Is Marketing on Pinterest Right for My Business?

Most businesses understand the importance of marketing on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, ect. Pinterest is a social platform that’s often overlooked due to the assumption it’s just a place moms go to find recipes and DIY inspiration. Actually, Shopify found it was the second highest source for referral traffic and that 93% of pinners use the platform for research or making purchases. Not only are users extremely active, but Pinterest has rolled out a number of new features over the past year increasing the platform’s marketing abilities. 

Pinterest is becoming a great tool for digital marketing, but just as all social platforms, it’s not ideal for all businesses. Discover more about Pinterest, its marketing capabilities, and whether or not it’s right for your business. 

The Benefits of Using Pinterest for Business 

Driving Traffic to Your Website 

Pinterest has the ability to drive mass amounts of traffic directly to your company website. Research has found that Pinterest actually drives more referral traffic than LinkedIn, Google+, and YouTube combined. This is due to its unique design. Every image placed on a board is automatically hyperlinked to its original source. To be directed to your website, all users have to do is click directly on the image of the pin. 

Using Pinterest regularly can also help drive more organic traffic by increasing SEO rankings. This is partially due to contents’ ability to last longer on the platform. Generally, the most popular posts on other social sites are whatever is most recent. Pins gain popularity over time as they’re actively searched for, found, and re-pinned. This can help to be a powerful tool in driving you up Google’s rankings and making you more discoverable. 

Engage with High-Intent Customers 

Since last year, users increased 28%, to 322 million active monthly users. Not only are there more people using Pinterest than ever, the majority of them are high-intent, ready to purchase audience members. 98% of users report trying new things they discover on the platform, 93% have used it to research, plan for, or make purchases, and 39% of users are active shoppers. Users are more likely to purchase products they come across organically on Pinterest than any other social platform due to users proactively searching, rather than just scrolling through a feed. 

Build Brand Image and Authority 

Visual content is more important than ever, as 62% of Gen Zers and millennials say they like searching by images. Pinterest is the perfect platform to tell customers who you are and what you’re about, visually. You have the opportunity to reinforce your brand image by regularly appearing on users’ home pages, creating a variety of boards that reflect your identity, or sharing outside relevant content. These practices can help to build credibility and brand authority in your niche industry. 

What Types of Businesses Should Use Pinterest?  

Whether Pinterest is a good fit for your business is ultimately up to you, but there seem to be some that perform better than others. In general, it’s easier for B2C companies to market on Pinterest, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible for B2B. Clothing, cosmetic, food, home decor, and DIY’s are the types of content that seems to perform best. While the majority of Pinterest users are women ages 25-54, 50% of all new sign-ups are men

Another statistic that’s important to keep in mind is that 40% of Pinterest users have a household income of $100K per year or more. This shows that the platform attracts those with large amounts of disposable income with the ability to spend on luxury products. 

That being said, any business has the potential to be successful on Pinterest. Just as with any other marketing tool, success is highly dependent on your strategy. The key is having the ability to consistently create captivating, high-quality, visual content that’s valuable to users. A good pin has: 

  • Vertical imagery. Majority of pinners are on mobile. Shoot for a 2:3 aspect ratio so your image doesn’t get truncated, while making it as high-quality as possible. 
  • Descriptive copy. Explain what users are looking at and entice them to learn more.
  • Text overlay. Including a headline that reinforces your message.
  • Tasteful branding. Include your logo so your brand doesn’t get lost in feeds.

How to Get Started 

When getting started, make sure you set up a business account, rather than a personal. This will give you access to analytics and other exclusive marketing tools. If you already have a personal account, Pinterest allows you to convert it to a business profile here. It’s important to keep branding consistent with your site and other social media accounts. If it’s available, try to use the same username. If you have them, you should also connect your Instagram, YouTube, and/or Etsy accounts. Doing so ensures pins from these sites will be attributed to your business. Plus, you’ll also be able to track related analytics. Once your account is set up, you can start creating boards and adding pins. If you plan on running paid ads, you can then set up your ads manager account as well. 

How We Can Help 

At Onimod Global we are experts in social media marketing. We know which platforms are best for brands, and create visibility for brands where customers are searching, interacting, and ultimately converting. Find out more about we do, or contact us today!

