There’s no doubt that local marketing is becoming increasingly more competitive.
To outpace competitors and engage with local customers, especially when you’re a national brand, it helps to incorporate a more well-rounded approach to marketing across search, social, and reputation management.
Today, even brands that operate locally are expected to provide local information on SERPs and transactional tools online for an easier path to purchase.
So, how do you keep up with localized marketing standards?
How can you maximize your brand’s visibility and avoid missed revenue opportunities?
Join our upcoming webinar with Damian Rollinson, Director of Market Insights at SOCi, as we dig into their most recent local Local Visibility Index (LVI) benchmark report and share the in-depth insights you need to inform your local marketing strategy.
The LVI applies approximately 100 metrics to measure the digital marketing performance of thousands of stores, offices, and service providers – and this year’s study significantly expanded the scope of the report, with responses from nearly 600 companies across about 40 verticals.
You’ll discover a range of powerful performance metrics relevant to your industry, plus find out how much low visibility could ultimately cost you.
Key takeaways from this webinar:
Which factors drive success in search, reputation, and social media marketing for multi-location brands.
40 industry benchmarks, covering the full breadth of local B2C commerce.
The $2.4 billion cost of low visibility and what drives that loss.
At the end of the presentation, you’ll be able to ask Rollinson your most pressing questions in a live Q&A session.
Sign up now and start mastering the highly competitive arena of localized marketing.
Part of any successful business is a successful digital marketing strategy.
Creating a strategy is one thing, but the execution is just as important, if not more.
But with the digital landscape changing every day, where’s the best place to start creating and optimizing your strategy?
Read on to learn how to create a successful digital marketing strategy for your brand.
What Is A Digital Marketing Strategy?
Inevitably, digital must become the pillar of your overall marketing strategy.
With an average of 12 touchpoints and two months for a customer to convert from awareness to sale, many of those touchpoints will be digital.
While there’s not one clear-cut definition of what a digital marketing strategy is, it can be summarized as the following:
A digital marketing strategy is part of a larger business plan that outlines how to reach its overarching business goals using digital channels.
A digital marketing strategy must be tailored toward specific company key performance indicators (KPIs). Core elements of creating a successful strategy include:
These channels can include (but are not limited to):
Search engines.
Social media platforms.
Email.
Websites.
Apps.
Identifying channels is just one part of the digital marketing strategy. The second necessary key piece is consistent and relevant messaging to the target audience.
While the overarching message should be consistent across channels, the way brands engage and specifically talk to customers will, and should, vary by platform.
While both are essential elements of a marketing plan, strategy and tactics have different definitions and serve different purposes.
As mentioned above, a strategy is part of a larger business plan to help brands reach overarching company goals.
Conversely, tactics are planned actions to achieve a greater marketing strategy.
The Key Differences Between Digital Strategies And Tactics
Strategy
Tactics
Focused on long-term goals
Focused on short-term goals
Part of a larger company plan
Can be measurable objectives
Channel-oriented
Campaign-oriented
Audience-oriented
Action-oriented
Provides a roadmap for tactics
One example of a digital strategy could be paid media marketing. The tactics that fit within paid media marketing could include:
Running paid search ads on Google or Microsoft.
Testing audiences on the Google Display Network (GDN).
Testing landing page or ad copy creatives for optimized conversion rates.
To summarize: Tactics do not equal strategies. Strategies are created to then inform which tactics should be used.
Digital Strategy Examples
While digital marketing strategies may contain similar characteristics across brands, each strategy and its tactics will look different. Strategies are not a “one size fits all.”
Below are some of the more common digital marketing strategies used by brands across the world:
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
Search engine optimization (SEO).
Content marketing.
Ecommerce.
Email marketing.
Social media marketing.
PPC Advertising
PPC marketing is a form of online advertising where brands pay each time a user clicks on their ad and is driven to the company website. Typically PPC campaigns are run in Google and Microsoft Ads.
Within those two PPC platforms are multiple campaign types to choose from, depending on the advertiser’s goals. These can include:
Search ads.
Display ads.
Shopping ads.
YouTube ads.
App ads.
Discover ads.
Performance Max.
And more.
PPC ads can be hyper-targeted to specific audiences or targeted to the masses, depending on the brand’s objectives. PPC is generally used to drive a brand’s traffic, sales, and conversions.
An example of a PPC search ad on Google is below.
Screenshot from search for [ppc software], Google, March 2023
SEO
An SEO strategy involves optimizing the brand’s website, app, or content to help rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
When a brand’s website and content are optimized, it helps drive improved organic (non-paid) search visibility, ultimately driving more traffic to the website.
SEO is considered a long-term strategy, and while there are typically no “direct” costs (like PPC advertising), it does involve indirect costs such as:
Employee or agency time and fees.
Third-party platforms or technology costs.
One benefit of having a strong SEO strategy is that, over time, the reliance on PPC marketing can be reduced, making the budget more efficient.
Using the same example of the search query [ppc software], an example of organic listings and answer boxes on the Google SERP is below.
Screenshot from search for [ppc software], Google, March 2023
Content Marketing
This strategy is more “behind-the-scenes” work, if you will. It includes creating (and sharing) unique and valuable content with a company’s target audience.
Part of a content marketing strategy involves creating different types of content for each digital platform.
For example, if a brand wants to create content for the TikTok platform, the content would be in the form of short video clips (maximum of three minutes).
Conversely, if a brand wants to increase brand authority, it may involve creating a long-form article and blog strategy to live on its website.
Content marketing aims to help build and establish trust with the target audience and turn them into long-term, repeat customers.
Using the same example as the PPC section above, an example of content marketing is below. The brand Skai (formerly Kenshoo) curates blog posts for its readers to increase engagement.
