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10 Alternative Content Types to Try

OCTOBER 18, 2023

Remix your content mix with these 10 alternative formats:

Live streams offer an interactive, authentic experience that builds trust with users, holding their attention 10 to 20 times longer than an on-demand video.
Screencasts or screen recordings with narration make your demonstrations, FAQs, and step-by-step instructions more memorable to clients.
Podcasts that tackle topics in your niche drive brand awareness. In fact, 69% of listeners say they discover new products and services through podcasts.
Storyboarding or combining panels of text, images, and illustrations can be a powerful well to tell stories like the customer journey.
AR/VR content is an immersive channel to demonstrates product features, run interactive ads, or offer tutorials.
Instructographics are like infographics that teach the audience how to do something.
Carousels generate the most comments and 1.92% higher engagement than single images.
Shoppable posts appeal to Gen Z, who prefer to do their shopping on social media.
Ephemeral content like Instagram stories create a sense of urgency to capture attention.
Gamified content helps you stand out from competitors and generates twice the conversions.

Dig in to each type at G2.

3 Rules for Writing, According to Science

OCTOBER 17, 2023

Tired of people TLDR-ing your content?

Scientists analyzed over 650k reading sessions and found 3 elements that keep people reading until the end.

Keep it simple, stupid. Use shorter, common, and concrete words for clarity. When your content is easy to mentally process, people are 25% more likely to finish it.
Avoid long, complex sentence structures, and eliminate passive voice.
Capture attention with emotional language and an excited, anxious, or hopeful tone.

Dig into the study at Ariyh.

9 Simple Steps to Improve Site UX

OCTOBER 16, 2023

Increase your conversions by limiting the distraction of bad site UX. Here’s how:

Opt for a crisp, clean layout with big margins and white space.
Ensure that your site loads within 1 to 2 seconds.
Keep people funneling through your site with easy navigation: large headers, simple footers, and spotlighted articles.
Keep the look and feel consistent throughout.
Be selective about stock photography. Imagery should highlight your brand’s personality.
Differentiate those URLs by linking a phrase instead of a single word. Go for a CTA button where it counts. And make sure formatting isn’t hiding your links.
Make sign-ups easy with auto-fill forms, and don’t ask for more info than you truly need.
Mobile-friendly or bust.
QA those links!

Head over to MarTech for more.

The Case for Amazon Ads

OCTOBER 15, 2023

Amazon Ads offer a unique, product-focused advantage for ecommerce advertisers. While Google Ads promises a broader reach, Amazon Ads present the following opportunities:

Higher conversion rates. Most U.S. product searches occur on Amazon, leading to significantly higher conversion rates—up to 15% compared to just 5% with Google Ads.
Easy attribution and tracking. Amazon Ads’ integrated approach, complete with product data, reviews, videos, and customer trust, makes it a breeze for advertisers to map the customer journey from keywords to sales.
Drive rankings. Unlike Google, Amazon’s unofficial policy suggests that Sponsored Ads can influence organic rankings by driving more buyers to listings, increasing sales, and improving sell-through rates.
Long-term value. Amazon Ads not only boost sales and rankings but also generate reviews, akin to links for Google SEO, making it a tangible investment in your Amazon presence, unlike Google Ads, which Google explicitly keeps separate from organic rankings.
Marketplace dominance. Google’s “Unfair Advantage” policy limits advertisers to one listing per keyword, while Amazon allows a single advertiser to command a significant portion of the search results page, granting more real estate control.

Check out Search Engine Land for more on Amazon Ads.

Mental Models for Content Marketers

OCTOBER 11, 2023

Let’s get academic for a minute. These 5 mental models can radically shift your perspective and shock you out of a content rut:

The Gordian Knot: Address complex problems with unconventional, simpler solutions, similar to how Alexander the Great cuts a knot with his sword instead of attempting to untie it. This principle emphasizes the value of reframing problems and seeking higher-level solutions to make issues seem less complicated.
Chekhov’s Gun: Any prominent element introduced in a story or article should have a meaningful impact on the plot or content. This principle warns against making promises in introductions or headlines that aren’t fulfilled in the subsequent content, emphasizing the importance of delivering on what is initially suggested.
Arbitrage: This means to find a valuable item at a low cost and resell it for a higher price. To apply arbitrage to content writing, take undervalued ideas from one context and repurpose them in a different context to increase their value, such as translating financial concepts into marketing or making dense information more accessible in blog posts.
Hamming Question: Mathematician Richard Hamming asked, “What are the most important problems in your field?” In content marketing, consider if the content being produced tackles the most substantial challenges faced by the audience and whether it’s achieving meaningful outcomes rather than simply adhering to routine schedules.
Oblique Strategies: These are intentionally vague directives aimed at breaking creative ruts and fostering new ideas. For example, “Give way to your worst impulse” encourages the creative to abandon their current approach and consider alternative perspectives, ultimately leading to a more focused and potentially unique outcome.

Check out the Animalz post for more.

New Ad Options for Reels

OCTOBER 10, 2023

Just in time for the holidays, Meta has announced these new Reels features to enhance your ad campaigns:

Collection ads: These Reels feature one large video/image with several smaller images in the bottom left, which users can swipe through, located under the ecomm CTA.
Multi-destination Reels carousel ads: You can now direct users to multiple product pages within your carousel ad to help potential customers browse items seamlessly.
Swipe left functionality: Users can now quickly access your landing page and shop your products with a simple swipe to the left, moving from passive to active shopping with ease.

Check out the announcement for more info on template and music optimizations, too.

The TikTok Search Ads Toggle

OCTOBER 9, 2023

Over half of TikTok users discover new brands and products on the platform, relying on TikTok’s powerful search experience to find tips, recipes, reviews, and more.

When you enable TikTok’s new Search Ads Toggle within the Ads Manager, your existing in-feed ads are automatically served alongside relevant organic search results in the app, extending your reach to high-intent users.

These search ads are labeled “Sponsored” and will appear in various positions on the results page based on your existing targeting, as well as “relevancy, user intent (…), and learnings from other user behavior,” according to TikTok.

TikTok claims that 70% of ad groups with Search Ads Toggle enabled saw more efficient performance. The feature is automatically enabled for in-feed ads, but can also can be activated mid-campaign if you opt out initially.

Check out TikTok for brand case studies using the Search Ads Toggle.

11 Google Ads Hacks for PPC

OCTOBER 6, 2023

Supercharge your PPC campaign on Google Ads with these 10 hacks:

Enhance relevance by mastering the art of single keyword ad groups.
Employ ad extensions wherever possible to be more prominent and engaging.
Optimize and adjust bids by device to meet your users where they’re at.
Schedule your ads for peak performance when your target audience is most active.
Refine your ad’s location targeting so you can exclude irrelevant areas and bid for others more aggressively.
Use dynamic keyword insertion to let Google tailor your message for optimal relevance.
Implement remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) so you can bid aggressively for high-value users.
Experiment with different match types to find the most effective strategy for your campaign.
Use negative keywords along with the positive to save your budget.
A/B test everything to collect data for insights.

Check out Entrepreneur to drill down through each hack.

How Orphan Pages Affect SEO

OCTOBER 4, 2023

Orphan pages, or pages that don’t have links to anywhere else within your website hierarchy, might be affecting your SEO. Here’s how:

They’re not indexed. Orphan pages are inaccessible to search engine crawlers, preventing them from indexing and potentially excluding them from search results. Nevertheless, search engines can sometimes find orphan pages through XML sitemaps, but this doesn’t negate the need to address the issue.
They don’t rank well. Not having internal links to a page can negatively impact its search engine rankings and organic traffic, even if it’s crawled and indexed. Google’s PageRank algorithm relies on inbound links to assess a page’s quality and authority, with each link acting as a vote. Internal linking helps distribute “link equity” throughout your website, but a page lacking these internal links may struggle to rank well and receive organic traffic.
They’re just bad UX. Orphan pages, lacking inbound links from menus or other pages, remain hidden from visitors. Users can only access these pages by directly entering the URL, which is impossible if they are unaware of the page’s existence. If valuable information is on an orphan page, it’s essentially inaccessible to your audience, defeating its purpose.

Find out how to fix orphan pages over at Semrush.