Twitter Marketing: Is it Right for Your Brand?

Twitter has proven to be an incredibly powerful marketing tool for certain brands. It can be a great platform to increase awareness, engage with customers, and grow your business, but it isn’t right for everyone. Each social network is unique in its targeting, reach, and overall marketing abilities. When making the decision whether or not a specific platform is right for your business, an analysis of both yourself and the platform needs to be done.

What to consider before marketing your business on Twitter: 

Are you B2C or B2B? 

This is one of the most important factors that should go into developing a social media marketing strategy. In general, those searching on social media are at the very top of the sales funnel, but there are exceptions. Twitter is usually best for B2C companies, but it can work for B2B companies with the appropriate tactics. It’s becoming a central discovery hub for consumers, making it a great platform for displaying expertise, products, and creativity. News, retail, e-commerce, fashion, finance, travel, hospitality, sports, health and wellness are some of the top performing industries on Twitter. 

Who is your audience? 

This is the number one thing that should be considered before deciding to join any social media platform. If your ideal audience is millennials, Twitter is a strong choice, as 40% use it. As age increases, the percentage of use decreases. 27% of 30 – 49 year olds are users and 21% of 50 – 64 year olds are users. That doesn’t necessarily mean Twitter is a bad platform for reaching an older audience. It just means your actual strategy on Twitter would be different. It’s also important to note that 42% of users access the site daily

What is your brand’s persona? 

Establishing a well-defined brand voice is essential for Twitter strategy. Brand voice should be original, convey a message, reflect core values, and resonate with your audience in a personal way. Companies that convey their Twitter account in a lighthearted way generally have a leg up than those that keep it serious. Twitter users are most encouraging, engaging, and creative of all other social networks. Content that’s fun, snarky, and relaxed will always perform better on this platform. This also goes into deciding whom will be doing the tweeting for your company. It is possible to have more than one person running the account, but it’s essential to make sure they’re all in sync. 

What is your overall social media goal? 

If you only want to use Twitter to gain followers, promote yourself, and don’t care about what others have to say, it’s probably not the platform for you. This isn’t an account you can just put on autopilot. Regular engagement and interaction is vital for Twitter success. Scheduling tweets and never checking back is a huge missed opportunity. To maximize reach and keep your audience engaged it’s essential to check activity often, retweet relevant content, and jump in on trending conversations. Twitter is best for building relationships with customers, as it’s one of the most personable social platforms. Many companies utilize it for customer service inquiries, as it’s the best means of contact for many reasons. There are no hold times, it’s more informal, it’s public, and it’s in real time. Companies have the opportunity to respond to complaints immediately, which means problems can be solved that much faster. Since other users can see this happen as well, it showcases excellent customer service and may even save you from repeating them in the future. 

Final Thoughts 

Twitter can be a great platform for marketing and presents unique opportunities for both companies and customers, though it’s not for everyone. It’s simple to use, but takes frequent attention. Finally, it’s important to note that Twitter, just as all social media, is not an ultimate marketing solution. It should be used as a tactic, working in conjunction with other tools to support your overall marketing strategy. 

How We Can Help 

At Onimod Global we are experts in social media marketing. We know which platforms are best for brands, and create visibility for brands where customers are searching, interacting, and ultimately converting. Find out more about we do here, or contact us today here.

The Top Tips and Benefits of Content Marketing

The use of content marketing has grown exponentially in recent years. While the vast amount of content on the internet can be a positive, it’s also left the market extremely saturated. This means that the use of content is much less effective than it was in the past, which is not a positive. This doesn’t mean it should be abandoned, there are still many benefits to content marketing. It just means the content used needs to be valuable, relevant, and correctly leveraged. 

What is Content Marketing 

Content marketing is a digital marketing strategy that focuses on creating and sharing valuable or relevant information on a consistent basis for the ideal buyer persona. The goal is to build relationships with customers, drive organic traffic, increase conversion rates, and ultimately capture more sales. It’s important to know that content marketing is not promotional content. The modern consumer is hyper aware of sales pitches or anything in-genuine. Consumers prefer being educated and informed about products and companies, and are much more likely to believe other consumers over a company. 

