Life without Google’s right rail: 12 strategic implications for marketers

Google made major news last week when it confirmed that it was eliminating right rail (sidebar) ad slots for queries with a high degree of commercial intent.

Why the change?

Nearly every change Google makes to the way it displays paid and organic results is an attempt to balance consumer preference against revenue yield. So far, this approach has been successful in reaching an outcome that satisfies both.

In terms of consumer preference, there is no reason to believe that its user base will be alienated by the appearance of a fourth top-of-organic ad spot when commercial intent is high.

As I’ve noted many times, in this context ads are often more relevant to the searcher than organic listings.

Revenue-wise, it is possible – even likely, that the new top-of-organic fourth spot will deliver revenue equivalent or in excess of that earned via the entire right rail.

While some commentators have lamented the further loss of organic real estate caused by this change, it is doubtful that this loss will be appreciated by more than a fraction of Google’s users, a sizeable percentage of which already have trouble distinguishing between paid and organic results (an issue that the FTC has been concerned about for years, but that’s another story).

Strategic implications for marketers

While it’s too early to quantify the precise effects of Google’s abandonment of the right rail on marketers’ willingness to participate in paid search, the amount of money allocated to Google versus other ad platforms, and the impact on ROI/ROAS, the change has critical strategic implications for marketers, among them:

1.Position becomes more important than ever

The change will accelerate competition for the top four paid spots, raising prices for these coveted positions.

I expect this to drive significant CPC inflation as it becomes an all-or-nothing ecosystem. Get out your checkbooks and re-check budgets!

2. PLAs

PLAs (which may continue to be displayed in the right rail in some SERPS) become more critical than ever to retailers.

At the same time, PLA prices may – because of this change — become cost-prohibitive to some marketers if the demand for PLAs begins to exceed the supply of right-rail PLA ad slots.

3. Real-time

Real Time or near-real-time Bid Management becomes more important for ever for power keywords.

I expect some marketers who’ve been content with once-a-day batch management of bid changes to upgrade to systems such as Maestro, which works in real-time.

4. Quality Score

Quality Score becomes more important than ever, so ads and landing pages for any of the top 10% of keywords should be reviewed.

5. CRO

CRO (conversion rate optimization) becomes more important because any bid management system needs to be able to acquire position in the all-important top-of-organic “four pack.”

6. Segmentation

Segmentation of campaigns by geography may make more sense, due to both order/customer value and conversion rate difference.

7. Mobile search

Re-evaluation of the “mobile opportunity” as the desktop inventory shrinks, and a focus on understanding which mobile micro-conversion metrics should be tracked (click to call, calls, etc.)

8. RLSA

Re-evaluation of RLSA (remarketing lists) is a way to justify higher bids on critical keywords.

9. Video and images

Marketers will want to double down on video and image SEO to colonize remaining organic spots on the SERP.

10. Metrics

Marketers must be sure of their conversion metrics and KPIs.

Failure to accurately measure/quantify all marketing benefit from a keyword will result in under-bidding and campaign failure.

Marketers must evaluate:

• Offline conversions that happen as result of SEM
• Email capture and social media activity driven by SEM
• Brand lift due to site engagement, particularly on early research or generic keywords
• Visitation to key micro-conversion pages on the site, (contact us, etc.)

11. Interaction effects

Better understanding of the interaction effects between other media and search to facilitate aggressive bidding when warranted.

12. SEO, Social and all earned/owned media

SEO, Social and all earned/owned media become even more important, as does effective display media.

All stimulate search behavior and raise quality scores if they are none effectively.

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Social Media Marketing: How to Optimize Social Profiles for Search

Social Media Marketing: How to Optimize Social Profiles for Search.

Your social network is one of the best ways to increase brand awareness and sales. It provides you with a place to share content, communicate with customers and show how your product or service offers value to the community. However, there is only so much time and money that you can spend increasing your following. How can you grow your social networks organically?