Screenshot from Skai.io, March 2023
Ecommerce
If a brand sells physical products, an ecommerce strategy should be crucial to a company’s business goals.
Enabling an ecommerce strategy means an online storefront is created for consumers to purchase products.
Some of the tactics in an ecommerce strategy can include:
Creating an online storefront where brands sell direct to consumers (DTC).
Selling physical products on online marketplaces such as Amazon.
Creating affiliate sales programs where others get paid to promote the brands’ products.
Paid shopping ads on Google and Microsoft to drive sales.
Influencer and brand ambassador marketing.
Email Marketing
This component of a digital strategy involves sending targeted emails to potential and current customers. The ultimate goal of email marketing is to drive leads, sales, or transactions and create repeat purchasers throughout the customer journey.
For example, a soon-to-be bride is looking for the perfect wedding invitations after getting engaged.
After this user is subscribed to the brand’s email or marketing communications, an email strategy cadence is created to guide them throughout the planning process. That could include:
Promoting free samples on wedding invitations.
Discounts on wedding invitation suites.
Free (or discounted) Thank You cards after the wedding.
Referral program to create word-of-mouth sales.
Email marketing is a great way to talk to the target audience and build lasting customer relationships, even after the initial purchase.
Below is an example of a targeted email offering a promotion in my inbox:
As part of the larger digital marketing strategy, social platforms should be chosen to promote content or interact with the target audience in some form.
Below are just a few tactics that can be used in social media marketing:
Creating organic content to post.
Running paid ads on platforms to target audiences.
Launching influencer marketing campaigns depending on the specific goal.
Using the same brand example as the email section, below is an example of a retargeting ad on Facebook (Meta):
Screenshot from Facebook, March 2023
How To Create A Digital Strategy In 5 Steps
As mentioned above, a digital marketing strategy should be created after identifying the overarching business goals.
For this reason, the steps to create a successful digital strategy include specific steps to help achieve the larger business goals.
Step 1: Identify Target Audience And Build Personas
A digital marketing strategy will only be as good as the target audience behind it. After all, they’re the ones who purchase your brand’s products and services.
When identifying a target persona, consider the following items:
Demographics: After identifying where to sell your products/services, determine if any key geographic areas may outperform others. Other demographic categories are age, parental status, household income, and more.
Interests: What kinds of hobbies does your ideal persona have? This information can help shape content for the customer.
Behaviors: How (and where) do these users consume content on the internet? Are they impulse shoppers? What social platforms do they frequent?
Pain points: What problems are users trying to solve? This is the key area to focus on. By providing your target audience with a solution to their pain points and speaking to them in a way they understand, you’ll likely win a customer for life.
Step 2: Conduct Competitor Landscape Analysis
It’s important to understand the digital landscape before diving into digital channels.
Which competitors are bidding on relevant keywords you’d like to target?
How are competitors messaging their target audience?
Which channels are competitors advertising on?
How do competitors rank organically compared to you?
How much are competitors’ monthly digital ad budgets?
Third-party tools like Semrush, SpyFu, Google Keyword Planner, and Google Trends can help answer many of these questions.
Note that with any third-party tool’s data, the information provided cannot be guaranteed 100% accurate and should be used as a guide, not as an absolute.
Step 3: Determine Necessary Digital Marketing Channels
Once you’ve figured out who your target audience is and where they hang out online, it’s time to determine the key digital marketing channels.
Ideally, a mix of channels will be chosen as it’s not best practice to choose one or two and put all your eggs in one basket.
The key is to diversify the digital channels and meet your customers where they’re online at any given point in time.
These channels will likely include any of the above in the digital strategy examples section.
Each channel identified should include its own set of KPIs. These are set by the marketers and greater business teams.
Be sure not to set the same KPIs and measurement goals for each channel, as they all serve different purposes.
Creating realistic measurement goals ensures that awareness channels are measured against awareness KPIs, such as brand lift instead of direct conversions.
As with any digital channel, it’s important to understand how they can be measured.
This step should include identifying a proper measurement platform, such as Google Analytics or another tool, to ensure that marketing dollars and channels can be measured.
Step 4: Create Content And Unique Value Proposition Plan
Once the digital channels have been identified, it’s time to plan your content for each channel.
The key is creating a consistent messaging framework that can be reused and reworked in each channel. That way, you’re not starting from scratch each time.
For example, if you want to introduce your brand on YouTube or the Google Display Network, the content should not be focused on a direct conversion or a “Buy Now” CTA. That’s simply asking for too much on an initial brand awareness touchpoint.
On the other hand, for someone well on their search journey and looking for specific products and services, that could be a time to introduce discounts and special offers.
Lastly, make sure that what you’re providing your customers is unique and differentiated in the market. Conducting a competitor analysis first will help identify what’s currently being offered in the market.
Even if your product or service is similar to your competitors, it’s important to find a way to differentiate your brand.
Step 5: Execute And Optimize Digital Marketing Strategy
Once you’ve defined steps 1-4, it’s time to launch your digital marketing strategy.
However, the work is not done yet. Your digital marketing strategy should be ongoing and fluid based on performance and the changing market landscape.
Digital marketing channels and campaigns should be continuously monitored and analyzed to ensure that marketing budgets and resources are utilized most effectively.
This should include daily, weekly, and monthly checkpoints in each channel.
Monthly reports and quarterly business reviews (QBRs) should be conducted to provide opportunities to shift and pivot strategy based on findings.
Summary
Digital marketing strategies are not a “one size fits all.” They also should not be the only strategy a brand has.
While it’s important to think about “digital-first” when it comes to strategies, it needs to align with the overarching business goals.