Content Marketing Benefits:

Higher rankings

One of the number one things you can do to increase your search engine rankings is add more content to your site. Search engines, Google especially, likes to provide users with results that deliver exactly what they’re searching for. Consistently adding relevant, keyword rich content in the form of blogs or landing pages is the best way to provide that experience. Having more pages doesn’t always correlate to more traffic, but having more quality pages indexed can grant you more opportunities to rank for more search queries. 

Brand credibility

Having high quality content on your site immediately increases your perceived expertise, authority, and trust of your company. Users thinking highly of brands that they feel are answering their questions and providing useful and relevant information. Higher domain authority strongly correlates with higher search rankings. So yet again, producing consistent quality content will help increase organic traffic for all pages of your site.

Drive sales 

The first goal of your content should be to deliver some kind of value to the reader. After that has been done, you can use any remaining space to tactfully promote your product, service, or brand. Content can inspire requests for more information, trials, downloads, consultations, and sales. Highly targeted content can be one of the best ways to speed up the sales funnel, as long as it’s done right. Your content should never seem like a promotional advertisement. 

Content Marketing Tips:

Your content should be the answer 

Content should be based on questions potential customers might have. The more direct and detailed the answer is, the better it will rank on Google or other search engines. Most companies are well aware of their customers’ problems and pain points. This can be transformed into tutorials, how-to-guides, etc. For a piece of content to be effective it needs to be actionable. Inform your audience about specific steps to take or resources they need to carry out the advice you’re giving. Your answers can vary according to audience demographics. If you know your audience is split, segment your content strategy to target each group directly, instead of writing generically.

Use images and videos whenever possible 

HubSpot’s 2016 video marketing statistics report that adding videos to landing pages can boost conversions up to 80% and that users are 64% more likely to buy something online after they’ve watched a video about it. You can integrate videos into blogs or create them separately as their own entity, like a “vlog.” When people only spend 8 seconds deciding whether or not they’re interested in a piece of content, it helps to be visually stimulating. So even if you can’t include a video, images can be just as effective. 

Create and stick to a content calendar 

For content to be effective it needs to be consistent. The best way to ensure you’re posting regularly is by laying everything out in a weekly or monthly content calendar. It should be more detailed than just reminders to post. Include things like what your blog topics will be, what tags you’re using for each post, where everything needs to be shared, etc. This way when the time comes you’re not scrambling to think of content ideas. There are a number of tools that can assist with content calendars. CoSchedule, WordPress, and Asana are a few editorial calendar and project management tools, but it can be done a basic spreadsheet as well. 

Make sharing your content easy

This is one of the easiest tips to implement to a site. Social sharing buttons should fit in with the site’s theme and be prominently placed throughout blog posts and web pages. If the sharing process is complicated and time-consuming, no one will do it. It should be a simple, one-step to share process. There should be options to share to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and any other platforms that seem fitting. 

Always include a CTA

Strong call-to-actions are necessary in any marketing strategy. It’s unlikely users will go to your homepage, browse to other pages, or end up where you want them to be. They need to be told what to do with a quick link to it. Whether that be liking/following a social media page, sharing a post, subscribing, requesting more information, etc. It’s beneficial to A/B test your call-to-actions as well. Try different locations, colors, copy, etc. It’s important to make sure the CTA doesn’t interrupt the flow of content, though. It should seem like the natural consequence of the content. It should also be clear and easily clickable. 

No matter your ultimate marketing goal, content is always a valuable addition. It works, and that’s why it’s so widely used today. The key is to ensure it continues to work in a saturated market is by leveraging new and innovative tactics, like setting clearer content marketing goals and A/B testing various content. 

More from Onimod Global 

Sometimes, outsourcing your content marketing is the right choice. At Onimod Global we’re experts in SEO, social media, and content marketing. We create visibility for companies in the places their customers are searching, interacting, and engaging. Take a look at how we’ve helped other companies, and learn more about what we can do for you!

YouTube’s New “Video Reach” Campaign Capabilities

Earlier this week YouTube launched a new way to run video ad campaigns. Advertisers can now upload three different types of videos under one campaign, and it apparently cuts campaign costs by more than 20%. In the announcement, YouTube said they’re constantly working on better ways to help companies achieve their marketing goals—whether that’s to build awareness, shift perceptions, or drive a specific action. It should be a simpler and more effective way to drive reach while meeting target audiences in the places they’re watching.