Optimize for Search

Anything that is available for public viewing on a social media site will be indexed by Google. This means that you have a chance to rank for keywords when you create your Facebook page, Twitter handle, LinkedIn profile, or Pinterest account. When done correctly, you will receive targeted traffic to your social media page, which should have links to your website or anywhere else that people can go to buy your product or your service.

How to Optimize for Search

You want to use keywords that are closely associated with your business and use them in the appropriate areas. This means creating a page name, URL and short description that has a targeted keyword in it. For instance, if you were a cosmetic dentist, you might have that keyword as part of your Facebook page, Twitter bio, or LinkedIn job description. You want to do this because Google will use information from these sections when it decides what to index.

Here is an example video on how to do this for LinkedIn:

The Advantages of Organic Search Traffic

There are many advantages to organic search traffic such as the fact that it is targeted and easier to convert. If you are a cosmetic dentist, you will get traffic from those looking to get their teeth fixed and need those services. Organic traffic is also cheaper to acquire, which enables you to get a larger return on the time that you took to create an optimized page.

Want More Local Customers to Find You Online? Download Your Local SEO Checklist Instantly!​

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Powerful Personal Branding Tips to Take You from Digital Zero to Social Media Hero

I don’t know about you, but I like to know who I’m doing business with.

I always appreciate when I know a little about the owner of a business and not just the business name—it helps me feel more comfortable about spending money with someone if I can see that they are who they say they are.

But personal branding isn’t just for the business owner—in the digital age, it’s for everyone, even your grandmother!

Tim Ferriss, Author of the 4-Hour Work Week has this to say about your personal brand:

“Personal branding is about managing your name — even if you don’t own a business — in a world of misinformation, disinformation, and semi-permanent Google records. Going on a date? Chances are that your “blind” date has Googled your name. Going to a job interview? Ditto.”

The point is, your info is out there, whether you’re aware of it or not. You can let it sit out there, looking good or looking bad on its own…

Or you can take control of it.

Your personal brand doesn’t just encompass your professional work it is anything related to you—online and offline.

Ready to take control? Here are 3 helpful tips so you can start building your own personal brand:

1. Google Your Name And See What Comes Up

This is step numero uno. If you have no idea what your name is associated with, you need to find out now.

Your name could be associated with nothing.

Or, you could share a name with a famous tiger-taming comedic actress in sweden.

But if you don’t check, you’ll never know.

Once you know what’s out there, you can work on influencing it. I find value in having a Google+ profile because it allows me to have a little more influence on what Google displays about me and how it displays that information.

And since Google is not only where most people start researching you, but also the place where you have the least control, any method of influencing it should interest you.

Did you know that you can set an alert on Google for your name and even your business? Sh-yeah, neato!

That way, when something new is posted online, like a news article (or a Facebook post that went viral for all the wrong reasons), you will get a notification #ThanksGoogle.

2. Develop Your Personal Mission Statement

Every successful company has a mission statement—something they strive to do or be.

At Blue Steele Solutions, our mission is to help small businesses grow, be more efficient, and perform like the big guys!

My personal mission is to make an impact in and through the areas I care about most: family, community, and marketing.

Ready to write your own mission statement? Start by asking yourself, “What do I want to be known for?“ Create a word cloud by writing down all the words you want to be associated with you.

Then, start putting these words into short phrases, little sound bites about you. Finally, write a sentence. Keep it short and sweet. Use strong verbs and focus on what you want to do and how you want to do it.

3. Get Digital

Part of building a personal brand is building and nurturing connections—and one place to start is with friends and family.

Guys, there are so many tools we can use to update our friends, family, and network about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Letting the people around know what’s going on with you is a great way to start networking (and be a part of your community at the same time!)

Social media is a great place to start, but that’s not the only marketing tool available to you. Building a personal website is awesome, but you have to know what you’re doing—you don’t want to build some junky weebly website that reflects poorly on you. The personal website might be something you put together down the road with the help of an expert.

In the meantime, you can use a few simple digital tools to tell your circles about the initiatives in your life that are in line with that “personal mission statement” you just made. Here are a few of my favorites:

MailChimp

MailChimp allows you to create newsletters and deploy them to your email contacts at no cost. That’s right! Free-gratis-frei!

