Bell marketers recognized the popularity of Snapchat’s funny lenses and advertised themselves in the process.

In 2016, at the beginning of May, they’ve launched the funny lens you can see just above. They launched it during the Cinco de Mayo Holiday. It was a hit! According to Adweek, it generated 224 million views in one day.

Netflix’s Narcos

Launched in 2015, the Narcos TV series is a chronicle look at drug lord Pablo Escobar’s life and the legacy he’s left behind. To promote their show, Netflix decided to create an interactive app for Wall Street Journal’s readers.

On their website, they had articles on the history of the international drug trade and its personalities, a map of the main routes, and even a quiz. All these were meant to advertise the Narcos TV series natively.

Why These Campaigns Were Successful

The Perception of Authenticity

The Booking and Microsoft ads were meant to blend in with the rest of the news article. They wanted to make readers believe that their ads are news. By making their ad look and feel like a news article and placing it amongst similar content, it naturally fits in with surrounding news stories. It felt more authentic and trustworthy. Intelligent placement in front of the right audience can help your content reach wider, more relevant audiences.

Jump on the Trend Wagon

Unlike the first two ads, Taco Bell’s Snapchat Lens was innovative in that it jumped on the curtails of Snapchat’s trending features. Apart from the fact that it advertised their company, it generated a lot of buzz because it was fun, interactive and easy to share. The Snapchat users loved the new content. A proof of this fact would be the 224 million views it generated during the first day. This is native advertising with a dash of humor and fun.

Deliver Value in an Engaging Way

Last, but not least, Netflix’s Narcos ad was meant to be interesting and informative. It tried to attract Wall Street Journal’s readers by offering them information regarding the main subject of their TV series. All this was done in a very encyclopedic and interactive way. Two thumbs up for appealing to your target audience!

Native advertising started gaining lots of traction in the past few years. Small and big companies, alike, have begun leveraging this type of advertising. It’s meant to entertain and inform their customers, all this while advertising themselves.

This trend is here to stay because, as the majority of companies, is consumer-centric. It focuses on the customer’s needs and well-being first, rather than focusing solely on the product or company it advertised.

The post How the Most Successful Brands Are Using Native Advertising appeared first on Rival IQ.

Every day, reviews about products and services come pouring in across the web. Depending on the content, user accounts of your brand can either help or hurt the company. Worst of all, differing opinions found on results pages are more confusing than anything else for readers. When multiple reviews contradict one other, users begin to question who they should trust.

For today’s marketers, forming relationships with online influencers is one approach to help influence public opinion. By working directly with your brand, bloggers and personalities can share messages about your products and services through a social media megaphone, broadcasting to followers who will listen. By following these initial steps to propose partnership opportunities, you can steadily shift public opinion of your brand.

Step 1: Earn it

If the right person recommends your brand, you will immediately see the results. You may experience copious reviews from consumers and media, or a boost in traffic to your website, an increase in social media followers, possibly even a bump in sales. Before asking someone to do this, you must demonstrate that working with your brand is worth the time.

1. Put your best foot forward. Now is the time to make sure your social media profiles and website are scrubbed and updated, reflecting the right messaging and calls to action you want new users to see. At this point, you should be regularly sharing dynamic and compelling content, thoughtfully engaging with your audience, and leveraging social media advertising to acquire as many followers as possible.
2. Business before marketing. Before promoting your product or service, be entirely sure that you’re operating at your highest level. Work out any bugs in your system, address customer service concerns, and continue to deliver your very best. Remember: you should always encourage that people write about your brand honestly. Honesty in reviews and recommendations is a value that applies whether or not you’re providing compensation to your influencers.

Step 2: Make an outreach list

Online influencers do not necessarily have to make top lists to influence the right people. Microinfluencers, or users with roughly 100K followers, may be more willing to build a relationship with you as they’re growing their own brand. These influencers are also looking for a mutually beneficial relationship so keep microinfluencers in mind when you’re creating your target list. Also, consider looking in the following places:

• Your employees: while they may not have a significant following, employees do have a passion for the brand and can advocate on it’s behalf to their family and friends who trust their recommendations.
• Your customers: if you offer a service or class, evaluate the social dynamics of your clients. Look closely for natural leaders who frequent your place of business and sway others in person.
• Your topics: visit local discussion boards and forums that discuss topics that pertain to your industry. Identify trends about what people want and are looking for, and look for regular contributors who have already earned respect amongst the group.

GroupHigh has several methods and strategies to in mind as you evaluate if someone can bring value to your business.

Step 3: Lead with a plan

Stephen Covey, the author of “7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” famously coined the phrase “Begin with the End in Mind.” Adopting this practice encourages people to begin each day, task, or project with a clear vision of the desired outcome, and then proactively seize opportunities as they come along to make things happen.

It may seem appealing to start retweeting an influencer’s content, or worse – randomly contact them directly, but you’ll ensure a better outcome by starting with a solid end objective.