 

Video Reach Campaigns 

Before, advertisers would have to make 3 separate campaigns for each video ad type. Now, they can use 6 second bumpers, skippable in-stream ads, and non-skippable in-stream ads in a single campaign. From there, Google’s machine learning will automatically serve the most efficient combination of these formats to help reach your audience at scale.

Bumper Ads: Non-skippable ads, 6 seconds or shorter that are shown before the video the user wishes to view. Bumper ads use target CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) bidding. You pay each time your ad is shown 1,000 times.

Skippable In-Stream Ads: The ad plays before, during, or after other videos and viewers have the option to skip after 5 seconds. These can appear on YouTube watch pages, on videos on partner sites, and apps in the Display Network. You have two bidding options, CPV or CPM. With CPV you pay when a viewer watches 30 seconds of your video (or the duration if it’s shorter than 30 seconds) or interacts with your video, whichever comes first. CPM bidding means you pay based on impressions. Skippable in-stream ads use CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) bidding, so you pay each time your ad is shown 1,000 times.

Non-Skippable In-Stream Ads: The non-skippable video ad is an ad format that may appear pre-, mid-, or post-roll while viewing partner content. They can be 15-20 seconds long and viewers must watch the ad before they’re able to watch the selected video. A smaller, 300 x 60-pixel ad may also be shown next to YouTube videos that show non-skippable video ads on desktop. They are sold on a CPM basis, and may generate higher CPMs than other ad formats on YouTube.

 

TrueView for Action Campaigns

For companies looking to build a full-funnel strategy, YouTube recommends using the video campaigns alongside a TrueView for action campaign. TrueView campaigns are built to drive leads and conversions by adding CTAs, headline text overlays, and an end screen to video ads. In the announcement, YouTube said that soon, TrueView for action ads will extend to the home feed, giving advertisers the opportunity to capture more high value leads. 

 

Masthead on TV Screens 

YouTube also announced it will be bringing mastheads to their fastest growing surface, the tv screen. According to YouTube, their daily watch time tops 250 million hours a day. It will be available as a reserved placement for advertisers to ensure brands can drive the visibility they need on the dates that matter most. They can be purchased on a CPM basis, with audience targeting capabilities, and cross-screen or single-screen Masthead buying options. YouTube believes the rich audio and visual experience brought by the TV screen will create an upper-funnel drive greater than ever before. 

 

Final Thoughts 

Some companies have already started adopting the new campaign strategies. Ford, being one of them, has reported strong results. In alpha tests, the automaker lowered their campaign cost over 20% compared to their past YouTube campaigns. These new capabilities take advertisers’ guesswork out of creating comprehensive campaigns that utilize a series of ads. YouTube is becoming a stronger and more strategic partner by focusing more on marketing objectives rather than media. 

 

More From Onimod Global 

To catch up on the latest digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here!

The Importance of Social Listening

Social listening is an invaluable marketing tool that not enough companies take full advantage of. It allows you to track, analyze, and respond to conversations about your brand, competitors, and your entire industry online. If you don’t have a social listening strategy in place, you’re missing out on critical insights.

 

What is Social Listening 

Social media listening is analyzing conversations and trends happening, not just around your brand, but your industry as a whole, and using those insights to make better marketing decisions. Social listening is not the same as social monitoring. Social monitoring involves tracking and responding to messages about or sent directly to your brand. Social listening helps you understand why, where, and how these conversations are happening, and people’s in-depth thoughts, not just their tags and mentions of your brand specifically. It can assist in forming future campaigns, improving content and messaging strategy, and building effective and impactful brand partnerships. Social listening is all about understanding the bigger picture. 

 

The Benefits 

Reputation Management 

This is the most common reason companies perform social listening. Companies can monitor mentions of their products and track overall brand health. Following conversations around your brand can allow you to illuminate consumer attitudes and sentiment drivers. Social media has become a leading customer service platform, and where customers prefer to complain. Whether it’s to a brand or just about one in general, customers openly share about any problem they’ve encountered. Other customers often judge brands by how they respond to these complaints. Companies that respond promptly with professionalism and empathy keep customers and gain new ones. 