Don’t confuse strategy and tactics and end up rushing into a tactics-first approach.
By taking the time to create a solid digital marketing strategy, you’re setting the brand up for long-term success and the ability to pivot based on performance.
The economic impact of the pandemic is still a significant factor in most marketing budgets.
And today’s competition for marketing dollars and space is fiercer than ever.
So what innovative, cost-effective ways can make your brand stand out?
Which new channels can you add to your marketing mix to maximize ROI?
On April 12, I moderated a webinar with Sreekant Lanka, SVP of Digital Solutions at iQuanti.
To maximize results, Lanka showed how to refresh your search strategies and connect with your target audience through high-impact marketing channels.
Here’s a summary of the webinar. To access the entire presentation, complete the form.
Key Takeaways
Align your media where your audience is.
Your content must cater to your potential visitor’s intent during each funnel stage, from building context at the top of the funnel to being more specific at the bottom of your funnel.
Top Of Funnel Strategies
Tactic: Lead your top-funnel activations with videos to drive awareness & recall.
KPIs: Aided and unaided recall lift and top-of-mind awareness.
Tactic: Nurture your mid-funnel with a mix of videos & statics by driving & traffic consistently.
KPIs: Engagement rates, retention rates, quality visits to the website/app, branded search volumes, and CTR.
Bottom Of Funnel Strategies
Tactic: Close the bottom funnel with search, retargeting, and other high-quality signal-based audiences.
KPIs: CPA, ROAS, and LTV/CAC.
Measure Success Through:
Different KPIs per funnel stage.
A sense of overall CAC to help assess the overall health across marketing channels.
Attribution challenges and privacy pave the way for increased adoption of incrementality testing.
Take Note Of The Evolving Search Landscape
To grow your brand, consider what is evolving and which channels are emerging. To begin with, note that users now search for different things than they used to.
Look For Changes In Search Queries
The search landscape is changing and moving away from a keyword-first approach.
You can see shifts:
From keywords to conversations.
Expanding into multiple sessions.
Emerging as “Near me,” “best of,” etc.
Moving beyond the lower funnel.
Notice Changes In Bidding Strategies
Bidding strategies are also changing, primarily driven by the Google ecosystem building capabilities beyond keywords.
Marketplaces & social media sites are commanding a significant share of product searches.
Understand How AI Is Changing The Face Of Search
In this regard, the exact impact of AI on SERPs is still unclear. Still, you can see the potential in keyword targeting, search volume, and implementation.
Site optimizations will likely be key as tools evolve to include more relevant and up-to-date information.
Shift Your Strategy Around Newly Evolving Segments & Needs
Search, as a product, has been changing, especially with Gen Z on its way to becoming the most dominant customer segment.
As a segment with the lowest attention span, you should look at how verticals are evolving with the shift.
Are you looking for new ways to expand your digital marketing efforts with outside-of-the-box tactics?
With the economy on a downswing and competition for marketing dollars at an all-time high, it’s a great time to start exploring new opportunities.
For years, marketers have been looking at keywords, reach, frequency, and incrementality – but in order to thrive, you need to think beyond search and shift your focus to where your users are.
As you adjust your spending, it’s important to invest in innovative ways to connect with users in order to compensate for this year’s economic changes.
Join our upcoming webinar and learn how adding new channels to your marketing mix can help you maximize results and impact this year.
You’ll learn about:
Search stagnation and the need to think “beyond.”
New performance marketing platforms that can help grow businesses.
Emerging media trends across industries.
In this webinar, Sreekant Lanka, SVP of Digital Solutions at iQuanti, will discuss high-impact marketing channels that will help you outperform your competition.
You’ll leave this live session with the insights you need to refresh your marketing strategy and go beyond traditional search marketing tactics.
Ready to discover new ways to connect with your target audience and maximize your marketing spend?
Sign up now for the unique opportunity to assess your media strategy and customize it for your user journey.
Now, you’ll be able to double down on PPC and SEO campaigns that are truly bringing in customers.
Although phone inquiries usually represent high-intent prospects, it can be difficult to know which marketing channel drove a particular lead to call your business – that’s where Google Analytics 4 comes in.
What Is Google Analytics 4?
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the newest version of Google’s website traffic and engagement tracker.
It can help you understand how many people are visiting your website, what pages they’re reading, and what information makes them become a customer.
GA4 will allow you to seamlessly measure your customer’s journey across multiple platforms – this includes phone calls and offline conversions.
“With the move to GA4, goals are now conversions. GA4 is much more intelligent and automated about conversion tracking, so setting up goals based on limited conversion criteria is no longer necessary.
Conversions in GA4 are based on events. Thus, your conversions will be event_name, with the parameter modifying the event. You can now mark an event as a conversion.”
Also, even though GA4 has the ability to track clicks on a phone number, they still miss out on a large percentage of calls where users type the numbers directly into their phones.
How Can I Track Advanced Phone Call Analytics In Google Analytics 4?
Since GA4 does not effectively track phone calls, implementing Call Tracking by CallRail into your Google Analytics strategy can help you gain more actionable marketing insights than using Google Analytics 4 alone.
CallRail integrates seamlessly with GA4 to enhance your call-tracking process.
Step-By-Step Guide To Creating Call Tracking Conversion Events In Google Analytics 4
To manually mark an event as a conversion in GA4, you can configure the event in two ways:
Track an existing event as a conversion.
Create a new conversion event from the event name.
To start tracking an existing event as a conversion:
In the left navigation, click Admin > Events.
Locate the event in the Existing events table.
In the event’s “Mark as conversion” column, click to turn the switch on. If you have CallRail you will see conversions under the following names: phone_call, form, chat, sms.
To create a conversion from the event name:
In the left navigation, select Admin > Conversions.