Become intimately familiar with everything they present online. Some may call it “stalking,” but I prefer to call it “thorough.” You have to know what makes your influencers tick so you can figure out the best message to use when you reach out to them. Study their online behaviors to get a good idea of who they are, what they like, and how they’ll respond to your brand. Always keep your overarching marketing goals top of mind when brainstorming how interacting with them will help you meet your bottom line.

Step 4: Build trust and get a response

It can be tricky to get influencers, who have thousands and maybe millions of followers, to actually pay attention to your brand. However, creating content designed to grab their attention can be the start of a new relationship.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that many people are quick to retweet or like flattering content. With this in mind, consider doing the following:

• Shareable graphic: Search an influencer’s blog or website for a powerful statement. Add the quote to a graphic featuring their photo, and then share the image and tag them to provide credit.
• Write a blog post: pick a relevant topic and contact your potential influencer for a quote to publish with it. Even if they don’t reply, publish the blog anyway and be sure to tag them. If the content is compelling, it will earn people’s attention and possibly an acknowledgment from the influencer in the form of a comment, share, or like. If they share it, you’re off to a great start in building a relationship and maximizing content promotion.

If your brand is less recognizable, this process might take a longer than you hope. Count small wins along the way to track whether or not you’re moving the needle forward. Small wins include tracking social engagement such as likes or shares of your content. If they take the time to respond to you, it’s a step in the right direction. It may only be a matter of time before they’re willing to entertain a more formal business conversation.

Oh, and – remember what I said about stalking? Be persistent, but not annoying or clingy. It’s a balance. If you come on too strong, you may lose opportunities before they even begin. Pay attention to how your efforts are received and adjust accordingly.

Step 5: Create mutually beneficial requests

There are countless ways you can approach working with influencers. One creative stunt includes activations like this one by Dan Fleyshman: “My agency planned a stunt with social media rock star Jake Paul, where he would vlog on YouTube his experience of carrying an 8-foot teddy bear named @BrodieDaBear through LAX airport. We went as far as buying the bear a seat! It ended up getting international coverage on social media and transcended onto CNN and the morning news shows.”

Don’t hold back, the more creative, the better. The sky is truly the limit.

Ideas include

1. Offer compensation in exchange for a blog post or social media mention (note: they will have to disclose that this type of content is sponsored).
2. Propose a great video or podcast idea, but let the influencer sit in the driver’s seat to execute. Offer to financially support their efforts so they can flex their creative muscle and not worry about having the resources to do so.
3. Ask to feature them in your content with the guarantee it will be seen and well received.
4. Provide a product or service free of charge in exchange for an honest, open review about it.

Whether providing compensation, a free product or service, or some other perk, you’ll need to find a way to incentivize the influencer to participate. Come up with creative proposals that will reach your target audience and gain traction online (this creates a win-win, benefitting both you and the influencer).

Lastly, don’t worry if you never hear back from someone.

The reality is, no matter your best efforts, sometimes influencers just won’t give you the time of day. As long as you’re not getting the cold shoulder from everyone you reach out to, you can assume it’s not your fault. Just because an approach didn’t work for one person, doesn’t mean it won’t work for many others. Keep up the good fight, and trust the process to help influential third parties spread the word about your awesome brand.

The post 5 Tips to Kick Off your Influencer Marketing Strategy appeared first on Rival IQ.

It’s nearly impossible to keep up with new marketing trends these days—much less have the resources and time to build them into your marketing plan and execute. This year, choose just a few new things to try, even if they aren’t new in the industry (hello, guest posting). A refresher may be just what your plan needs to boost engagement, impressions and overall marketing success.

Video Marketing Tests

Video marketing is one of the fastest growing areas of the industry, with 65 percent of marketers planning to increase their mobile ad budgets to account for video (Hubspot). This year is a great time to test your video marketing chops and see what excites your specific audience.

Despite being a newly popular frontier in marketing, there are already many resources available to guide your efforts, see a few below:

· 7 Tips for Launching a Video Marketing Strategy
· 3 Steps to Creating a Video Marketing Campaign
· 10 Practical Tools to Help You Start Your Video Marketing Campaigns
· What to Know About Instagram Live Video

A Guest Posting Program

Guest posting gets a bad rep thanks to “spammy” outreach and poor link building practices. However, I’ve now successfully run three guest posting programs and, as I explain in this article for Bitly, it’s actually one of the best ways to get high-quality content for free. If you do it right, you’ll get free blog posts, from experts in the field, on a regular basis.

Not to mention, it’s an excellent way to get high-quality links back to your website if you choose to write a blog post for them as well. However, guest posting is only valuable when you follow a few basic, but important, rules:

• All websites that guest bloggers want to link to must be high quality. Use traffic, domain authority and trust flow, social presence, the frequency of posting and more to measure. If your company uses different metrics, consider checking for those as well.
• Authors must be experts in some way, whether they’ve written on the topic multiple times for other high-quality sites or are professionals in that field.