Market Research 

Social listening can supplement – or sometimes even replace – traditional market research strategies. Traditional market research methods such as surveys, focus groups, interviews, etc. only reflect attitudes of a small group of people at one point in time. The information gathered can be time-constrained, selective, and skewed. Social media analytics can produce data in hours or days, as opposed to the weeks and months for conventional methods. When the information gathered is unprompted it’s more likely to reveal consumers’ true, unfiltered feelings. Social media listening can help quickly identify market issues, consumer concerns, and preferred product features. For most companies, their markets are constantly and rapidly changing. Those fail to keep up quickly get left behind, such as BlackBerry and Nintendo. 

Competitor Analysis and General Research 

The purpose of social listening doesn’t just stop at your brand, you can also monitor competitors, as well as just any general phenomenon being discussed online. Occasionally checking a competitor’s website doesn’t really give the full picture about how they’re performing in the space. Companies can gain a wealth of competitive intelligence through monitoring what’s being said about your competition on social networks, in the general media, on discussion boards, etc. This can give you data on new product development, marketing strategies, product positioning, key consumers, and any PR activity. Identifying competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and successful/unsuccessful strategies can help you determine things to try and avoid. 

Additionally, you can monitor anything in general that you find relevant to your brand. Whether you’re a journalist writing an article on a political issue, a charity wanting to evaluate the volume of conversations around a social cause, or an entrepreneur looking to start a business and doing market research, social listening can assist you. 

Identifying User-Generated Content and Potential Influencers 

Consumers frequently post photos and videos praising products online. User-generated content can be an enormously effective and affordable way to market yourself. Countless studies have shown that consumers trust recommendations made by other customers more than brands, especially if the consumer has influence. Social listening enables brands to find this type of content, amplify it, and repurpose it for marketing purposes. 

Through social listening you can also identify the impact and reach of your brand mentions and find who your most influential advocates are. If you’re looking to partner with an influencer, you can create a social listening alert for your industry and see who are the most influential people in your niche. It’s also smart to note competitor’s influencers because they would likely make a good fit for your brand as well. 

 

The Top 5 Social Listening Tools of 2019 

 

 

 

 

Conclusion 

Social media is an invaluable resource for insights and trends in consumer behavior that not enough brands take full advantage of. Social listening tools continue to get more powerful and affordable as more brands turn to them for market research, customer insights, competitive analysis, and to gain leads. If you settle on purchasing a tool it’s important to remember that just monitoring isn’t enough. To make it worthwhile, you need to act on the data. Which means engaging with customers that are mentioning you, spotting trends to adapt to your marketing, customer services, and product strategies, with the overall goal to better serve your customers. 

 

More From Onimod Global 

To catch up on the latest digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here!

LinkedIn Adds New Features to Campaign Manager

LinkedIn announced late last week that it will be adding three new features to their advertising platform. These features include brand awareness campaigns, website conversion tracking capabilities, and job applications. This new version will also have an optimized click pricing option. 

LinkedIn has recently been putting a lot of emphasis on improving the platform’s advertising capabilities and proving the product should be considered more in the paid social space. From updating ad targeting capabilities to new integrations, such as moat analytics integration for video marketing. The newest update is focusing on campaign objectives, ensuring it’s easier to achieve the right results that better align with them. The updated Campaign Manager has been in public beta since October, but LikedIn reports that it’s working, as customer satisfaction has lifted 67%. 

The New Campaign Objectives

Brand Awareness: Introduced as the first top of funnel ad objective to the Campaign Manager, designed to help advertisers increase “share-of-voice” on the platform rather than generating traffic. These campaigns are charged by impressions (CPM or cost per thousand), rather than clicks. 

Website Conversion Capabilities: Because “conversion” has such a broad range of meanings, LinkedIn has tightened the integration of its conversion tracking tool. Campaigns can now be created that are optimized for specific actions, such as purchases, downloads, or registrations. 

Job Applications: LinkedIn is a large recruiting tool for companies looking for new applicants. Now any LinkedIn Talent Solutions customer can create ads using Campaign Manager, driving applications to LinkedIn or back to the company website. 

