At its best, digital marketing has the power to connect communities to resources, opportunities, or policies that genuinely improve outcomes. The quality of your content and clarity of your strategy will help you get the most from these powerful outreach tools. At S360, our digital marketing services start with a clear understanding of your marketing goals, as well as the political, organizational and community context surrounding them. For clients who are working at the intersection of politics, business, culture and community, this 360° approach offers a unique lens that drives strong digital marketing outcomes.

We proudly work with businesses, non-profits, advocacy coalitions, and the public sector – however each group has different requirements and restraints that need to be considered. As an S360 Partner leading the digital marketing practice, Matt Davidson has built a dynamic team who start their process with vital questions for our clients: who are you trying to reach? What does success actually look like? And what constraints do we need to work within?

Matt and his team work closely with clients to ensure that we are considering and addressing critical transparency requirements, stakeholder dynamics, budget constraints, and equity considerations that are applied differently for public and non-profit groups, as well as those engaging in political advocacy. With clear guidelines and goals to meet, our team will develop data-driven digital strategies, build and launch campaigns, and closely track the outcomes in real time. Clients get regular reporting that connects their investments to outcomes, clear communication, and a team that’s always thinking about what’s next.

Building the Digital Marketing Group

Matt began a small, independent agency called Sovo Media, which he joined to S360 over a decade ago. From that time, he has built our Digital Marketing Group from the ground up. Before that, he worked at Microsoft after the Bing launch, helping advertisers figure out how to convert search traffic into business outcomes. This gave Matt a practical, performance-first mindset that he brings to each client project to this day.

“The skill that matters most in this role isn’t simply knowing every platform,” said Matt. “It’s understanding the client goals and applying them to precision targeting, smart creative, and rigorous measurement.”

Today, S360’s Digital Marketing Group manages approximately $5 million in annual media budgets for hundreds of clients. Matt oversees a team of four digital marketing strategists working collaboratively with communications, traditional marketing, and creative professionals across the firm to support the unique needs of each client. Matt credits the success of this practice area to the team’s ability to translate digital marketing complexities for clients to feel knowledgeable and informed of their choices.

What makes S360’s practice genuinely different is our depth of public sector experience across 1,000+ clients. We’ve run digital campaigns for school districts, state agencies, utilities, nonprofits, and advocacy organizations across the western United States. We understand the difference between marketing a bond measure and marketing a college enrollment campaign, and how both are completely different from a commercial brand campaign. Most agencies treat the public sector as a vertical they dabble in. For us, it’s our core identity.

Staying current, because this industry does not reward complacency

Keeping up with ever changing trends in digital marketing requires building the habit into your week, not your quarter. Matt follows a disciplined mix of industry sources, platform updates, and relevant communities. But he notes that the best signal is often what he sees in client campaign data. When something shifts in performance patterns across multiple clients, that tells him something is changing at the platform level before the trade press catches up. This type of vigilance means that S360 teams can make quick shifts for clients that follow the data and support effective ongoing campaign management.

What remains consistent? The fundamentals of human attention and persuasion haven’t changed. People respond to relevance, to clarity, to messages that feel like they were meant for them.

“The targeting tools get more sophisticated, the creative formats multiply, but if your message doesn’t resonate with a real person who has a real need, then the algorithm won’t save you.”

Trust and transparency matter more than ever in public sector marketing because communities are sophisticated and campaigns that feel non-genuine backfire badly.

The other constant: measurement. Matt has always anchored his team around the question ‘what does this actually produce?’ not ‘how many impressions did we buy?’ That discipline of connecting investment to outcomes never goes out of style.

Complex, meaningful projects are the dream

Matt would love to run a statewide education equity campaign that connects communities across urban, suburban, and rural regions to support children’s outcomes. Much of Matt’s career has been working in the education and non-profit space, and the campaigns he finds most meaningful are the ones where the work truly changes what’s possible for a family or a community.