Create guidelines to ensure the work that’s coming to you will need as minimal editing as possible. You’ll slowly build a pool of authors who are good writers, passionate about the industry, and can contribute more regularly.

Regular Non-Sales Email Marketing

Email marketing is still one of the best methods for reaching customers. In fact, a shocking 80 percent of marketers said email was their primary channel for lead generation, according to Mailigen.

To keep customers interested, it’s important to send a mix of emails—not just sales-based. One too many sales emails will cause subscribers to lose interest; soon enough, they’ll see an email from you and delete it right away because they know it’s going to be another sales pitch.

Here are a few new types of emails to send:

• Content-based: Send a weekly blog roundup of your posts for the week, or write an article in the email with a link to finish reading on your website or blog.
• Video: Most email platforms don’t allow you to embed videos directly into your emails (due to spam security reasons), but there are ways to get around it. Take a screenshot of your video or create a .gif and link the screenshot to your video or to the webpage version of your email (If you have selected to have one). Try this with your audience and check the metrics to see if they liked it or not.
• Discount or coupon announcement: Email is a great distribution channel for sharing coupons and discounts with customers (see below). Make it exclusive and add a timeframe to boost urgency and effectiveness.
• Freebies: Everyone likes a freebie. For example, a free tax resource from a CPA provides value outside the paid interactions between business and customer.

A Coupon Distribution Plan

Coupons, or online discounts, are an excellent way to drive new and recurring customers. In fact, coupons have the potential to increase monthly revenue by up to 40 percent, according to a November 2016 survey by CouponBox. Surveyed retailers reported earning $29,435 in monthly coupon sales.

However, if you don’t distribute your coupons and announcements about discounts well enough, they won’t be effective. What good is a BOGO deal if no one knows about it? While adding a banner to the top of your website is smart, there’s more you can do to drive coupon-based sales. Here are a few ideas:

• Email the coupon to the segment of your audience that you think would be most interested, based on your research and knowledge of the customer. Look at past purchases, demographic data and more to determine who will be in this segment.
• Share a “new customer only” deal on your Facebook page and boost the post to be seen by more people.
• Create content with your coupon or deal featured prominently. If a particular product is on sale, for example, write a fun or interesting piece about the product, and announce the sale at the top and bottom of the article. Remove the discount or coupon when the sale is over and keep the article as a stand-alone piece of content.

Drip Email Campaigns

Companies like Hubspot make it easier than ever to set up drip email campaigns. These allow you to stay in touch with every potential and current customer, whether they’ve just signed up to receive announcement emails or purchased a product.

The process is simple: You create a variety of tracks for each type of potential or current client and set up a timed email flow, which automatically delivers the email you’ve created and specified based on the parameters you’ve selected. For example, a free trial campaign may look like this:

• 1st Email: When they sign up for free trial—“Get ready to be blown away…”
• 2nd Email: Five days into the trial—“How do you like it so far? Did you know you can use this feature…?”
• 3rd Email: 20 days into the trial—“Don’t forget, your trial is up in just ten short days…”
• 4th Email: One day before the trial period ends—“We don’t want you to go, for just $20/month you can have…”

Whether you’re interested in video marketing or plan to expand your email marketing portfolio, 2017 is the year to do it. Every year it gets increasingly harder to stand out among a crowded group of competitors, but being forward-thinking with marketing is one of the best ways to set yourself apart from the rest.

The post 5 Details to Add to Your 2017 Marketing Plan appeared first on Rival IQ.

The average community has ten members.

It’s not for lack of trying. Too often, brands and organizations take the first step into building a community without considering the strategy behind it. What you need to do to increase the chances of building a successful community for your brand:

1. Define a purpose and goal

It’s a no-brainer, but so many communities form without a clearly defined purpose. For most brands, the goal ultimately ties back to revenue, but you’ll want to take a step beyond that to experience a truly thriving community. Be specific in defining your goals.

Here are a few examples of goals and purposes that may work well for you:

• Engage our most active customers by providing them with exclusive access to content to increase customer lifetime value by 10%.
• Create an open community that establishes our brand as a leader, engaging current and potential customers in efforts to increase the reward program membership by 15%.
• Build an influencer community by connecting members with other industry influencers and “behind the scenes” access to increase impressions and share of social media voice.

2. Build a member profile

After you determine your community’s purpose and goal(s), take the time to write out who you want to serve. Most brands have multiple personas, but it’s hard (and often unrealistic) to build a community that serves everyone. Instead, pick the primary persona that your association will help. In this profile, address how that persona will benefit from joining.

While a brand may experience a spike in engagement and participation due to the initial excitement in launching, community organizers will need to provide value to its members to sustain long-term growth and engagement. If you don’t meet their needs, they won’t come back.

Be sure to answer these questions when creating your community persona profile:

1. Who is this person?
2. What are their membership criteria?
3. What benefit does this person receive from joining?
4. Will these be extrinsic or intrinsic motivators?