Optimized Click Pricing 

Going along with the new Campaign Manager, LinkedIn has optimized their click pricing to better align with advertisers’ objectives as well. Meaning that you only pay for what’s valuable to you. For example, if website visits are selected as the campaign objective, the only clicks that are charged are those that made it to the landing page. For social engagement campaigns, pricing is optimized to include all social actions such as likes, comments, shares, etc. LinkedIn has been previously known as an expensive paid advertising platform. This new payment model is supposed to better align with larger objectives, and hopefully provide better ROI for advertisers. 

Final Thoughts 

LinkedIn is starting to become a much more marketing-friendly platform and a stronger competitor in the paid social space. When it comes to digital campaigns, it can be extremely beneficial when the machine learning systems have a better understanding of your objectives. Providing more variety in campaign goals, as well as different pricing models to match each type, will help advertisers get the results they need, while avoiding paying for the actions that they don’t. 

Putting these Features to Use 

At Onimod Global we’re experts in SEM and Social Media. We handle paid advertising on Google, Bing, and across all social platforms, including LinkedIn. We’ve recently been rolling out brand new LinkedIn campaigns for a few of our clients, and have started producing a few results. We understand that LinkedIn is not an appropriate advertising platform for all brands or all campaigns. Having the correct brand positioning is essential, and with our expertise we know exactly where you and your ads need to be. 

Learn more about what we do here, or if you’re ready to become a client, contact us here.

 

Instagram Advertising: Is It Right For You?

Instagram has recently announced that they are going to start displaying ads in its Explore tab. The Explore section allows users to browse new content while discovering new accounts based on their interests. The platform says they will be introducing ads “slowly and thoughtfully” in the coming months. They want Explore to be the best place for people to discover something new and for businesses to connect with people who may become meaningful customers

Instagram is becoming an increasingly popular marketing platform, as it has been reported they’re experiencing more user engagement growth than its parent company, Facebook. This new update gives advertisers even greater opportunities to reach users beyond just their feeds. While the benefits to advertising on Instagram are rapidly growing, the cons are still there. So, how can you be sure that Instagram is the right platform for you? 

How Instagram Advertising Works

As most other social platforms, Instagram advertising is utilized to grow brand exposure, website traffic, generate new leads, and hopefully get leads closer to converting. As the platform is visually based, text ads are not a thing here. Marketers must use images, a set of images, or videos, which can be accompanied with text, to reach users. 

The Pros 

Ultra Specific Targeting Capabilities 

Instagram falls under Facebook, meaning marketers have access to the same demographic targeting mechanisms on both platforms. Companies can target users based on interests, location, behavior, etc. Instagram offers a variety of campaign goal options, ensuring marketers are optimizing ad spend. 

Unique Visual Ad Formating 

Instagram ads allow marketers to maximize the extent of visual content. Companies can captivate users and create brand awareness by using high quality photos or videos. These photos and videos can be displayed as traditional posts, or there is the option to show them as stories as well. Companies have also started to reach out to influencers on the platform. Influencers are users that have a large and established following, whom companies have started paying to promote their products on their account. 

Higher Engagement Rates 

Instagram is a personal, conversational, and engaging platform. Engagement rates are 10 times higher than Facebook, 54 times higher than Pinterest, and 84 times higher than Twitter. Their formatting makes it possible for users to gain access to sales pages in just one click. Marketers can include call-to-actions to begin the checkout process, encouraging purchases straight from the app. This design eliminates the usual obstacles involved with online sales, allowing for instant gratification. 

The Cons 

Limited Audience 

While the platform offers a monthly user base of over 800 million, 90% of their users are under 35 years of age. Instagram is perfect for brands looking to engage with a younger audience, but those with an older target audience may find themselves struggling. While there are older users, very few are active. It’s also not the best platform to reach men. While they are on Instagram, it’s not as heavily as on other apps. Those brands exclusively targeting older ages or men may find it better for ROI to turn to other advertising platforms. 

Time-Intensive 

Staying fresh and relevant is crucial on a platform with large numbers of younger users. Authenticity is especially important here compared to search platforms, such as AdWords. Users begin to notice if brands are constantly regurgitating the same content just to increase posts. Brands have to be consistent with responding to comments, posting new content, and incorporating as many visual elements as possible to encourage interaction.