Click New Conversion Event.
Enter the name of the new event. Be sure to use the exact event name with proper capitalization.
Start Using Phone Call Event Data To Supercharge Your Marketing
You shouldn’t have to guess which marketing tactics are working for you, and to what extent.
With call tracking software, you can know for sure.
CallRail will help you better “understand what makes your phones ring.” And with this new set of data, you and your clients can start filling the information gaps in your process.
Now, you can get the full scope of your ROI and keep track of all the major conversion events within a lead’s lifecycle.
Once you start incorporating offline conversion tracking into your strategy, you’ll notice an improvement in your agent-client relationship, as you prove campaign value through data collection.
Your clients just want assurance that their marketing efforts are paying off, and leveraging Google Analytics 4 with CallRail’s Call Tracking can help you prove that all aspects of their marketing campaigns (including phone calls) are working successfully.
TikTok has introduced several new targeting and boosting features with Promote, which enables users to turn any of their existing TikTok videos into ads in a few easy taps. Announced, February 8, 2023.
These new features are designed to help TikTok creators – including influencers, advertisers, brands, and small businesses – drive traffic back to their profiles, reach their target audiences, amplify their creator marketing budgets, and turn viewers into potential leads.
YouTube launched Promoted Videos back in November 2008, and Facebook launched promoted posts in 2012. So, this isn’t a new concept.
But the fact that TikTok is expanding Promote’s features is a signal that creators need more ways to boost their videos on the platform – especially in the wake of controversy that erupted last month when Forbes reported: “TikTok’s Secret ‘Heating’ Button Can Make Anyone Go Viral.”
The new Promote features give TikTok creators additional tools to target their desired communities and choose exactly how they can interact with their ads – just in case TikTok employees decide to stop manually boosting videos’ reach by using a “heating” button that bypasses the algorithm intended to drive the TikTok experience.
Promote’s New Suite Of Features
More Profile Views
The new “more profile views” goal allows advertisers to drive traffic directly to their TikTok profile.
With this new call to action, brands get more ways to tell their story or show off a range of products or services.
Promote For Others
The new “Promote for Others” option enables marketers to boost content, influencers, or partners.
This new feature also enables marketers to promote a creator’s videos or LIVE videos to help increase views by their target audience.
Location Targeting
There’s a new location targeting option, in addition to the existing audience targeting options for gender, age, and user interests.
This allows small businesses with physical locations to directly target their local community.
More Messages
The new “more messages” goal allows small businesses to drive traffic directly to their TikTok inbox.
This provides service businesses, B2B brands, and businesses that take custom orders with more customer interaction to close their sales.
Interview With BlitzMetrics CEO Dennis Yu
As I mentioned, promoting your videos isn’t a new concept.
He’s spent a billion dollars on Facebook ads across his agencies and agencies he advises – and TikTok creators will want to know about his “Dollar a Day” strategy.
Here are my questions and his answers.
Greg Jarboe: First of all, tell us about your “Dollar a Day” strategy.
Dennis Yu: “Greg, as you know, we spent $1 billion largely on Facebook ads using Dollar a Day to be able to drive sales at all three stages of the funnel.
And we know that, on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn, the campaign objectives are all exactly the same, from awareness to consideration to conversion. They’re literally the exact same all-day ad systems built against the exact same campaign objectives.”
GJ: But what do you do after spending a dollar a day for seven days to promote a particular post?
DY: “I look at the analytics. If it’s good, then I’m going to put in $2 a day for another 20 or 30 days. I might put $10 a day, but I’m allowing this thing to initially test. Right.”
GJ: So, what do you think about TikTok’s Promote features?
DY: “Promote has been around for at least a year (for me), and it works just like boosting on Facebook. Instead of $1 a day, it’s $5 a day minimum.”
GJ: So, what kind of results have you seen promoting TikTok videos?
DY: “I’ve boosted about a thousand posts across a range of accounts to test performance by objective (see screenshots).”
Screenshot from TikTok, February 2023
“Video views have been the most effective, by far, getting half a penny a view to three cents a view – with average watch times similar to organic.
So, if your video organically did well, then boosting it will “throw fuel on the fire.” But if it sucks, no amount of money will overcome that.”
GJ: Do you have any recent examples that you can share?
DY: “See screenshots from a promoted post I just did, which I’ve re-promoted five times.”
Screenshot from TikTok, February 2023
“Notice the video is about how much a pilot makes, but Alex isn’t wearing a uniform or in front of a plane.”
Screenshot from TikTok, February 2023
“But the comments are from pilots, even though I can’t choose pilots as targeting.”
Screenshot from TikTok, February 2023
“TikTok’s algorithm is that good. So, if you have great content, simply put money on it to get more of the same.”
Screenshot from TikTok, February 2023
GJ: Do you have any concluding thoughts or tips that you’d like to share?
DY: “TikTok’s cost of video ads is one-third that of Facebook because the advertiser demand hasn’t caught up to the traffic yet.
So, anyone who has had success on Facebook should port over their campaigns to TikTok to take advantage – so long as they have vertical video.
TikTok intentionally designed its ad system to be familiar to people who run Facebook ads – its teams have told me this.”
Editor’s note: The interview has been lightly edited for clarity, brevity, and adherence to our Editorial Guidelines. The views expressed by the interviewee in this column are his alone and do not necessarily represent the view of Search Engine Journal.
Are you looking for more ways to generate income for yourself or your business this year?
With high-ticket affiliate marketing programs, you earn money by recommending your favorite products or services to those who need them.
Affiliate marketers promote products through emails, blog posts, social media updates, YouTube videos, podcasts, and other forms of content with proper disclosure.
