Susan will be keynoting at Engage 2020 which will be taking place March 12th and 13th at the Sentinel Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
I’ve spent the past 16 years in the online space, starting out in Fortune 500 ecomm. I’ve held strategy and leadership positions both client-side and agency-side, which gave me a huge learning curve in understanding how both sides of the relationship need to operate to be successful. While I’ve done everything from editing to email marketing, paid media has always been my favorite, and it continues to be my specialty. I am the CMO at Aimclear, a multi-award-winning digital marketing agency. We service cutting edge clients who come to us specifically for our creative approaches to media and advertising experience. I seriously geek out over integrated paid social endeavors, and how they tie into bottom-of-funnel user actions like search.
2) What’s the best way to tie social activity to sales/lead generation that might take place in a different user session?
More and more, we’re recommending and building customized attribution modeling and reporting on cross-channel efforts. It’s a difficult area for many clients, because they’re running on platforms that users interact with multiple times before coming to the site. There isn’t a clear path from Point A to Point B in that regard, so much of today’s learning is evolving to inferred success between what’s happening off-site vs. what finally happens once a user visits. We have invested heavily in our data science capabilities to supercharge our efforts in tying platform API access to on-site data in order to drive strategy. In some ways, we are going back to the roots of advertising, where things were less measurable, and marrying it with the data capabilities of today.
3) What 3 pieces of advice would you give to people attempting to smartly self-manage their Facebook Campaign?
1. Sales are not likely to happen quickly, so align your buying type with where users are. Recognize a chunk of your audience will need to hear from you quite a few times before they consider buying. Leverage the cheaper media types to accomplish that instead of going right towards expensive optimizations.
2. Don’t have Facebook optimize to an event that doesn’t happen often. Conversion campaigns are the most expensive campaign type there is, and they’re only worth running if Facebook has a confidence level about who it’s looking for. In other words: if you only get three purchases a week, don’t optimize for purchases. Dial it back to things like Add to Cart, or even Page View if you must. You have to view part of your media buy as the fact you are purchasing data to make Facebook smarter.
3. Don’t be lazy with creative. It’s extremely competitive now, and Instagram and Facebook audiences are overlapping less than they were.
4) Why is a holistic, multi-channel approach to digital marketing necessary in 2020?
Consumers are inundated with messaging all day long, which makes it a noisy world to compete in for attention. Add to that there are now multiple platforms and ways users consume media, and they all have personal preferences about what they like and what they remember. That makes for a world where one version of something doesn’t work anymore. Advertising brands need to prepare for the fact that they may have one set demographic, but some will like Instagram, some will like TikTok, and some still like Facebook. Some subscribe to your emails, others don’t. The challenge lies is having a consistent message that is tailored to use the best each of those platforms has to offer. Consistency, while allowing for the nuances of the user environment, is key.
With that many platforms, inconsistency in messaging across all those platforms will unravel your brand quickly because it’s harder for users to connect the dots in their mind when it comes to your value proposition. Be consistent with your brand, while remaining true to each platform’s realities.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.