When answering these questions, realize there will be trade-offs. If you start a community by offering free swag or discounts as an incentive to join, understand that you’re setting the bar. They may expect more swag in the future. Fulfilling those expectations will probably be part of the reason members stay or go. If members join because they are looking to educate themselves, the content will need to continually evolve to keep up with their thirst for knowledge. Be prepared to offer new challenges or insights on a regular basis.

3. Create a community profile

Once you know who you’re targeting to be a part of your community, define what your community will offer. Part of building a community is facilitating connection, so ask yourself, “how will community members be able to connect with each other?”

If you’ve decided on extrinsic motivation, how will community members get those rewards? Do they get points, or track submissions?

What other features will you need to facilitate your purpose and serve your community members? Consider forums as a resource, or having the ability for community members to reward or recognize other members.

You’ll also need to identify rules or norms for the group. My personal favorite norm and one I’ve carried with me across groups is, “We welcome the good and the bad, but not the ugly. Ugly language, like racism, bigotry, or just plain mean language will not be tolerated.” It makes it easy to deal with members that aren’t there to foster a healthy community.

4. Choose an internal Community Manager

Just like managing your brand’s social media accounts, building a community is not a “set it, and forget it” endeavor. A community manager will need to invest proper time engaging the community, moderating conversations, addressing issues, and getting involved with growing the community.

To do these things well, your community manager should be someone within the organization who is passionate about customers, their needs, and of course, the product/service. A certain level of authority, autonomy, and knowledge is necessary – similar to a customer support associate, they need to be able to make decisions on the fly (within reason).

5. Establish a recruitment strategy

If you build it, they will not come.

Almost 90% of online communities have no more than three members. Existing is simply the first step in a long journey. For a community to matter, and reach its stated goal, it needs to have members who engage with one another. Since you know who will benefit from your community, and what your community will offer, it should be fairly straightforward to build a strategy around recruiting those members.

For most brands, there’s likely an email database somewhere you can use as a kickoff point. Consider creating a campaign around the new community. Use your Facebook pixel to target your website visitors with a Facebook ad campaign. If you have eCommerce, target your biggest or most frequent purchasers. With your customer list and community persona in hand, you can build a lookalike audience in Facebook to target fresh faces. It’s all based on the profile you wrote – so pair that with your data and use it to work to your advantage. And of course, support it with a social media campaign.

My favorite recruitment strategy example is when Tillamook launched their community, the Tillamook Co-Op. In starting the co-op, the organization put forth a clear purpose and offered a one-time incentive for the first few hundred members which created a way to engage their most passionate fans.

Lastly, consider if there is someone on your team who can be the face of the effort. You’ll gain more traction if you have someone with high status, lots of influence, who is familiar, and likable.

6. Pick a technology

Yes, this is meant to be last. Seriously.

Once you have everything else in place, then you can pick which tool(s) will work for the community’s needs (or build it from scratch). Like buying a house, know your needs first, then find what fits, not the other way around. There are plenty of options for community software, but even the most popular tools might not meet your brand’s needs. So start with your needs first.

These are the first steps to creating a new online community, and this list certainly isn’t exhaustive. As mentioned earlier in this article, each design choice is a trade-off. Learn more about creating an online community, in “Building Successful Online Communities.” Though published in 2011, the design features covered will resonate with all communities today. Once you launch your community, understand that needs and the community members will shift, so be prepared to shift as well.

Have you built a community for your brand? If so, we’d love to hear about the biggest lessons, surprises and best practices you discovered in your journey!

The post 6 Steps to Strategically Build an Online Community appeared first on Rival IQ.

Beware huge top images.

Large images are, as you may have noticed, a big trend both in websites and, as I have noticed, in email. However, is this image the best way to get your point across? Those huge (300 wide X 400 high) banners are pushing down your compelling content out of eyesight. At a minimum, a headline needs to appear above it. By all means, if you have an epically compelling image, go ahead and super-size it. However, not every message lends itself to a visual, and your words drive action. Use large images wisely.

Use the preview text.

I feel very sad when I see emails that have confusing preview text (the text that appears first, in the preview pane of Outlook/other email application.) You can get very creative there–it’s a huge opportunity to pique interest, and that property should be used in every email. Please don’t let these be the first words your audience sees: “Click here to view in a web browser”.

You. You. You.

My personal best practice is have the word “you” among the first six words in your email. Ideally in the first three. If you’re having trouble getting the word “you” in there, that’s a big red flag that your copy isn’t audience-centric. What’s in it for them? Avoid chest-beating. It’s easy to fall into that trap when your company is filled with pride for the product. Put the customer benefits first, then insert the “we’re #1” language later, and only if your boss insists (if they’re good at their job, they won’t.)

Be a brand or be a person.

That is to say, pay attention to your voice, and let it match your “from” name. Don’t be a robot–be energetic (this is direct response, after all), and now’s the time to totally embrace your voice.