While not all affiliate marketers make enough to quit their 9-to-5, any additional income in the current economy can come in handy for individuals and businesses.
How To Get Started With Affiliate Marketing
Here’s a simple summary of how to get started with affiliate marketing.
Build an audience. You need websites with traffic, email lists with subscribers, or social media accounts with followers to promote a product – or ideally, a combination of all three.
Find products and services you can passionately promote to the audience you have built. The more you love something and believe in its efficacy, the easier it will be to convince someone else to buy it.
Sign up for affiliate and referral programs. These will be offered directly through the company selling the product or service, or a third-party affiliate platform.
Fill out your application and affiliate profile completely. Include your niche, monthly website traffic, number of email subscribers, and social media audience size. Companies will use that information to approve or reject your application.
Get your custom affiliate or referral link and share it with your audience, or the segment of your audience that would benefit most from the product you are promoting.
Look for opportunities to recommend products to new people. You can be helpful, make a new acquaintance, and earn a commission.
Monitor your affiliate dashboard and website analytics for insights into your clicks and commissions.
Adjust your affiliate marketing tactics based on the promotions that generate the most revenue.
Now, continue reading about the best high-ticket affiliate programs you can sign up for in 2023. They offer a high one-time payout, recurring commissions, or both.
The Best High-Ticket Affiliate Marketing Programs
What makes them these affiliate marketing programs the “best” is subjective, but I chose these programs based on their payout amounts, number of customers, and average customer ratings. Customer ratings help determine whether a product is worth recommending. You can also use customer reviews to help you market the products or services when you highlight impressive results customers gain from using the product or service, and the features customers love most.
1. Smartproxy
Smartproxy allows customers to access business data worldwide for competitor research, search engine results page (SERP) scraping, price aggregation, and ad verification.
836 reviewers gave it an average rating of 4.7 out of five stars.
Earn up to $2,000 per customer that you refer to Smartproxy using its affiliate program.
2. Thinkific
Thinkific is an online course creation platform used by over 50,000 instructors in over 100 million courses.
669 reviewers gave it an average rating of 4.6 out of five stars.
Earn up to $1,700 per referral per year through the Thinkific affiliate program.
3. BigCommerce
BigCommerce is an ecommerce provider with open SaaS, headless integrations, omnichannel, B2B, and offline-to-online solutions.
648 reviewers gave it an average rating of 8.1 out of ten stars.
Earn up to $1,500 for new enterprise customers, or 200% of the customer’s first payment by signing up for the BigCommerce affiliate program.
4. Teamwork
Teamwork, project management software focused on maximizing billable hours, helps everyone in your organization become more efficient – from the founder to the project managers.
1,022 reviewers gave it an average rating of 4.4 out of five stars.
Earn up to $1,000 per new customer referral with the Teamwork affiliate program.
5. Flywheel
Flywheel provides managed WordPress hosting geared towards agencies, ecommerce, and high-traffic websites.
36 reviewers gave it an average rating of 4.4 out of five stars.
Earn up to $500 per new referral from the Flywheel affiliate program.
6. Teachable
Teachable is an online course platform used by over 100,000 entrepreneurs, creators, and businesses of all sizes to create engaging online courses and coaching businesses.
Earn up to $450 (average partner earnings) per month by joining the Teachable affiliate program.
7. Shutterstock
Shutterstock is a global marketplace for sourcing stock photographs, vectors, illustrations, videos, and music.
507 reviewers gave it an average rating of 4.4 out of five stars.
Earn up to $300 for new customers by signing up for the Shutterstock affiliate program.
8. HubSpot
HubSpot provides a CRM platform to manage your organization’s marketing, sales, content management, and customer service.
3,616 reviewers gave it an average rating of 4.5 out of five stars.
Earn an average payout of $264 per month (based on current affiliate earnings) with the HubSpot affiliate program, or more as a solutions partner.
9. Sucuri
Sucuri is a cloud-based security platform with experienced security analysts offering malware scanning and removal, protection from hacks and attacks, and better site performance.
251 reviewers gave it an average rating of 4.6 out of five stars.
Earn up to $210 per new sale by joining Sucuri referral programs for the platform, firewall, and agency products.
10. ADT
ADT is a security systems provider for residences and businesses.
588 reviewers gave it an average rating of 4.5 out of five stars.
Earn up to $200 per new customer that you refer through the ADT rewards program.
11. DreamHost
DreamHost web hosting supports WordPress and WooCommerce websites with basic, managed, and VPS solutions.
3,748 reviewers gave it an average rating of 4.7 out of five stars.
Earn up to $200 per referral and recurring monthly commissions with the DreamHost affiliate program.
12. Shopify
Shopify, a top ecommerce solution provider, encourages educators, influencers, review sites, and content creators to participate in its affiliate program. Affiliates can teach others about entrepreneurship and earn a commission for recommending Shopify.
Earn up to $150 per referral and grow your brand as a part of the Shopify affiliate program.
13. Kinsta
Kinsta is a web hosting provider that offers managed WordPress, application, and database hosting.
Now more than ever, marketing and sales leaders are taking a critical look at where to allocate their resources and how to staff their teams.
Attribution modeling is one of the best tools for providing clear guidance on what’s working, and what isn’t.
What Is Marketing Attribution?
Marketing attribution is the approach to understanding how various marketing and sales touchpoints influence the prospects’ move from visitor, to lead, to customer.
By implementing attribution in your organization, you’ll have a better idea of:
Which channels are most influential during different phases of the sales cycle.
Which content formats are more or less impactful in your marketing or sales enablement efforts.
Which campaigns drove the most revenue and return on investment (ROI).
The most common sequence of online or offline events that prospects interact with before becoming a customer.
