Maximizing Audiences For Your PPC Campaigns, SEO Driven Editorial Calendar, & LinkedIn Advertising (Review)

Week 8 of a 12 Week Series on Growth Marketing

Each week for 12 weeks, I am writing about what I am learning through the Growth Marketing Mini-Degree from the CXL Institute. This week, I worked through three courses in Module 5: Maximizing Audiences For Your PPC Campaigns, SEO Driven Editorial Calendar, and LinkedIn Advertising.

Maximizing Audiences For PPC Campaigns

This course was focused on audiences, and how we can create really effective audiences, hone in on our ideal audiences, and how we can optimally use those audiences across all channels.

One of the more helpful sections of this course to me focused on intent-based marketing. How do we target intent? Keeping in mind our end goal is always to help the user get to the endpoint of what they wanted to do, we can target them in multiple parts of the journey. First off, gauging intent is much easier to do when it comes to search networks, simply because the search queries the user uses can shed light on their particular intent. This isn’t always the case, as in the case of, for example, Googling a definition of something. In that case, it’s much harder to gauge intent.

Intent can also be tracked for retargeting on the display network by utilizing Google Tag Manager (GTM). This gives us the ability to track our potential customers and retarget based on events we record in Google Analytics (GA), fed to GA using GTM. Tracking things like on-page scrolls, clicks, and time on page are all behaviors that help us gauge the intent that the user has with our product. The main takeaway is track everything you can track.

We best leverage our audiences when we can expand our audiences by creating segmenting of audiences, but also keep in mind that knowing who not to target is important. GA should be able to help you see and build audiences that are clean, segmented, and effectively targeted if you are utilizing GTM and capturing that use behavior that informs intent. In addition, following the user across platforms, and understanding the behaviors cross-channel are ways we can leverage for success and study intent.

SEO Driven Editorial Calendar

Building a seed keyword list is the first step in creating an editorial calendar that speaks to the user’s relevant problems, so what is a seed term? A seed term is a term that widely represents a subject, broadly indicating where to start in the keyword research. It could be something like “surf”. It’s truly supposed to be a “seed” for brainstorming, a single keyword with broad intent. A seed term is a broad term that you can dive in on later (pun intended). A few places that assist with keyword research are Buzzsumo and Moz.

The best topics that are specific enough will end up in your editorial calendar. How do we determine if a topic is good enough to land on the calendar? A great topic will have a few key qualities: first it should have ample search volume. It doesn’t need to have a ton of volume, just some. Second, it needs to be able to imply a specific piece of content. And third, it should be showing potential to rank well. If a term hits these three things, it’s usually a great specific topic.

One of the most helpful sections of this course was the checklist that covers every facet of SEO-based content creation. From the headline, down to the URL and metadata, there are best practices that help your message clearly and concisely reach your target customer. A few SEO-based content creation tips:

Make sure your heading is “scan-worthy and clear”.

Utilize links! Cite sources and link to relevant articles in your niche.

Optimize for clickthroughs by using data from paid ads.

Use images to create relevance, interest and curiosity about your brand. Also include ALT text on images.

Create a custom URL that uses one of the targeted keywords in your headline, but is more often shorter than the headline itself.

Avoid using a passive voice, again trying to write for the 8–9th grade level.

Brevity and clarity go a long way with every aspect of the marketing process, reinforcing the idea that clean campaigns come from knowing what to put on the page and who to target, but also having discernment over what and who to exclude as well.

LinkedIn Advertising

In this course, we learned why LinkedIn can be a powerful platform for advertising, and how to navigate and build campaigns in LinkedIn. After we find our target audience, we can analyze the cost data with the return on investment, and see where we need to make adjustments. While an obvious reason to use LinkedIn ads is for recruiting, it is also useful for education.

Advertising on LinkedIn can be advantageous for a few reasons: utilizing the advanced targeting options and capabilities built in, having access to the business archetype prevalent on the platform, and you can also target the most qualifying leads from the best companies in the world. You can target at the individual level, which can include job titles, job skills, groups, and seniority. Or, you can target at the organization level by: company name, company size, and industry.

B.A.N.T. = Budget, Authority, Need & Timing

Find the best qualified leads by making sure they score “higher” in these four categories: Budget, Authority, Need & Timing .Using B.A.N.T. will not only help you quality leads, it will help you know which of those leads to prioritize.

Among the types of ads you can run on LinkedIn, there are a few advanced tips that I found helpful. First, exclude larger company sizes rather than including the small companies. Using Seniority over age/years of experience can be a more accurate depiction someone. And lastly, at the ad group level, turn off the default on setting of “audience expansion” so that additional impressions aren’t served to people outside of the audiences you’ve set.

What type of content does well on LinkedIn? You want to think of the least friction items that are “no brainer” downloadables like free cheat sheets or free check lists. Something that can be used as a resource; something that can be printed and pinned to the wall as a reference so it’s helpful, and easy to consume.