Consider creating a monthly or maybe even quarterly newsletter—this helps you foster a sense of community and also keeps you in their minds for that mission you’re trying to achieve. That way, when an opportunity arises that falls in line with your mission, you’ll be the first person they call, and not the last.

LinkedIn

If you’re a professional and you’re not on LinkedIn, literally what are you doing with your life? Get on there!

LinkedIn is a necessity for a business professional (or anyone that thinks they will one day be looking for a job).

And unless you’re independently wealthy or have a secret trust fund I don’t know about, that’s basically everyone.

Your LinkedIn profile should incorporate your personal mission statement in some aspect, but it’s more than that.

It is a catalog of all your successes—like a digital resume. You can show off all the fun organizations you’re involved in and a listing of all the people that you have networked with. Instead of keeping a drawer filled with business cards (and facing the nightmare of sorting through them), LinkedIn sorts everything nicely for you—and it’s free!

Plus, LinkedIn’s publishing capability allows you to create posts in blog form to share with the online community. If you’re not ready to make your personal website just yet, LinkedIn publishing is a great place to start.

These Are Just Beginnings—Your Ultimate Goal Should Be A Website

At the end of the day, you have something of value that you want to share with people. Your business card, your social media posts, and your LinkedIn posts all should point somewhere—to one place that people can find out what you’re really about—and that’s your website.

If you’re in the beginning stages of building your personal brand, the website might be far in the future, but it should always be the ultimate goal.

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3 Sure-Fire Tips On Making Online Marketing Work for Your Business

In this new day and age where jobs are difficult to come by and competition is high, people are shifting from an employee mindset to an entrepreneurial one. Owning your own time, working at home, and creating your own direction and opportunity are only three of the numerous benefits of being an entrepreneur and owning a business. However, the journey is not uphill all the time.

There is no such thing as an overnight success in business. There are many challenges to overcome when you’re starting out, two of which are scaling your venture and turning a profit. One of the best ways to achieve these is through marketing. Specifically, online marketing.

“Online marketing plays a pivotal role especially now that we are becoming more connected to the internet,” says James Ryan Jonas, a University of the Philippines professor and mentor to student teams in various local and international competitions. One of the teams he mentored won the top prize in the 2013 Google Online Marketing Challenge (GOMC) besting 2,500 teams in the world. He continues his earlier statement with, “We need to reach our target market, and online marketing is one way to reach them cheaply and more effectively.”

Online marketing allows businesses to grow through the use of technology. In addition, web analytics, the measurement of web data, allows entities to conduct market research, and from there, gather market insights to be used for online marketing campaigns. If you have a business idea or are just starting out on your entrepreneurial journey, read and act on the tips below to utilize online marketing for your business:

1. Use on-demand information to create a strategy

On-demand information allows you to gather market insights for your marketing plan. Online metric tools such as Google Analytics provide businesses with this information. If you have 100 sales in a day, Google Analytics can show you that 50 sales came from Facebook, 30 from online publications, and the rest from blog links. This will give you numerical proof that the best way to increase sales is to focus on Facebook as your primary channel for marketing.

2. Use content that is relevant, timely, and unique

Use the three together and your content will be a triple threat. Relevance provides value; timeliness strengthens your presence by following trends; and uniqueness creates a monopoly of information by becoming the go-to resource.

If you’re at a loss on how to meet the above criteria, below are specific examples on how to creating and specializing content:

• Relevance: If you’re creating a write-up for a restaurant, include the, address, numbers, menu prices of the restaurant and pictures of all your meals rather than describing how the meal was sans photographs and other information
• Timeliness: An example of this is providing livestreaming or live tweet updates of an anticipated sports game. Not everyone can watch the game in the arena or has premium cable, so these people will be looking for the above-mentioned.
• Uniqueness: if you are a travel writer, you can create a monopoly of information by targeting less-travelled destinations (e.g. write-up of an Antarctic cruise versus the more common Mediterranean cruise)

3. Align distribution channels with your brand

Online marketing is not only limited to Facebook as many people think so. There are online publications, blogs, content aggregator websites (e.g Reddit), visual-centric platforms (e.g. Pinterest), and mobile-platforms among others. In the realm of social media alone, there’s Facebook, Instragram, Twitter, and Linkedin to name a few.