Button up.

Buttons work. Why? We’ve all been trained to pay attention to buttons (large, colorful) as the sign of our next step. In the time-tested mantra of “don’t make me think,” make it more than obvious what they should do–in the body of the email.

Focus the call-to-action.

One action per email. Include as many links (and the aforementioned button) as you’d like, but make sure they lead the reader to the same place.  It may be prettier to have only one or two links/buttons, but let your A/B testing show how more than one CTA increases click-throughs. Also, marketers without direct-response backgrounds are often tempted to add supplemental information–links to several different pages, videos or other assets. Don’t do it. If other links are necessary, you’re trying to say too much.

Relevance is everything.

You may have heard that the biggest driver of an email’s success is the list you use. I’d argue it’s really about the match of the list to your content. Segmented and targeted emails generate 58% of all revenue according to the Direct Marketing Association.

There’s a lot to remember when it comes to writing good email. A/B testing has a way of reminding us what works best. And, of course, success often varies according to your company, industry or audience. We hope these are helpful email best practices, and that your next email campaign is a roaring success.

The post Email Best Practices You Shouldn’t Forget appeared first on Rival IQ.

While there is a certain structure and some things that may help optimize your blog posts to show up early in search results, I’ve always found that answering questions clearly and honestly in blog posts is a pretty safe way to blog and show up in organic search results, which is one of the greatest benefits to blogging. Google and Bing are constantly improving their search algorithms to provide searchers with the best answers – always trying to overcome any dishonest tricks people might use to push lesser relevant webpages to the top of search results – anyways. So here we go with some quick tips that will help you write well for people and for the web on your blog!

1. Frequency Matters – Publish at least once a week

If you’re blogging to boost your organic search results, frequency matters to search engines. The more often you offer something new to the web, the more search engine crawlers will take note and remember that they should crawl your site for new info. So try and publish a blog post at least once – if not twice – a week.

I’ve found that it helps to create a rhythm in my routine for blogging.

Image Credit: writehacked.com

If I know I want to publish a post on Friday, I’ll:

• brainstorm topics the Friday before my publish date
• create a bulleted outline by Monday
• write my first draft on Tuesday
• do some revisions (add images and clarify my sub headers) on Wednesday
• let the post sit for a day through Thursday so that I can…
• review my final draft with a fresh set of eyes before publishing on Friday!

For me, the heavy focus days are Monday and Tuesday where I outline and draft my blog post. Otherwise, I space out my time for revisions because time usually allows me to review my writing with a refreshed perspective. By giving myself time to forget the what or why I wrote what I did in my draft, I’m less likely to unconsciously insert explanations and words that aren’t there – I’m able to approach my draft as a new reader and identify any areas where I may not have explained clearly enough! This is just what works for me, other bloggers may find that they prefer to organize their thoughts in their head and can sit down and produce a blog post in a 2 hour sitting. Just find what works for you!

2. Blog about FAQs in 500-1000 words

Not sure what to write about? Start with your frequently asked questions – and don’t be afraid to answer the tough questions that your industry or competitors tend to tiptoe around. Today’s customers are empowered with smartphones, educated, and able to dig for knowledge and opinions. Just because you dance around the answer to a question doesn’t mean they won’t find the truth somewhere else. So be the one to offer the truth and gain their trust!

Try to answer a frequently asked question in 500-1000 words. A 500 to 1000-word answer to a question not only looks and feels like a full and satisfactory answer, it also plays better with search engines. So take the time to explain the who, what, where, when, why, and how. Give background and context where necessary, explain why a question or topic matters, and illustrate your answers and reflections with helpful imagery – be it charts, videos, or other graphics.

3. Organize your thoughts – use sub headers!

If you aren’t sure how to organize your information, try sitting down with someone who doesn’t know your business for 5-10 minutes and explaining what you plan to write about to them. Before you sit down to chat, organize your thoughts as you would for your blog writing:

• Imagine your blog post broken apart with sub headers
• Your sub headers should properly title and describe what you discuss in the paragraph(s) that follow
• Try listing and reading only your sub headers and see if they, alone, give you a full sense of what your blog post is about. If it’s not clear what your post is about from your title and sub headers alone, you may need to clarify them or add in some more information!

When you sit down to talk about your ideas, ask the person you’re chatting with to ask questions when they need clarification or more information. Be ready to listen, make note of times they ask for more information and see if you should be reorganizing your thoughts to include that information earlier on.

Blogging for Small Business: There’s always a way

Blogging once or twice a week is your investment in getting found in organic search results, in reaching more qualified prospects, in creating a digital database of content you can reference in the future. So why wouldn’t you blog? Not comfortable writing? Consider recording a video of yourself answering a frequently asked question or reflecting on a hot topic and uploading it to YouTube. You can then hire a freelance marketer or writer to take the content from your video and turn it into a blog post. And then you can even embed your video into the blog post too for added engagement!