Why Is Attribution Important In Marketing?
Analyzing attribution data provides you with an understanding of which marketing, sales, and customer success efforts are contributing most effectively and efficiently toward revenue generation.
Attribution modeling helps you identify opportunities for growth and improvement, while also informing budget allocation decisions.
With accurate attribution models, marketers are able to make more informed decisions about their campaigns, which has allowed them to increase ROI and reduce wasted budgets on ineffective strategies.
What Are The Challenges Of Marketing Attribution?
Developing a perfect attribution model that guides all of your decisions is a pipedream for most marketers.
Here are five challenges that result in inconclusive data models or total project abandonment:
Cross-Channel Management
This is a common challenge for enterprise marketers who have web assets across multiple websites, channels, and teams.
Without proper analytics tagging and system settings configuration, your web activities may not be tracked accurately as a visitor goes from one campaign micro-site to the main domain.
Or, the prospect may not be tracked as they go from your website to get directions to then go to your physical storefront to transact.
Making Decisions Based On Small Sample Sizes
For smaller trafficked websites, marketers using attribution data may not have statistically significant data sets to draw accurate correlations for future campaigns.
This results in faulty assumptions and the inability to repeat prior success.
Lack Of Tracking Compliance
If your attribution models rely on offline activities, then you may require manual imports of data or proper logging of sales activities.
From my experience in overseeing hundreds of CRM implementations, there is always some level of non-compliance in logging activities (like calls, meetings, or emails). This leads to skewed attribution models.
Mo‘ models, mo’ problems: Each analytics platform has a set of five or more attribution models you can use to optimize your campaigns around.
Without a clear understanding of the pros and cons of each model, the person building the attribution reporting may not be structuring or configuring them to align with your organizational goals.
Data Privacy
Since GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy laws were enacted, analytics data continues to get murkier each year.
For organizations that rely on web visitors to opt-in to tracking, attribution modeling suffers due to the inability to pull in tracking for every touchpoint.
How Do You Measure Marketing Attribution?
Measuring attribution is all about giving credit where it is due. There are dozens of attribution tools out there to assign credit to the digital or offline touchpoint.
Attribution measurement starts with choosing the data model that aligns with your business goals.
Certain attribution models favor interactions earlier on in the customer journey whereas others give the most credit towards interactions closer to a transaction.
Here is a scenario of how to measure marketing attribution in a first-touch attribution model (we’ll get to the different models next):
A prospect comes to the website through a paid search ad and reads the blog.
Two days later, she comes back to the site and views a couple of product pages.
Three days later, she comes back through an organic listing from Google and then converts on the site by signing up for a discount coupon.
With a first-touch attribution model, the paid search ad will get 100% of the credit for that conversion.
As you can see, choosing the “right” model can be a contentious issue, as each model gives a percentage of credit to a specific interaction or placement along the path toward becoming a customer.
If your business relies on paid search, SEO, offline, and other channels, then likely one of the individuals working on one of those channels is going to look like the superhero, whereas the other marketers will look like they aren’t pulling their weight.
Ideally, when you are choosing an attribution tool, you’ll be able to build reports that allow you to compare various attribution models, so you have a better understanding of which channels and interactions are most influential during certain time periods leading up to conversion or purchase.
What Are Different Marketing Attribution Models?
Marketers can use various marketing attribution models to examine the effectiveness of their campaigns.
Each attribution tool has will have a handful of models you can optimize campaigns and build reports around. Here is a description of each model:
First-Click Attribution
This model gives credit to the first channel that the customer interacted with.
This model is popular to use when optimizing for brand awareness and top-of-funnel conversions/engagement.
Last-Click Attribution
This model gives all of the credit to the last channel that the customer interacts with.
This model is useful when looking to understand which channels/interactions were most influential immediately before converting/purchasing.
Last-click attribution is the default attribution model for Google Analytics.
Multi-Touch/Channel Attribution
This model gives credit to all of the channels or touchpoints that the customer interacted with throughout their journey.
This model is used when you are looking to give weight evenly or to specific interactions.
There are variations of the multi-touch model including time-decay, linear, U-shaped, W-shaped, and J-shaped.
Customized
This model allows you to manually set the weight for individual channels or placements within the customer journey.
This model is best for organizations that have experience in using attribution modeling, and have clear goals for what touchpoints are most impactful in the buyers’ journey.
Marketing Attribution Tools
There are several different tools available to help marketers measure and analyze marketing attribution. Some attribution tools are features within marketing automation platforms or CRM systems like Active Campaign or HubSpot.
Others are stand-alone attribution tools that rely on API or integrations to pull in and analyze data, like Triple Whale or Dreamdata.
As you are evaluating tools, consider how much offline or sales data needs to be included within your attribution models.
For systems like HubSpot, you can include sales activities (like phone calls and 1:1 sales emails) and offline list import data (from tradeshows).
Other tools, like Google Analytics, are not natively built to pull in that kind of data and would require advanced development work to include these activities as part of your model.
(Full disclosure: I work with HubSpot’s highest-rated partner agency, SmartBug Media.)
Additionally, if you need to be able to see the very specific touchpoints (like a specific email sent or an ad clicked), then you need a full-funnel attribution system that shows this level of granularity.
Attribution modeling is a powerful tool that marketers can use to measure the success of their campaigns, optimize online/offline channels, and improve customer interactions.
It is important, though, to understand attribution’s limitations, the pros and cons of each model, and the challenges with extracting conclusive data before investing large budgets towards attribution technology.
The next question will be about ROI and what you can do to mitigate the oncoming issues.
During an economic downturn, the objectives of reducing churn are amplified. Your sales pipelines may see less activity, and the C-suite may focus more on MRR (monthly recurring revenue) and ARR (annual recurring revenue).