“If you are targeting businessmen and professionals, Linkedin is more effective than Facebook,” says James Ryan Jonas in an interview with MoneyMax.ph. Align your marketing channels to fit your target market and the brand of your business.

Challenge accepted

Online marketing is both challenging and rewarding. Don’t get disheartened if your website doesn’t get one million views overnight. Numerous years ago, who would have thought that Facebook can be used for marketing your business? Today, it is one of the most effective tools for that. The three steps above, accompanied with dedication, discipline, and hustling, will help steer your business forward.

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Blogging: Stop Following, Start Exploring

The title “Stop following. Start Exploring.” is the slogan for a popular Indian educational portal Shiksha (means education), but it also holds true for bloggers. As a newbie bloggers, most of us start with choosing a niche for our blogs. Some of us don’t even know what niche we should choose. Whether, it should be a multi-niche blog or  a single niche blog, etc.  Now even if you somehow figure out the niche you are interested in and created a blog with related domain name, the next step is to curate contents for the blog.

The old saying in the blogging world is “content is the king”. But, how true is that? I would say very true and content is the only thing, which differentiate your blog from the millions of blogs on the internet. Now to create contents for your blog, the popular method is to bookmark popular websites related to your niche and try to figure out what is working for them and what is not. For example, if you are interested in gadget niche you may follow something like GSMArena, Anandtech, Phonecurrent and create a similar website.

Bookmarking popular websites isn’t a bad idea nor analyzing them. However, following them extensively to the core where you start focusing on only a few popular blogs and trying to be like them will not take you anywhere. After a year of blogging, you will find yourself nowhere in the crowd and you may ultimately quit blogging. And the popular blogs which you were following w

Why? Because, you chose to follow them, and they chose to explore.

#Stop Following 

No popular websites on any niche became popular overnight. There are various factors, which have contributed to their success. They have started early, they chose a niche which wasn’t populated by that time and most of them are godfathers of their niche. They started from the scratch and were really passionate about what they are doing.

Now among all these factors, there is one more thing which has made them what  they are now. Now, before I spill the beans, let me ask you one thing.

Which popular blogs, those bloggers used to follow? Note that there weren’t many popular blogs that time and almost everyone was a beginner.

The answer is none. Instead of following anything, they choose to explore things, which were related to their niche. They still do the same and we still do the same as well. That is following them.

I began my blogging journey with the same attitude of following some of the most popular blogs related to technology niche. I started as a writer for tech blogs, which helped in learning about blogging. Later, I created my own blog in the technology niche. Fortunately, after 6 months of blogging I was in better position than most of the tech bloggers in the same field who started even before a year than my blog went live.

You may call it a luck or just coincidence, I was able to choose topics, which were low competitive as well as had high search volume without using any SEO software. I did apply some basic SEO techniques, which worked perfectly well with the blog. After 8 months of blogging, the blog was getting around 300K pageviews a month, among which 90% of the traffic was organic, 2% from social media and 8% from referral.

Woohoo, happy ending, right? Nope.

Now after 2 years of starting the blog, the blog is still in a strong position, but couldn’t bring the satisfaction a genuine blogger will look from his blog. If I ask myself how exactly is my blog different from thousands of other technology blogs on the internet? How many topics I started before anyone in the web world and found solutions for them? well, I barely could answer anything. Except the fact that it has grown large, brings good revenue and I never applied any Black hack techniques. Is that enough? Well, at least not for me.

#Start Exploring 

Since I keep creating new blogs every now and then, this time I thought of building a blog, which purely contains solutions or topics discovered by me (mostly). The blog is Technicalnotes and as the name indicates, it is a tech blog and technology is the niche I love.