The post 3 Tips on Blogging for Small Business appeared first on Rival IQ.

Maybe you handle SEO yourself, or perhaps you hire professionals to do it for you. Either way, your search rank is something to be treasured, cherished like a beloved pet – but being one of the top dogs in your field does have its downsides.

As the SEO industry has grown to support sites in the quest for better rank, its evil cousin crept out of the woodwork. Negative SEO can destroy years of hard work – and if your ranking has started to slip, you could be one of its victims.

“Could” being the operative word – a sudden fall in rank or traffic could be due to any number of factors, and negative SEO is only one of them, but it’s still something you need to be aware of. Here are some common forms of negative SEO – and what you can do to defend against them.

#1. Link-Based Negative SEO

When it works, negative SEO does exactly what the name implies – negatively impacts the search ranking of the target website. The impact can be small, or it can be utterly devastating – a successful attack could even force a business to close.

Google does not publish the long list of factors influencing site rank for any given term, but we know that incoming links play a significant role.

Numbers matter, but quality is king – so it’s no surprise that the simplest and most common form of negative SEO exploits the way the Google algorithm assesses the links pointing to a site. Google likes high-quality, “organic” links – the best are links that look natural, from well-regarded, trusted sites hosting relevant content.

A link to your site from, let’s say, Forbes.com, will be regarded by the algorithm as “good” – their reputation is outstanding; if a Forbes author valued your content enough to link to it, Google assumes others would want to read it too. Incoming links from authoritative general or industry sites have a positive impact on where you rank for certain terms.

But a link from a low quality affiliate site, wouldn’t have the same appeal. If you suddenly acquired a thousand links from SpammyLinkLand.com (I made that up, but you get the idea), Google – assuming it was doing its job as intended – would be anything but impressed.

If you suddenly find yourself with a few thousand links pointing your way from low-quality blog comments, junk forum posts or obvious link farms, you might be the unwitting victim of a sneaky attack.

Activity like this gives off the whiff of someone trying to cheat the system – automated mass-creation of backlinks in the hope of making the target site appear more popular or relevant. Google penalizes sites trying to game the system by lowering their rank.

You could get an automatic penalty based on the poor quality of the mass of links, or a manual penalty because a human thinks something looks suspicious. Manual penalties are much harder to repair.

Unfortunately, the algorithm can’t tell who was ultimately behind the creation of these links. Was it the site owner, a rival, a bored black-hatter or a disgruntled ex-employee? Too often, the site is punished even if the owner had nothing to do with the spam.

For a negative SEO provider, this is a golden opportunity to do some serious damage.

Backlink Defense Tips

• Regularly monitor your backlinks, using either Google Webmaster Tools (free, less capable) or a paid option such as Ahrefs or Monitor Backlinks.
• Google isn’t flawless, but it does spot a lot of these links for what they are and disregards them. If they’re not hurting you, you can take a more leisurely approach to removal.
• If you identify harmful backlinks, politely ask the sites hosting them to remove them. Even if you know it won’t work, do it anyway. A tool like Rmoov (free for basic users) is helpful if you’re doing this.
• If necessary, employ the Disavow tool on Webmaster Tools. This informs Google you do not want the links specified to be taken into account when determining your ranks, but it should be used with extreme caution, and only after requesting the links be removed.
• If you were given a manual penalty, do what you can and file a reconsideration request to Google, along with documentation showing what steps you have taken to fix the issue.
• Talk about what’s happening on social media and raise awareness among your peers. They may have experience of similar attacks, and helpful advice for recovery – and the more people talk, the sooner Google might get round to finding a foolproof solution for this.

#2. Negative Click-Through

Another type of negative SEO focuses on making Google think your site isn’t providing users with what they’re looking for.

Amongst the many, many factors influencing your ranking, click-through rates from Google searches matter. If a thousand users search for a given term and click on Site A, the Google algorithm assumes that Site A is delivering what people are looking for, which has a positive influence on site rank.

But if those same thousand users search and do not click on Site A, Google may assume it is not what people want to see when they search for that term. This could result in a fall in rank.

A typical negative SEO attack aiming to exploit this would see the attacker using bots to automatically carry out searches for a term that the target site ranks highly for. For example, if an attacker targeted Hillary Clinton’s official website, he would program bots to search for “Hillary Clinton,” then click on every result except www.HillaryClinton.com.

One bot (or person) doing this wouldn’t make a difference, nor would ten; for this particular example, the attacker would probably need hundreds of thousands of bots sending queries repeatedly over a long period of time to make an impact.

Even then, Google is (probably) smart enough to recognize such a large-scale attack and disregard it.

But for a smaller site competing within a very specific niche, a few thousand search-and-no-clicks spread out over a week or month might be enough to shift the site’s ranking. And this sort of smaller attack may not be detected.