From a craft perspective, Matt is excited by the complexity: micro-targeting across dozens of distinct communities, navigating multiple languages and cultures, working within public sector transparency requirements, and trying to move people from awareness to action on something they may have never engaged with before. A project like this would benefit from S360’s integrated services model, where we pull in experts in developing compelling creative, resonant messages, community trust-building and public affairs, and precision targeting with rigorous measurement.

At S360, leading with our values is important and we dig in on meaningful projects that make an impact. From connecting kids and families to educational opportunities, to supporting advocacy campaigns where digital work connects to real policy change. For Matt, this is when the job feels like it matters most.

The post Meet the Partner: Matt Davidson shares his data-inspired, human-centered approach to digital marketing appeared first on Strategies 360.

Given the market share and overall influence that these two networks enjoy in the marketing space, we wanted to discuss how our agency uses each network to help our clients reach their marketing goals. With a spend of 6 figures per month across each network, our team has a lot of experience taking advantage of the unique opportunities that each network has to offer.

Google is primarily known for its search marketing capabilities. However, it has rapidly expanded into display and YouTube advertising as well. Facebook is known for its social media network which has grown to include Instagram as well. Across each channel there are benefits and limitations. As an example, Google can target based on specific online searches. This can be a powerful marketing opportunity as someone who is actively looking for specific information will be in the mindset to act quickly. Facebook collects a significant amount of information about their user base. This allows marketers to reach audiences based on demographics, interests and behaviors which also lends itself to a powerful tool in a marketer’s arsenal. Throughout this article, we will touch on the benefits and limitations of each as well as how our team has found success across each network. 

Google Search

There are three key things to remember when setting up a Google search campaign: volume, relevancy, and competition. When developing a list of search terms we look for the following:

• Volume – Keywords that have a decent number of searches per month (typically 50 searches/month or higher)
• Relevancy – Search terms that are highly relevant to our website and messaging are key to ensuring that we are developing a successful campaign
• Competition – Ensuring that there isn’t so much competition that keyword bidding is prohibitively expensive is important in developing any successful campaign.

 Why are these three areas so important?

In terms of volume, around 20% of your search terms will account for 80% of your search traffic. By focusing on high volume search terms, you can better optimize campaigns while focusing on the searches that will have the biggest impact.

Relevancy is a key factor across the entire campaign. By ensuring that search terms are relevant to both your messaging and your website, you will increase both your click through rates and the time visitors spend on your time. This is important because increasing your click through rates will decrease the cost of traffic. This is because the search engines allowing advertising on a cost per click basis. This means that you only spend advertising dollars when someone clicks on your ad. Think of it like this:

Advertiser 1 bids $100 cost per click for an ad that generates 0 clicks for every 100 visitors. The search engine in turn makes $0 for every 100 visitors that are shown these ads ($100 x 0 visits = $0).

Advertiser 2 bids $1 cost per click for an ad that generates 10 clicks for every 100 visitors. The search engine in turn makes $10 for every 100 visitors that are shown these ads ($1 x 10 visits = $10).

In this scenario, Google will prefer to prioritize advertiser 2 over advertiser 1 although they are willing to spend only 1% as much to get in front of the same searchers. And this is why relevancy matters so much.

Finally, competition matters because it directly impacts costs and the likelihood that you will be able to generate relevant clicks to maintain a high click through rate. If your budget is $500/month and you choose to compete on a slate of competitive terms that average a $50 cost per click, then you will only generate 10 clicks per month. The likelihood that these 10 visitors will make an impact on your organization is very slim as volume matters. Therefore, going after less competitive keywords will make a big difference in both the costs to gain visibility and the volume of relevant visitors that you acquire as a result. Therefore, we recommend focusing on what is called long-tail terms as opposed to short tail. These are essentially terms that are 3 – 6 keywords in length and therefore, more specific while drawing in less competition whereas short tail tends to be broad. For example, if you run a law practice, searches for “law practice” will be competitive and expensive. But searches for “collaborative divorce lawyers in Seattle” will be much more specific, cost effective and someone searching for this term is likely to find your firm very relevant if you are in fact a collaborative divorce lawyer.