For this blog, I stopped following and started exploring. I also did not use any off page SEO tactics to make it achieve good rankings in search results. It wasn’t necessary because the contents in the blog were first to be published in any blog on the internet. As far as link building is concerned, if you are the first one to publish anything important, the links will flow automatically as the popular tech blogs will pick your contents and link back to them as reference or source. Basically, you are making them follow you, instead of following them.

Now talking about the result so far (though, it’s too early), in last few months the blog has grown much faster than I thought and the results are impressive. It has quality  and unique posts. The links coming to the blog are natural and at the end of the day you will have something original, which you have created by exploring things instead of following.

Conclusion 

If you are a newbie, have started blogging in 2015-2016 and looking for a long-term goal, I would recommend you to start exploring things on your own than simply following the footsteps of the popular. Try to create your own contents, do extensive research and then publish your post. It may look difficult in the beginning, but you will grow to be a much experienced and mature blogger with an opinion over the years.

Blogging is a crowded place with more number of spammers coming with new tactics to trick the Google algorithm every day. Now if you don’t create a unique blog with unique contents, then there is no reason for Google to rank your blog higher than the blogs which has contents similar to your blog and have published it before you could. And the possibility is that Google may just destroy all your hard work by penalizing it for the crime you didn’t commit while targetting the spammy blogs. Now it’s completely your choice to create something which is worth having and boosting about or just follow the masses.

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Get to Know Remarketing, TOFU, and More: 10 Buzzworthy Marketing Strategies Worth Explaining

Surfing through my daily content curation or checking out the latest, popular marketing stories, I’ll sometimes find strategies that sound completely fascinating—and entirely foreign.

What do some of the biggest buzz words—remarketing, onboarding, CRO, etc.—even mean?

And is it really possible for you to get these strategies happening for yourself?

I’ve been really happy to dig in to all these intriguing new topics, and I’d love to explain 10 of these buzzworthy strategies—as well as some simple ways to test the waters with your online marketing efforts.

10 New Marketing Strategies to Know

I’ve found a lot of inspiration and ideas for marketing tips to try by visiting sites like Growth Hackers and Inbound. These places collect some really fabulous articles that contain some completely brilliant strategies. Here are 10 I’d love to talk more about:

1. Remarketing
2. Amplification and Applause
3. Programmatic Buying
4. CRO
5. Responsive Design
6. TOFU, MOFU, BOFU
7. Customer Behavior
8. Rented vs. Owned
9. User Onboarding
10. JTBD

Any from the list here ring a bell? It’d be fantastic to learn from any experiences you have with the strategies here!

1. What is remarketing?

Remarketing lets you display targeted ads to people who have previously visited your website – as they browse elsewhere around the internet.

For example, if someone visits your site, browses a product in your store, and leaves without buying, you’d be able to show that person an ad for that product anywhere that remarketing ads are served—other websites, Google search, even Facebook!

Marketers who do paid ads and promotion love remarketing (also called retargeting) for a number of reasons:

• Reduced cost per impression
• Better conversion rates
• Improved ROI
• Precise targeting
• Cost effective branding

The ROI in some cases can be as high as $10 earned for every $1 spent!

How to get started with remarketing

There is a great number of tools that can help with the setup for remarketing and make it easy to get an experiment off the ground:

• Google AdWords
• Facebook Ads
• AdRoll
• Chango
• Perfect Audience
• Triggit
• ReTargeter

For Facebook retargeting in particular, many of the tools listed here have built-in features that let you create remarketing ads in the News Feed. Another simple route here is to use Facebook’s Custom Audiences feature as your remarketing test.

Step one: Export a list of customer/visitor data from your site. This could be shopping cart abandonment, recent orders, email subscribers, etc.

Step two: Upload the list as a custom audience to Facebook.

1. Log in at the Facebook Ads Manager
2. Go to Tools > Audiences
3. Go to Create Audience > Custom Audience
4. Upload your customer/visitor list

(Another option in creating a custom audience is to base it off of website traffic and visits, using a Facebook custom audience pixel that’s added to your pages.)