Negative Click-Through Defense Tips

• Again, be vigilant. Keep track of your click-through rates with our Google Analytics reports to identify what’s happening.
• Score well in other ranking factors to help shield you from attack damage.
• Don’t be tempted to buy a couple of thousand search-and-clicks for yourself to counter the attack. Google is likely to flag this as attempted manipulation, and it could dig you even deeper into a hole.

#3. Review-Based Negative SEO

Customer reviews count. Sometimes they make a big difference, sometimes they don’t; in SEO, you have to assume there are no insignificant factors.

Everything is important, and reviews are no different – especially if you don’t really stand out from your competition in other areas such as backlinks and site content.

Your reviews – either on Google Reviews or on respected sites such as Trustpilot or Yelp – don’t just influence whether or not a potential customer will choose you; they could also determine whether that customer even knows you exist.

In a garden-variety assault on your reviews, a competitor or someone else with an ax to grind would leave a few negative reviews of your business. Because the review sites rank businesses based on star-ratings or similar, low-star reviews would make you slip down their ratings – and drive down your Google rank in turn.

The primary damage from negative reviews directly influences potential customers on the review site, and the impact on your search rank may result in a drop in traffic, which affects your rank.

But the real damage to your rank could come from something far more insidious. Fake positive reviews could be the ticket for someone aiming to hurt your search rank – doubly so if they’re planted on Google Reviews.

Seeding a ton of glowing positive reviews is a risky strategy for a competitor. The algorithm could miss something like that and your attacker could accidentally help your rank. But it’s more likely Google will notice and think you’re writing yourself amazing reviews . This sort of suspicious activity could earn you a manual penalty – even if you had nothing to do with it.

Negative Review Defense Tips

• Secure your WiFi. You don’t want a particularly smart local rival to sit outside your home or business, banging in fake reviews on the same IP address you use to manage your business.
• Keep an eye on your reviews and be ready to quickly request the removal of any you feel are fake.
• Stand out above your competitors in other ranking factors – this will lessen the blow of any negative reviews.
• Sign up to receive email alerts on Webmaster Tools – these will tell you if you’ve been given a manual penalty.

#4. Duplicating your Content

People stealing your original content and reposting it on other sites is obnoxious – we all like to receive due credit for our work, and this kind of behavior takes that away.

But it doesn’t just harm our egos – it could also damage your bottom line.

Google’s end goal is to present users with worthwhile, original content; as such, duplicate pages without canconical tags are a no-no. The algorithm does not normally apply penalties just for duplicate content – every website almost certainly has at least some of it, and most is ignored.

But where it deems the duplication is being done for nefarious reasons, such as to quickly rank a large quantity of pages, action may be taken. This can range from ranking drops all the way to removal from the search results – and the Googlebot isn’t perfect.

If someone has set up automated scrapers to harvest your content and repost it elsewhere – essentially, making it look like an organized spam campaign – you could find yourself caught in the net and penalized when someone steals your content without your permission or knowledge.

Alternatively, a negative SEO attack could aim to exploit the way Google deals with showing duplicate content to search users. It knows we don’t want to see the same stuff in our results, so it picks the site it considers most likely to be the originator of the content and lists it – and hides the rest.

So an attacker could, for example, copy one of your blog posts and upload it to a site that they think would score higher than you. If the Google algorithm rates this site as more trustworthy than yours, it may assume it was the originator of the content.

The traffic would go to them – and your original post would be shuffled into obscurity.

Duplicate Content Defense Tips

• Regularly check for your content being duplicated. This can be done manually, or with a tool like Copyscape.
• If you find scraped content on another site, contact the webmaster where it’s posted and politely request the content be removed.
• If this doesn’t work, Google recommends filing a DMCA request – as the original creator of the content, copyright law is on your side.
• If you receive a manual penalty – you’ll know about this if you have email alerts turned on – submit a reconsideration request with as much detail and documentation as you can.

Negative SEO: It’s a Problem, but You Can Recover

Though there are no laws specifically aimed at addressing negative SEO, legal options using existing laws are being explored.

That’s no consolation for anyone struggling to fend off this sort of attack right now. The good news is that a business can usually recover from a negative SEO attack and get back to where they were before.

The bad news? It remains a problem, and it’s unlikely we’ll see any sort of permanent solution from Google any time soon.

The post Negative SEO: Did Your Rank Drop Without Reason? appeared first on Rival IQ.

To keep things simple, we’ll use mechanics as a small business example throughout this post, but these concepts can apply to any small businesses such as dry cleaners, local retail shops, boutique grocery stores, house cleaners, childcare, and more.

Focus on Tactics That Help You Get Found in Search

One of the greatest things about search engines is that companies can find customers when they’re in a time of need. In the age of Google and smartphones, most people Google first and do some research before taking action to purchase a product or service. When someone’s searching for the answer to a problem, they have a need and are typically considered a more qualified lead. They’re closer to the purchasing stage.

If someone’s searching for “mechanics near me” or “how to repair breaks on my car”, then they’re most likely looking for a mechanic because their car is showing problems. A mechanic who provides answers to these questions on his website has an opportunity to start building trust and a relationship with the person searching for answers.