Keeping these recommendations in mind, we highly recommend all initial research start directly with the Google Keyword Tool: https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/. And with that, here’s an overview of Google 101 directly from one of our star account managers:

What is it?

A digital tactic based around keyword searches on the Google Search Engine.

How does it work?

Ads are shown to users in a specific geographic area, defined during the planning phase, when they search for a term that matches one from our pre-determined list. Keyword lists can contain as many as 500 keywords but should be within the range of 30 – 60 terms to allow us to best monitor and optimize the list.

We can create both standard text ads and Responsive Search ads. Standard text ads utilize up to 3 headlines and 2 descriptions, which are all predetermined. Responsive Search ads utilize up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions and then rotates them during a testing period to determine the best combination. We suggest running 2 standard text ads along with 1 Responsive Search ad when running a search campaign.

What does it look like?

Ads appear in the same style as search results on the Google Search Engine and identifiable by a small “ad” marker next to the displayed URL.

When do we use it?

Search ads are best utilized when we have a clear indication of what users will search for. For example, we have found great success with political campaigns, sports teams, healthcare, and education campaigns that employ a number of unique keywords. While good by itself, Google Search ads have some limitations with reach. Unlike Display and Facebook ads, Search ads only appear when a user searches for a keyword on Google. Because of this, Search ads are a great compliment to those awareness based platforms because users on the internet often turn to Google when they want to learn more about a topic.

Facebook Advertising

Facebook rules the social media world and as such is used very differently when it comes to our marketing campaigns. This platform relies on user data to target audience based on demographics, location and interests. You can then drive very relevant messaging based on these characteristics across both Facebook and Google. Furthermore, there are different actions that you can prioritize across your campaigns. Some of the more common ones that we work with include:

• Click to website – By selecting a click to site call to action, Facebook will prioritize showing your ads to the visitors most likely to click through to your website. In turn, it will optimize to drive the most visitors possible to your website with your budget.
• Likes/followers – If you’re looking to grow your social media audience, prioritizing likes and followers will help with this goal. Your ads will automatically show to users most likely to want to engage with you on your social media channels and will optimize accordingly.
• Lead generation – Targeting a lead generation call to action will help you grow your contacts for follow up purposes. This can help to build an email list, prospect list or anything in between. This is a unique feature as building a list of individuals to follow up with repetitively can be a valuable asset. And nobody does this better than Facebook.

If you’re going to look to run a Facebook campaign, our team highly recommends setting up a business manager account to do so: https://business.facebook.com/overview. And with that, here’s an overview of Facebook 101 directly from another one of our star account managers:

What is it?

Facebook ads are exactly what they sound like. They are ads that run on Facebook and Instagram. These ads can be static images or videos and also use lines of descriptive text, headlines, and calls to action.

How does it work?

Facebook and Instagram ads are all set up out of the Facebook business manager platform. These ads use Facebook’s vast library of data to hyper-target selected audiences. You can target anything from geographic location, age, and gender to certain pages that people like or other defining personal characteristics (having children, education levels, interests). All of these targeting tactics can be used independently or layered which allows us to target as broadly or as precisely as we want to.

What does it look like?

Facebook ads can show up in different styles. You can run ads that look like posts in the feed, ads that run along the sidebar of the website, in the Facebook messenger app, and as videos throughout someone’s feed. These ads run on Instagram in someone’s feed or in the stories section of Instagram. To the right is an example of two different types of Facebook ad placements (Feed and Right Column).

When do we use it?

Facebook and Instagram ads can be used (and generate great results) by themselves for almost any campaign. Because of the large amount of data within the platform, Facebook ads give us the most control over our target audiences. Facebook also allows for us to import customer/user lists if clients have these already, which adds another layer of targeting we can implement. Like display campaigns, search campaigns are a additional tactic to run alongside Facebook campaigns.

Successfully Marketing Your Organization with Google & Facebook

With any good marketing campaign, it’s important to diversify your marketing channels and to focus on the strengths of each network. By understanding how to optimally run campaigns across the biggest networks in the digital space and structuring your campaigns accordingly, it is possible to see success with your marketing campaigns in a short amount of time. And of course, working with a partner like Strategies 360 who already has experience in running these types of programs can get your campaigns off the ground even sooner.