Step three: Build an ad that would be valuable and useful for this custom group.

2. What are amplification and applause?

Amplification is shares and retweets. Applause is likes and favorites.

We’ve taken a lot of inspiration from the different ways to evaluate and measure a social media campaign, and this method of amplification and applause is a favorite.

Google’s Avinash Kaushik came up with the idea for these social media metrics, which include a total of four major categories:

• Conversation rate – The number of conversations per post. On Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn, it’s comments. On Twitter, it’s replies.
• Amplification rate – The number of reshares or retweets per post.
• Applause rate – Retweets, Likes, +1s, etc.
• Economic value – The sum of short-term revenue, long-term revenue, and cost savings

His four metrics, first explained in a 2011 blogpost, continue to be influential in the way that we evaluate our social media performance here at Buffer. Moz uses Kaushik’s methods in their social media marketing; we’ve done the same at the Buffer blog. There’s even an analytics tool, True Social Metrics, based on these metrics.

How to get started with amplification and applause

At Buffer, we are able to track amplification and applause quite easily through the Buffer dashboard’s analytics section. For each of our connected profiles, we can see the amplification (shares and retweets) of each post as well as the applause (likes and favorites).

To calculate the amplification and applause rate, I’ll often export the data into a spreadsheet, then get the average of each column to see how much of each stat we typically get per post.

Then to compare, for instance, Facebook to Twitter, I can go one step further and divide the average engagement by the number of followers to see engagement rate per follower—a stat that can be quite useful to compare social network to social network.

For example, if on Twitter we get 300 favorites and have 300,000 followers, we’d expect 1 favorite for every 1,000 followers. If on Facebook we get 50 likes and have 5,000 followers, we’d expect 1 like for every 100 followers (quite a great ratio, and quite a bit higher than on Twitter!).

3. What is programmatic buying?

Programmatic buying is the automation of online ad purchasing such that the advertiser need only to set a small number of variables like bid price and reach and the automation does the rest.

Say you’ve got an ad campaign in mind but not quite the time and resources for figuring out all the different possibilities for advertising online.

This is where programmatic buying really shines.

Marketers love it because it’s

1. Fast
2. Targeted

You can get a campaign up and running quickly, and you (er, rather, the automated machines) can hone the campaign as time goes on so that your ad is reaching its greatest potential.

AdAge has a wonderful breakdown of programmatic buying. Here’s a powerful quote:

Ad buyers can use programmatic buying to fan ads across the web and then, mid-campaign, evaluate what’s working best — which geographies, times of day, audience segments, publishers — to narrow their target accordingly, so they’re paying only for highly effective ads. This is a radical change from traditional ad buying, where a buyer agrees to run a certain number of ads with a publisher and is locked in to the contract.

How to get started with programmatic buying

Tools like Rocket Fuel and Sparc Media allow you to get started with the programmatic buying process. There aren’t a whole lot of lean ways to dip your toes in, so to speak, other than just taking a test run.

Facebook Ads and Google Adwords do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of automating and suggesting, which is a small taste of what programmatic buying might look like.

4. What is CRO?

CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimization. It’s using data insights and user feedback to improve the performance and results of a website.

CRO involves things like calls-to-action (CTAs), A/B testing, and conversion funnels. One popular place you might do CRO is with a landing page, where you can optimize all sorts of different parts—buttons, headings, CTAs, images, forms—in order to boost conversion.

How to get started with CRO

One of the big ideas within CRO is testing different elements of a webpage to see what works best. This type of A/B testing can be done using great tools like Optimizely. You can even test out some really lean methods.

For instance, one form of CRO could involve the social media headlines you share in your tweets and updates. Testing multiple headlines there is a version of A/B testing and CRO for your social stats.

What this has looked like in the past for us is that we’ll share new blog posts to social media multiple times using a handful of different headlines (I often try to write 10 to 15 headlines per post).

We can then check and see the performance of each headline in our Buffer stats dashboard:

First tweet:

Second tweet:

5. What is responsive design?

Responsive design is an approach to website design where the site will look great no matter the device—desktops, tablets, or phones.