What’s the best way to get your answers to show up in search results?

#1. Establish Your Google Business & Bing Places Pages

Before I dive into the more involved tactics on getting your answers found in search results, I want to make sure your company is getting top billing for local searches. This means establishing your business location by claiming your Google Business and Bing Places pages on these popular search engines. By doing this, you’ll show up on a Google map when someone searches for your product or service in a nearby zip code.

The benefits to doing this?

• Your business listing visually jumps right off the search results page
• You can make it easy to drive searchers to your website
• Searchers have convenient access to relevant business info and directions
• Your business looks established and real

So what about reaching prospects who haven’t allowed Google to use their location or that might be a little further away from you? That’s when we think about some long term and short term tactics that will help increase your small business’s visibility in search results.

#2. Blog Regularly to Invest in Your Long Term Search Results Visibility

The best way to show up in search results is “organically”. This means showing up as a search result that Google or Bing has determined highly relevant based on the content of a webpage (includes copy, images, and links to and from the page).

For experienced searchers, organic search results are considered the most trustworthy answers to search queries. You’ll notice in this example above, I was searching for “trustworthy mechanics” and the top organic search result is by Edmunds, an automotive resource. What this immediately says to me is that there aren’t any mechanics out there blogging about what they do and why they do it – or perhaps they just haven’t spent much time optimizing their web presence. This means there’s an easy opportunity for mechanics near me to start blogging now and gain a digital advantage reaching me as a prospective customer in need of a car repair.

As a searcher, reading the Edmunds article will be helpful to me because I’ll be learning how to find a good mechanic, but at the end of the day it doesn’t provide me with an immediate answer to my question. Edmunds establishes itself as a trustworthy resource because they’re providing me with helpful information — perhaps I’ll trust their recommendation for a mechanic near me. But imagine if the top search result was published on the blog of a local mechanic? A mechanic who blogs about the different troubles one might need a mechanic for and who shares his or her own personality and style diagnosing and treating car troubles through his blog posts? If I found a mechanic through his own unique answers to my problems on his blog, I’d have an opportunity to get to know his or her business better before stopping by. Each blog post offers another opportunity to build trust and develop a relationship.

#3. Try PPC Advertising to Show Up Immediately in Search Results

If you feel like your company page showing up in Google maps isn’t far reaching enough and you need to get found quickly in search results, that’s where PPC (Pay Per Click) ads come in. It can take some time to establish authority with Google’s search algorithm and that’s where PPC may help.

A PPC ad is a kind of digital ad that shows up alongside search results.

PPC ads show up above or along the side of search results which can be good for visibility but at the same time, some searchers see ads for what they are – ads – and deem them less trustworthy than organic search results. PPC ads show up for certain keywords you decide you’d like your ads to show up for. A mechanic might bid on the search term “brake repair” and create a PPC ad and a blog post or landing page that speaks directly to brake repairs on their website that the ad will link to.

PPC can be quite an undertaking for someone who hasn’t encountered it before. If you can allocate 10-20 hours a week for a couple of weeks to setup your AdWords account and campaigns, once you get your campaigns running it takes much less time to maintain and optimize them. Google and Bing both even have resources available to help you understand how AdWords works and how Bing Ads works. You can even get in touch with a Google or Bing representative who will help you optimize your campaigns. Alternatively, there are PPC marketing agencies out there that you could enlist to manage your PPC campaigns for you.

Consider trying PPC if you have a decent sized budget (it can easily get expensive and should be monitored closely early on) and either a trusted partner to run your campaigns or you can seriously commit to the time it will take to setup your campaigns. The reason I suggest PPC ads over display ads for small businesses is because you can reach prospective customers in their time of need and you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ads. It’s a little less of a guessing game than display ads can be, where you’re left wondering if you chose the right website, the right time of year, and the right messaging.

#4. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel – Invest in Channels Your Customers Already Use

As we noticed earlier, a blog post on Edmunds was the top organic search result when I looked up “trustworthy mechanics near me”. While Edmunds may not be a mechanic itself, Edmunds is establishing itself as an automotive resource for consumers. As a mechanic, you could consider contacting Edmonds to see if you could sponsor a couple of articles on their website or ask if there are other ways to develop a partnership to the benefit of your small business and Edmunds. At the end of the day, the goal for both parties is to help consumers answer their automotive questions. Why not work together towards success?

Similarly, other small business owners that offer services might find that websites like Angie’s List might be a good place to monitor and highlight their business listing online. Local storefronts might see more success being active on location based review sites and apps like Yelp or Foursquare. Don’t be afraid to ask your customers how they found you and where they go when they’re searching for products and services like your own! This kind of information is key to optimizing your digital content to have stronger online conversations with your existing customers and quickly reach prospective customers.

The post 4 Marketing Tactics to Get Found in Search appeared first on Rival IQ.