In this article, I will look at subscription-model-based businesses and some methods and strategies that can pivot their SEO efforts toward maintaining performance and SEO ROI (return on investment).
Understanding Why Accounts Cancel
Customers cancel their subscriptions for myriad reasons, but during an economic downturn, reasons tend to gravitate toward costs and perceived value.
Other reasons include not receiving enough value from the subscription, difficulty canceling their subscription, or feeling that customer support is unresponsive or unhelpful.
You can identify these issues before customers provide feedback on an exit survey. Create opportunities for conversations and feedback loops with the sales and customer service teams. This lets customers address concerns before they cancel.
Targeting Disengagement & Value Shortfalls
To show this value, we can pivot our content and messaging to demonstrate opportunity costs and how the upfront cost prevents a more significant shortfall in the long run.
Encountering usage friction with the software is an identifiable problem.
Within the organization, teams should be able to provide you access to DAU (daily active user) and MAU (monthly active user) data.
Companies often boast about having high numbers of each, but the data can also be used to identify accounts with below-average or spare login frequency, and these can then be collated and reached out to.
Put accounts on low and mid-tier subscriptions into an email gauntlet and reach out. Offer a consultation with an accounts person. You could also ask them to fill out a feedback form to identify pain points to help build a content strategy.
Reach out to accounts on high-tier subscriptions with existing account managers.
Addressing customer issues could be as simple as rewording elements of commercial product pages, adding additional sections, or reinforcing the value proposition with case studies.
You can also address these issues with traditional blog content. Add more support articles to your support center and build out existing ones with media such as video to address common friction points.
Developing Content Against Competitor Value Pitfalls
Price is likely the most challenging reason for leaving to predict and manage. Price is informed and dictated by other business needs and costs. While it might make sense to offer deals to high-value accounts, reducing the price on a wide scale likely isn’t an option.
Price and cost are subjective to the value your solution provides. So Demonstrating your benefits can help customers justify the expenditure.
Any solution’s cost must, at minimum, balance out the problem or provide additional value.
This is known as a cost-benefit analysis. A vital part of a cost-benefit analysis is comparing the costs of the solution versus the benefits and determining a net present value.
During this assessment, your messaging can leverage and demonstrate additional benefits, or benefit enhancements, against your competitors.
In SaaS, you could break this down as comparisons between both product elements and overall “package” elements:
Direct product features and performance of those features.
Indirect product features and “add ons” that supplement the core product.
The bandwidth of the solution on a monthly or annual basis.
The number of user seats/sub-accounts per main account.
Speed of customer support response (and level of customer support).
A typical approach to highlighting competitor pitfalls is with comparison tables and our-brand-v-competitor-brand URLs and blogs.
These pages will then compete with your competitors’ versions and independent websites, affiliates, and other reviews for clicks and to sway consumer opinion.
You must also explain these benefits and competitive advantages on the product pages themselves.
Bullet listing the product features is commonplace. But make sure the benefits are explained directly against your competitors. This can help these competitive advantages better resonate with your target audience.
Reinforcing Brand Solution Compounds
A brand compound search term is a term made up of two or more words and refers to a specific brand.
For example, the brand compound search term “Decathlon waterproofs” would highlight users wanting to find waterproofs specifically from the brand Decathlon.
Users performing searches like this also reaffirms the connection between topics and brands, helping Google further understand relationships and relevancy.
To optimize brand compound search terms, you need to understand the concept of semantic marketing. This means knowing how different words, phrases, and ideas relate in terms of meaning.
These can be words like “best,” “how,” or any other qualifier that will make the search more specific. This will help you get more targeted traffic that will likely convert better than generic search terms.
Summary
While these are uncertain times and competition for users and recurring revenue becoming more fierce, pivoting your SEO and content strategy to focus on value propositions and addressing consumer friction points can help better qualify leads and provide objection questions that consumers will take to competitors.
In this strategy, the keyword search volumes and other values might not be high. When you’re addressing user friction points and concerns, the value is qualitative, not quantitative.
GPT-4, is said by some to be “next-level” and disruptive, but what will the reality be?
CEO Sam Altman answers questions about the GPT-4 and the future of AI.
Hints that GPT-4 Will Be Multimodal AI?
In a podcast interview (AI for the Next Era) from September 13, 2022, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discussed the near future of AI technology.
Of particular interest is that he said that a multimodal model was in the near future.
Multimodal means the ability to function in multiple modes, such as text, images, and sounds.
OpenAI interacts with humans through text inputs. Whether it’s Dall-E or ChatGPT, it’s strictly a textual interaction.
An AI with multimodal capabilities can interact through speech. It can listen to commands and provide information or perform a task.
Altman offered these tantalizing details about what to expect soon:
“I think we’ll get multimodal models in not that much longer, and that’ll open up new things.
I think people are doing amazing work with agents that can use computers to do things for you, use programs and this idea of a language interface where you say a natural language – what you want in this kind of dialogue back and forth.
You can iterate and refine it, and the computer just does it for you.
You see some of this with DALL-E and CoPilot in very early ways.”
Altman didn’t specifically say that GPT-4 will be multimodal. But he did hint that it was coming within a short time frame.
Of particular interest is that he envisions multimodal AI as a platform for building new business models that aren’t possible today.
He compared multimodal AI to the mobile platform and how that opened opportunities for thousands of new ventures and jobs.
Altman said:
“…I think this is going to be a massive trend, and very large businesses will get built with this as the interface, and more generally [I think] that these very powerful models will be one of the genuine new technological platforms, which we haven’t really had since mobile.
And there’s always an explosion of new companies right after, so that’ll be cool.”