Most all major sites have moved to responsive design, knowing how important it is to be useable for the large readership on mobile.

In most cases of responsive design, the sites adjust and evolve based on the device (there’s certain code that recognizes device size and tells the site how it should look). For instance a three-column website design on desktop might shrink to two columns on a tablet and one column on a phone.

How to get started with responsive design

One quick win for responsive design is to think about how the calls-to-action appear as your website scales between desktop and mobile. For example:

How do your social share buttons look for your mobile visitors?

We recently found that the social share buttons on the Buffer blog didn’t show at all when viewed from a mobile device, so we installed the SumoMe plugin to get a quick win and display share buttons to mobile readers.

Now we get 500 social shares per week and nearly 7,000 total since the change—all of which we would have never had were it not for the consideration of responsive design and mobile visitors.

6. TOFU, MOFU, BOFU

TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU reference different parts of a conversion funnel. TOFU is the top of the funnel. MOFU is the middle, BOFU is the bottom.

Given these distinctions between different parts of the funnel, you can begin to organize your content and strategy toward each. Here’s one way of looking at it, courtesy of the Denamico blog:

HubSpot has some amazing thoughts here as well. This is the way they view each stage of the funnel according to where the buyer is in their journey:

• At the top of the funnel, a buyer is typically trying to solve a problem or meet a need.
• Prospects in the middle of the funnel know that they have a problem or a need that must be solved and have moved on to determining the best solution.
• By the time a lead reaches the bottom of the funnel, they are ready to buy and the only question is who they will buy from.

How to get started with TOFU, MOFU, BOFU

One way to quickly incorporate this concept into your content strategy is to identify articles or content you can offer that fit with each stage of the funnel.

TOFU can be articles and social media updates that focus on common pain points or questions for the user.

MOFU can be articles and pages that speak more specifically about your brand or product, introducing it into the conversation.

BOFU can be demos, calls, lead nurturing where you explain how your product fits the specific need of a potential user.

We’ve started focusing a bit on this at Buffer where we’re thinking about blog content in terms of TOFU (those posts intended to spread far and bring in a great number of new readers) and MOFU (posts geared toward helping people share to social media and introducing Buffer as a possible tool to help).

The post you’re reading now is a bit more MOFU, as it has some specific Buffer examples sprinkled throughout. :)

7. Customer Behavior

Customer behavior refers to the actions you notice a customer/user taking as they journey to and through your site.

Customer behavior covers a quite broad series of actions, and at its heart, the strategy gets at the idea of data—knowing as much about a person’s interactions with you as possible.

This can look a number of different ways, be it a website visitor, a blog reader, a social media follower, etc.

How to get started with customer behavior

One simple method to begin with is tracking a couple of key stats for your website in Google Analytics.

For your desktop site, check:

• Bounce rate
• Visitor loyalty

For your mobile site, check:

• Bounce rate
• Time on site

Bounce rate is the percent of people who land on your website and leave right away.

Visitor loyalty (% returning visitors) measures how often a person comes back to your site.

Time on site speaks to the mobile-friendliness of your site. Is it a good enough experience that people are excited to spend time hanging out there?

All of these stats can be found from the main dashboard when you log into Google Analytics:

8. Rented vs. Owned

Rented vs. Owned refers to the types of sites, networks, and platforms you use for your content. Rented channels refer to social media and sites you can customize but not control. Owned channels refer to your website and places you fully control.

More: Avinash Kaushik’s rent vs. own strategies

Rented vs. owned is a really cool way of explaining the difference between your website and your social media profiles—two distinct places where you might expect to be trying out distinct strategies.

How to get started with rented vs. owned channels

One key to this framework of rent vs. own is to understand that there may be different approaches and strategies to each type of channel.

You might have different goals for each.

You might track different metrics.