Required to Work Through Mobile Devices 

While you can access the platform through a web browser, abilities are extremely limited. Users are required to post through apps on mobile devices. Once the ads are initially posted they can be shared easily throughout multiple campaigns, but you must be able to access the account on a mobile device. Brands that aren’t so mobile-friendly may run into frequent obstacles. 

Conclusion: Is it right for your business? 

The biggest factor that goes into the answer to this question is target demographic. If your target audience is exclusively those 50 and up, Instagram is probably not the ideal advertising platform. That doesn’t mean you should immediately dismiss the possibility of Instagram ads. Similar to what happened to their parent company, Facebook, the number of older users will increase as the platform continues to grow. The decision is ultimately up to what you believe is right for your brand. 

At Onimod Global we are experts in SEM and social media. We know which platforms are best for brands, and create visibility for brands where customers are searching, interating, and ultimately converting. Find out more about we do here, or contact us today here.

LinkedIn’s Newest Update Makes Advertising More Transparent

Company transparency is especially important when advertising on the internet, social spaces in particular. Social media users want to feel safe and ensured that their information isn’t going to be exploited for advertisements. LinkedIn just recently announced it has launched a new update, called Ads tab, for company pages. The intent is to bring even greater transparency to ads, increasing trust in their environment, while benefiting companies and users.

What is Ads Tab & How it Works

The Ads tab will be available on company pages, showing sponsored content ad history for the last six months. Members can view all native ads running in the LinkedIn feed through the tab, but the advertisers will not be charged for these engagements and the clicks will not impact campaign reporting.

LinkedIn said in the announcement that “the Ads tab builds on similar tools they’ve recently introduced to help members understand and control their ad experience, including new ad settings that each member can access from their LinkedIn account.”

They also added that this is just the first of many updates they have in the works to provide members with useful information about the ads shown to them on LinkedIn. The Ads tab will be implemented across their platform over the next few weeks, meaning it won’t be available to all companies immediately.

Why We Should Care

Transparency is something that benefits both companies and LinkedIn users. This extra layer adds more security to the LinkedIn platform, making it a more trusted source, attracting more users. An increase in users means the potential to gain a larger audience, and ultimately larger ad reach.

Putting it to Use

At Onimod Global we are your in-house cross-channel digital marketing experts. We offer services in SEM and Social Media. We handle paid advertising on Google, Bing, and across all social platforms, including LinkedIn. We market across multiple social platforms to create visibility for your company in places your customers are searching, interacting, and engaging. Having your brand in the correct positioning in essential, and we at Onimod Global have the expertise to know exactly where you and your ads need to be.

Learn more about what we do here, or if you’re ready to become a client, contact us here.

How to Optimize Your Dark Social Usage

Private messaging apps such as WhatsApp, direct messaging via social media, emails, etc. are all referred to as “Dark Social” by marketers because content shared through these platforms are particularly difficult to track and analyze. This is becoming an increasingly popular way for users to do their social sharing. Read more

Updates To YouTube Advertising Platform

A social site that is growing larger and larger everyday is YouTube.  As its followers have grown significantly in the past few years, so has their advertising platform.

With growth comes some changes, and the experts at Onimod Global are here once again to give you the latest updates.

 

According to MarketingLand, YouTube announced it is changing the attribution criteria for TrueView for action video ads. This specific type of ad is known and designed for advertisers that perform and feature call-to-action banners at the base of the video ads.

MarketingLand also shares with us two specific key attribution points that will be changing:

  • YouTube will now count an ‘Engagement’ whenever a user clicks or watches 10 seconds or more of a TrueView for action ad when using maximize conversions or target CPA bidding. That’s a change from 30 seconds.
  • A ‘Conversion’ will be counted, by default, when a user takes action on an ad within 3 days of an ‘Engagement.’ If you want this changed, you will have to ask your Google rep to customize this time frame. That’s a change from 30 days.
  • For users who click your ad, YouTube will still attribute conversions according to the conversion window you have set (the default is 30 days).

 

What does this mean for advertisers?

This change will most likely significantly influence your budget spend and the performance. If you use the SmartBidding tool, this change will effect you being charged per engagement. Any target prices set by the advertiser will be billed on an impression basis due to TrueView for action campaigns using Target CPA and maximize conversions.

 

Always stay updated on the latest digital marketing news on our Onimod Global News page.