When asked about what the next stage of evolution was for AI, he responded with what he said were features that were a certainty.
“I think we will get true multimodal models working.
And so not just text and images but every modality you have in one model is able to easily fluidly move between things.”
AI Models That Self-Improve?
Something that isn’t talked about much is that AI researchers want to create an AI that can learn by itself.
This ability goes beyond spontaneously understanding how to do things like translate between languages.
The spontaneous ability to do things is called emergence. It’s when new abilities emerge from increasing the amount of training data.
But an AI that learns by itself is something else entirely that isn’t dependent on how huge the training data is.
What Altman described is an AI that actually learns and self-upgrades its abilities.
Furthermore, this kind of AI goes beyond the version paradigm that software traditionally follows, where a company releases version 3, version 3.5, and so on.
He envisions an AI model that is trained and then learns on its own, growing by itself into an improved version.
Altman didn’t indicate that GPT-4 will have this capability.
He just put this out there as something that they’re aiming for, apparently something that is within the realm of distinct possibility.
He explained an AI with the ability to self-learn:
“I think we will have models that continuously learn.
So right now, if you use GPT whatever, it’s stuck in the time that it was trained. And the more you use it, it doesn’t get any better and all of that.
I think we’ll get that changed.
So I’m very excited about all of that.”
It’s unclear if Altman was talking about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), but it sort of sounds like it.
Altman recently debunked the idea that OpenAI has an AGI, which is quoted later in this article.
Altman was prompted by the interviewer to explain how all of the ideas he was talking about were actual targets and plausible scenarios and not just opinions of what he’d like OpenAI to do.
The interviewer asked:
“So one thing I think would be useful to share – because folks don’t realize that you’re actually making these strong predictions from a fairly critical point of view, not just ‘We can take that hill’…”
Altman explained that all of these things he’s talking about are predictions based on research that allows them to set a viable path forward to choose the next big project confidently.
He shared,
“We like to make predictions where we can be on the frontier, understand predictably what the scaling laws look like (or have already done the research) where we can say, ‘All right, this new thing is going to work and make predictions out of that way.’
And that’s how we try to run OpenAI, which is to do the next thing in front of us when we have high confidence and take 10% of the company to just totally go off and explore, which has led to huge wins.”
Can OpenAI Reach New Milestones With GPT-4?
One of the things necessary to drive OpenAI is money and massive amounts of computing resources.
Microsoft has already poured three billion dollars into OpenAI, and according to the New York Times, it is in talks to invest an additional $10 billion.
It was hinted that GPT-4 might have multimodal capabilities, quoting a venture capitalist Matt McIlwain who has knowledge of GPT-4.
The Times reported:
“OpenAI is working on an even more powerful system called GPT-4, which could be released as soon as this quarter, according to Mr. McIlwain and four other people with knowledge of the effort.
…Built using Microsoft’s huge network for computer data centers, the new chatbot could be a system much like ChatGPT that solely generates text. Or it could juggle images as well as text.
Some venture capitalists and Microsoft employees have already seen the service in action.
But OpenAI has not yet determined whether the new system will be released with capabilities involving images.”
The Money Follows OpenAI
While OpenAI hasn’t shared details with the public, it has been sharing details with the venture funding community.
It is currently in talks that would value the company as high as $29 billion.
That is a remarkable achievement because OpenAI is not currently earning significant revenue, and the current economic climate has forced the valuations of many technology companies to go down.
“Venture capital firms Thrive Capital and Founders Fund are among the investors interested in buying a total of $300 million worth of OpenAI shares, the Journal reported. The deal is structured as a tender offer, with the investors buying shares from existing shareholders, including employees.”
The high valuation of OpenAI can be seen as a validation for the future of the technology, and that future is currently GPT-4.
Sam Altman Answers Questions About GPT-4
Sam Altman was interviewed recently for the StrictlyVC program, where he confirms that OpenAI is working on a video model, which sounds incredible but could also lead to serious negative outcomes.
While the video part was not said to be a component of GPT-4, what was of interest and possibly related, is that Altman was emphatic that OpenAI would not release GPT-4 until they were assured that it was safe.
The relevant part of the interview occurs at the 4:37 minute mark:
The interviewer asked:
“Can you comment on whether GPT-4 is coming out in the first quarter, first half of the year?”
Sam Altman responded:
“It’ll come out at some point when we are like confident that we can do it safely and responsibly.
I think in general we are going to release technology much more slowly than people would like.
We’re going to sit on it much longer than people would like.
And eventually people will be like happy with our approach to this.
But at the time I realized like people want the shiny toy and it’s frustrating and I totally get that.”
Twitter is abuzz with rumors that are difficult to confirm. One unconfirmed rumor is that it will have 100 trillion parameters (compared to GPT-3’s 175 billion parameters).
That rumor was debunked by Sam Altman in the StrictlyVC interview program, where he also said that OpenAI doesn’t have Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which is the ability to learn anything that a human can.
Altman commented:
“I saw that on Twitter. It’s complete b——t.
The GPT rumor mill is like a ridiculous thing.
…People are begging to be disappointed and they will be.
…We don’t have an actual AGI and I think that’s sort of what’s expected of us and you know, yeah… we’re going to disappoint those people. “
Many Rumors, Few Facts
The two facts about GPT-4 that are reliable are that OpenAI has been cryptic about GPT-4 to the point that the public knows virtually nothing, and the other is that OpenAI won’t release a product until it knows it is safe.
So at this point, it is difficult to say with certainty what GPT-4 will look like and what it will be capable of.
But a tweet by technology writer Robert Scoble claims that it will be next-level and a disruption.
There are several coming that will completely change the game. GPT-4 is next level, I hear, for instance.