We’re thinking about this very question at Buffer. It’s great to see how a differentiation like rent vs. owned might even fit with a concept like TOFU. In some ways, our goals with rented channels differ from our goals with owned channels. With rented channels, we’re keen to grow our following and gain clicks back to Buffer. On owned channels (like the blog), we’re excited about time on page, email signups, and conversions to Buffer users.

9. User Onboarding

User onboarding is the purposeful way of welcoming new users to your product or page so that they have the best chance to succeed with you.

Samuel Hulick’s walkthroughs and analysis (see above) of popular web apps is perhaps the best introduction to user onboarding. It shows all the many different factors one must think about for helping a user get from point A to point B.

How to get started with user onboarding

One really neat way to get in the user onboarding mindset is to welcome others to look at your work. This can help you gain a new perspective on how people approach your site, product, or app.

There are a couple of neat places that can help with this:

• Peek – See and hear a 5-minute video of a person using your site (free)
• Five Second Test – Upload a design and get your questions answered by real users (free)
• Hotjar – Visitor recordings of how folks are browsing your site (free)

And for more inspiration, Zapier has a great list of spots to see great user onboarding in action.

10. JTBD

JTBD is a framework that helps you understand the Job To Be Done by your product—not necessarily what you set out for your product to achieve but rather what the user has hired your product to do for him/her.

Jobs To Be Done really comes down to this one question:

What is the customer hiring your product to do for them?

Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt once pointed out, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”

Another example is a fast food chain that discovered their milkshakes were super popular in the early mornings. Customers were hiring the milkshakes as a quick, convenient, one-hand meal while driving to work.

Carmen Nobel’s article for the Harvard business blog makes a couple good points here:

> “The JTBD point of view causes you to crawl into the skin of your customer and go with her as she goes about her day, always asking the question as she does something: Why did she do it that way?”

> The key to marketing is knowing what job the customer is trying to get done, and envisioning the one solution that gets it done perfectly.

How to get started with JTBD

There’s a really neat interview process that you can step through with a user (you can totally start with some VIP users or good friends who’ve gone through the product journey). This’ll get you on the right path toward discovering the JTBD by your product.

The full explanation of the interview is available on Medium, and just to give you a taste of the kinds of questions included here, this is a snippet of the introductory section on getting to know the point of purchase:

1. When did you purchase the product?
2. Where were you?
3. What time of day was it? (daytime/ nighttime?)
4. What was the weather like?
5. Was anyone else with you at the time?
6. How did you purchase the product?
7. Did you buy anything at the same time?

(I personally thought the weather question was so interesting to ask!)

More: A couple different ways to dive deep into these new strategies

If you’d love for any of these strategies to be fully explored in its own Buffer blog post, drop a note in the comments. I’d love the chance to dig deep into these for you!

Another way to get to know these strategies better is with Google’s free Primer app, a fun collection of 16 bite-sized lessons in online marketing.

(We are grateful to have worked with the Google team on one of the lessons here!)

Here’s all that the Google Primer app contains:

Advertising

• Create a High Quality, High Ranking Search Ad
• Evolve Your Ad Campaigns with Programmatic Buying
• How Remarketing Keeps Customers Coming Back

Content

• Get Customers Interested by Telling a Great Story
• Create Content Themes That Match Your Values
• Test Your Content Before You Invest
• Appeal to Searchers and Search Engines with SEO

Measurement

• How Strong A/B Tests Can Read Customers’ Minds
• Track Your Acquisitions with Digital Marketing
• Track Customer Behavior with Digital Metrics
• Track Marketing Outcomes with Digital Metrics

Strategy

• Keep Customers Interested with Email Automation
• Design Your Mobile Site to Be Customer-Friendly
• Make Email Marketing Your Inbox Secret Weapon
• Keep Mobile Users Engaged In and Out of Your App
• Make Every Post Count with a Content Strategy

Over to you

What new strategies are you keen to learn more about?

Have you had a chance to experiment or discover any of the ones mentioned here?

I’d love the chance to learn from you! Feel free to share any thoughts or ideas here in the comments!

Image sources: JTBD, Lander App, Pablo, IconFinder, Unsplash.

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