Contact our team if you’d like to discuss getting help with these types of campaigns or to learn more about how these networks have helped our clients to reach their goals.

— ARTICLE END —

The post Advertising on Google vs. Facebook – How Do They Compare? appeared first on Strategies 360.

This is why benchmarks are crucial. After you’ve established your key metrics for your digital advocacy campaign and a reliable reporting framework to track them, you’ll need benchmarks to understand what your data says about the performance of your campaign in the context of your organization, your industry, and your audience.

To help you understand how to use benchmarks in the content of digital advocacy, this article will:

1. Introduce you to benchmarking for digital advocacy
2. Walk you through the three main types of benchmarks
3. Provide examples of how these benchmarks are used

By the end of this article, you’ll know what benchmarks are and why they’re an important tool to guide your digital marketing and advocacy efforts. Let’s start with the basics.

What Is Benchmarking?

Benchmarking is the process of comparing a process, campaign, or initiative against your peers, your competitors, and yourself. Benchmarks help you put your campaign performance data into the context of what “success” looks like for your industry, your market, or your target audience.

The benchmarks you use to analyze the success of your campaign are based on your campaign goals , which can be quantitative or qualitative. For instance, a quantitative metric for digital advocacy might be an email open rate or social media reach percentage. A qualitative metric, on the other hand, is more subjective and may include things like the positivity of social media commenting. .

Benchmarks are a crucial tool for guiding your digital advocacy efforts because they help you:

• Optimize your digital marketing spend
• Analyze the ongoing performance of campaign elements
• Prioritize digital activities based on their performance
• Identify gaps and opportunities in your digital strategy

Types of Benchmarks

The more specific your benchmarks are to your industry, audience or market, the better prepared you are to effectively analyze how well your efforts are translating to success (no matter how you define it). To choose the right benchmarks for campaign analysis, however, you’ll need to consider what type of benchmarks make the most sense for you.

Depending on what you want to achieve, certain types of benchmarks will be more valuable for defining and optimizing your strategy than others. There are three main types of benchmarks for measuring digital advocacy success.

Internal Benchmarks

Internal benchmarks are based on historical data from your own organization’s campaigns, projects, and initiatives. Internal benchmarks are important because they help you understand where your organization is now; how that’s changed over time; and what this suggests about the future.

Internal benchmarks give you a baseline to determine what success looks like for you as opposed to what’s happening for your competitors and peers. For campaign managers, internal benchmarks can provide crucial insights into how incremental improvements to your campaign strategy impact audience response.

For example, Strategies 360 documents a number of key metrics across the hundreds of campaigns we manage every year. Important benchmarks that are documented internally include a breakdown by client and industry of average click-through or view-through rates (depending on the creative), percentage of audience reached, frequency of messaging, cost per thousand impression (CPM) and cost per click (CPC).

If you’re new to digital marketing, you may not have much in the way of historical data from which to draw insights. If this is the case for you, consider looking to other departments or units in your organization for sources of internal data based on your KPIs.

Competitive Benchmarks

Competitive benchmarking is the process of comparing your own organization’s data against a set of competitors using a specific set of metrics. This is a crucial element of campaign benchmarking because it allows you to more easily spot where a competitor is doing well or starting to struggle — which can highlight opportunities for your own campaign.

Competitive benchmarks can be used to establish where you are performing within your industry, and how that compares to your competitors’ performance in the same areas.

Establishing competitive benchmarks usually require in-depth research into what your competitors are doing and how well it’s working. This can be a time-consuming and tedious process. For this reason, it’s important to focus only on a few key metrics so you have a more narrow focus for comparison and analysis. The example above, for instance, focuses on audience growth as a key metric for comparison.

Industry Benchmarks

In addition to using your competitors’ data to analyze performance, you can also use industry benchmarks to understand how averages within your vertical compare against your own data. Industry benchmarks are generally made up of averages across a large subset of organizations collected and analyzed on a regular cadence.

