Making Money On-line: Online Marketing News: ROI of Social Selling, LinkedIn’s Ad Targeting, Facebook Hits 3 Million

Friday, 4 March 2016

Online Marketing News: ROI of Social Selling, LinkedIn’s Ad Targeting, Facebook Hits 3 Million

social-selling-statistics

The ROI of Social Selling: Data-Driven Outcomes [Infographic]
The first rule of sales is you have to be where your customers are. If you aren’t, how will they ever find you? As we progress further into the digital age, salespeople and marketers are becoming more and more collaborative, to the benefit of their mutual employers. The secret sauce to any organization practicing marketing enabled sales lies in great content that meets your customers where they are at every stage of the buying cycle. This infographic explains the how and why of social selling. Sales for Life

LinkedIn Intros B2B Spin On Facebook’s Custom Audiences To Target Ads
LinkedIn has upped their ad game, enabling marketers to target ads to employees of an uploaded list of up to 30,000 companies. Their new account-targeting option will be similar to those at Facebook, Twitter and Google+. So how can eager B2B marketers get their hands on this new targeting capability? According to Marketing Land, “Only brands buying ads directly from LinkedIn’s sales team can use account targeting at the moment, but the company plans to eventually roll it out to brands buying ads through its self-serve tool.” Marketing Land

Facebook Reaches 3 Million Advertisers, Launches ‘Your Business Story’ Video Tool
On March 2nd, Facebook announced they’ve reached 3 million advertisers on their platform. “To put that in perspective” author Andrew Hutchinson lists, “Twitter has 130,000 active users, Instagram recently announced they’ve hit 200,000 advertisers, and Google, currently the leader in the online ads space, is believed to have more than 4 million active advertisers (though they don’t openly discuss this figure).” In celebration, Facebook launched a new tool called ‘Your Business Story’ that allows Facebook advertisers to use their Facebook Page’s photos and content to tell the story of their achievements and highlights. Social Media Today

Facebook is letting publishers use Instant Articles to collect email newsletter signups
Facebook is testing newsletter sign-up messages at the bottom of their Instant Articles. What many publishers hope, according to Digiday, is “the more they bump into the publisher’s articles on Facebook, the more likely they are to start coming directly to the publisher’s own site. There, publishers can not only keep all the ad revenue they generate but can sell the readers on subscriptions and newsletters and other products as well as collect data on their reading habits that can be used to improve the site experience.” As a fairly common call to action in the content marketing world, ‘Subscribe’ is a natural next step for readers that enjoy your content –and Facebook is facilitating that conversion. Digiday

Google Image Search tests colored filter buttons
It appears that Google is taking a cue from Pinterest in their latest test — using colored filter buttons on their image search. The change shows up on desktop for a select few users, with a diverse button background colors. This will certainly make image searching more user friendly, enabling users to narrow down their searches in an intuitive way. What does this mean for marketers? It’s more important than ever to use specific and helpful alt tags when optimizing your content for search. Search Engine Land

Brands and agencies are already experimenting with on-demand Snapchat geofilters
Snapchat is allowing people and businesses to design their own geofilters for specific “spaces during set periods of time — starting from just $5.” This is big news for event marketers who want to find a new way to spread the word about their events, whether that’s a college on orientation weekend, or even a marketing conference. Restaurants like IHOP are using the geofilters to target customers in their stores, while other organizations are using it to encourage their employees to experience the feature before they begin using it in future marketing campaigns. Digiday

Despite Tech Aids, B2B Marketers Struggle with Targeting
Getting the right message to the right audience at the right time is an ever-present challenge for marketers, even with all of the targeting advantages available to us through various digital media. According to Wakefield Research: “Seventy percent of the marketers surveyed said their advertising fails to meet their expectations either all of some of the time, and 96% admit it’s inevitable that their communications will reach a significant number of people outside of their targeted segments.” Others cited problems including measuring ROI, long sales cycles, and lack of quality leads. Direct Marketing News

What were the top online and digital marketing news stories for you this week?

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend! I’ll be back next week with more online marketing news. Have something to share? Tweet me at @Tiffani_Allen or send it to @toprank!

Infographic via Hubspot

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