Visualizations like this industry benchmark breakdown for Google Ads give marketers a good understanding of how widely benchmarks fluctuate based on industry – which highlights the importance of specificity in benchmarking. Source: Wordstream

Industry benchmarks are a great tool for campaign planning because they help you understand the context and preferences of your industry and the impact this will have on your campaign performance. Unlike competitive benchmarks, industry benchmarks give you a more holistic understanding of your target audience and the context in which they operate.

Industry benchmarks are readily available for marketers and campaign managers, which makes them a popular source of insights for high-level strategic planning. There are plenty of great sources for industry benchmarks, which can be utilized on their own or in conjunction with internal and competitor data.

How Benchmarks Are Used

Benchmarks can be used in a number of ways within an organization or team. For campaign managers, benchmarks are generally used to analyze the performance of digital marketing or social media tactics — but they can also be a helpful tool for creating and optimizing processes and informing campaign strategy.

Process Benchmarking & Analysis

Process benchmarking involves taking a closer look at how different teams, units or organizations approach a particular process, and then using these insights to optimize and improve your own processes.

Strategic Benchmarking & Analysis

Strategic benchmarking is the process of comparing organizational models or approaches to determine the best way forward for your own strategy. This is a great tool for spotting opportunities and prioritizing your digital tactics based on where your peers and competitors are investing (or not investing).

Performance Benchmarking & Optimization

Performance benchmarking establishes how your campaign is performing based on specific outcomes. In the case of most digital advocacy campaigns, this usually involves comparing performance metrics across various channels like social media, paid search and display ads. Performance benchmarking is crucial for optimizing digital advocacy campaigns so they can beat out your competitors in terms of visibility, engagement, and action.

Strategies 360 uses tools like SpyFu to gain insight into how others in your industry are performing, and compare this against your own performance. Dashboards like this one provide a quick overview of what’s working, what’s not, and what needs optimization.

Data used to facilitate digital advocacy performance benchmarking generally rely on insights drawn from a combination of multiple digital marketing research tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs and SpyFu. For this reason, digital performance benchmarking, analysis and optimization is often an area where campaign managers choose to work with a digital advocacy partner like Strategies 360.

How We Use Benchmarks

Because we work with around 200 clients a year and manage close to 5 million per year in media spend, our team at Strategies 360 has a huge advantage in being able to compare our  data across a large subset of clients. We combine our internal data with robust external datasets from major networks to continuously optimize campaigns for what’s most impactful in different digital spaces at any given time.

Working against a set of benchmarks is key in maximizing digital spend as it allows us to quickly identify whether a campaign is over or under performing in order to optimize and adjust as needed. Here’s two examples of what that looks like in practice:

Optimizing Ad Messaging

Working on an initiative to pass a bond to better fund a local fire department, we identified one message in particular that was performing below our benchmark average on Google Search. After crafting an additional ad based on our higher performing ad and pausing our lower performing ad, we saw clicks increase by 28% over the second half of the campaign.

This led to a better user experience, higher engagement rates (click through or view through rates)  and a lower cost per click (CPC) all because we were able to quickly understand what was working and what wasn’t due to benchmarking.

Search Term Optimization

On another ballot initiative focused around allowing legalized marijuana sales, we saw dramatic improvements by pausing search terms that were performing below benchmark. After making these shifts due to our benchmark tracking, we increased overall campaign click-through rates by 25% while also decreasing our average cost-per-click by almost $1/click.

Achieve Benchmarking Success with Strategies 360

Ultimately, the best approach to setting benchmarks is a combination of internal and external sources — but few campaign teams have all of the resources they need to accurately set and track changes to industry and competitive benchmarks to guide their decisions. This is where working with a digital partner like Strategies 360 can help.

Contact our team to talk about how we can help you develop and optimize a digital advocacy strategy using our best-in-class digital advocacy benchmarks.

The post Benchmarking for Digital Advocacy – What It Is and Why It Matters appeared first on Strategies 360.