TL;DR

• Using Microsoft Advertising won’t take away your Google Ads success. It will add to it.
• Microsoft Advertising isn’t just Bing. It has a range of search networks, features and partner platforms under one roof.
• Microsoft Advertising is made up of older, more affluent demographics ready to spend.
• It also has a cheaper CPC than using Google Ads – and is easy to learn if you’re already set up on Google.
• Make your strategy the best it can be by using both Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising.

THE MYTH:

Google Ads has a world of benefits for business. In fact, if done right, it can earn you $2 in revenue back for every $1 spent.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and this is the attitude towards the inclusion of Microsoft Advertising into your PPC strategy.

If you’ve already got a working strategy set up with Google Ads, why would you waste budget advertising on a different platform with less of the market share? If you’re on Google, you don’t need Microsoft.

THE TRUTH:

The idea that it’s bad to advertise on multiple platforms is a complete myth. Using additional advertising platforms isn’t taking away from your Google Ads success. You’re not competing with yourself, you’re just expanding your reach.

Think of it like traditional advertising. Let’s say you’ve run a successful magazine advert campaign and you’re now investing in a set of TV adverts.

Putting out a TV advert doesn’t suddenly mean that your magazine ads are going to fail, or that you’re spending more money for the same results.

Sure, you might get the same people seeing both adverts. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it reinforces your brand in their mind. But generally, you’re targeting different people by another medium.

There is a caveat to this advice of course. Expanding the platforms you use only works if there’s a valid reason to be using them. You need to research and make sure it’s worth it before you invest.

With that said, here’s the lowdown on Microsoft Advertising and how it can be a useful asset to your PPC strategy.

Microsoft is more than Bing 

Before we get started, we need to clear up some misconceptions about Microsoft Advertising.

It’s not Bing Ads. The platform formerly known as Bing Ads was renamed “Microsoft Advertising” in April 2019.

But it’s not just a simple name change. The Microsoft Advertising platform includes a host of features and networks, including:

• Search engines like Bing, Yahoo! and AOL
• Microsoft Audience Network
• Sponsored products
• Automation
• Demographic targeting
• Responsive search ads

The Microsoft Audience Network is similar to Google’s Display Network. It allows you to reach more people than standard search ads. And, of course, Microsoft’s network includes popular business services such as Skype, MSN, Outlook, Microsoft Edge and LinkedIn.

In fact, because of LinkedIn data, audience targeting on Microsoft is incredibly accurate. You can target people by industry, company, and even job function, making it a great strategic tool for B2B marketers.

As we’ve pointed out in our Microsoft Ads manager checklist, Sponsored Products is a US beta programme build to increase conversions by driving traffic to specific product pages. This is done by adding more visibility to shopping campaigns and features such as viewable impressions and a tool for image management.

Once it’s out of beta, more information will be available.

But the key lesson you should take away: Microsoft is much bigger than you think, with plenty of cards up its sleeve. 

Why Microsoft Advertising is worth it

If you are new to Microsoft Advertising, there are 3 major draws to the platform.

1. Microsoft’s demographics

Before you can decide to advertise on Microsoft, you need to understand who uses it. After all, your audience is the most important thing.

Let’s not beat around the bush here. Microsoft-powered search engines don’t have the market share that Google does. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t used. In fact, the Microsoft Search Network connects more than 200 million Windows 10 users alone.

Every month, more than 379 million searches are made in the UK alone. That accounts for 22% of the UK desktop search market.

That’s a huge share. So it’s not surprising that Microsoft reaches 63 million search users worldwide that Google doesn’t.

Microsoft pitch deck data also shows that the Microsoft Audience Network accounts for 22.7 million unique visitors across MSN and Outlook alone. What’s more, it also reaches:

• 11.1 million people not reached on Facebook 
• 18.5 million people not reached on Twitter
• 16.8 million people not reached on Gemini

The pitch deck data also reveals:

• Nearly three-quarters of users are over the age of 35.
• 44% have graduated from college.  
• A third have a household income of over $100,000. 12% are in the top-earning bracket. 
• They’re also likely to spend 52% more online.

If these are the people you want to target, then you need to be using Microsoft Ads.

2. It has a cheaper CPC

Here’s a big one.

Advertising on Microsoft is traditionally a lot cheaper than Google Ads.

Marketing Donut records between a 30-50% lower cost for the same adverts. Search Engine Land puts it at between a 32.5% and 59.2% cheaper CPC. Either way, that’s money saved.

But it’s not just a cheaper CPC. According to Microsoft’s own data, the platform offers:

• A 29% lower cost per sale compared to Google Ads.
• A $0.49 average mobile CPC, lower than the industry average of $0.58. 
• A 35% higher conversation rate using the same CPC as Google Ads. 

That’s worth the investment.

3. Microsoft Ads is easier to understand 

One of the best things about Microsoft Ads is the gentle learning curve. If you’re already on Google Ads, using Microsoft Ads is a breeze. It’s set up and run in pretty much the same way.

But there are significant differences between both platforms. For example, Microsoft Advertising runs a few unique ad extensions such as action and multi-image extensions.

If you want to run the same campaigns on Microsoft, you can literally import them from Google Ads and they’re ready to go.

4. Microsoft Ads shares common features with Google Ads

It might be less popular than Google Ads but Microsoft Ads offers all the fundamental features you need to achieve success. You can also import Google Ads accounts into the Microsoft platform.

But one of the most underrated features that you can use between Microsoft Ads and Google Ads lies with the strategies. PPC optimisation makes or breaks an online advertising strategy.

Microsoft Ads gives just as much of a boost in campaign performance, uses negative keywords, audience targeting, bidding strategies, and dynamic ad creation. there are also reporting tools to help you review how you’re doing.

Expand your impact with Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising

Online advertising platforms may compete with each other but you don’t need to join them.

You could be missing out on potential customers – and loyal ones too. Integrating Google Ads and Microsoft Ads into your PPC strategy expands your reach and targeting high-paying customers wherever they are.

But as I said before, make sure your customers are there. Don’t use both platforms for the sake of it because if your audience isn’t on a specific platform, then there’s very little point in advertising there.

Warning aside, using two advertising platforms will help expand your reach and improve your success, not hinder it.

TL;DR

• Backlinks are great for SEO, especially from trusted sources. But they shouldn’t be the primary focus of your strategy.
• In the SEO hierarchy, on-page factors like technical SEO and content always come first. Backlinks are just the cherry on top.
• The quality of your backlink’s anchor text can also affect your ranking.
• It’s more important to create quality content and following EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) than the number of backlinks.

THE MYTH:

If you want to increase your search engine rankings, there is one SEO tactic that you need to use: backlinks.

Backlinks are links on external websites that link back to yours. You might also know them as “inbound links” or “incoming links”. Every backlink acts as a “vote of confidence” from the referring site. If they’re linking to you, they’re showing that your content is trustworthy and will increase your rankings.

So, getting backlinks is the most important SEO factor you should focus on for your website.

THE TRUTH:

If you search for anything to do with SEO, you’re bound to end up on some article on how to up your backlinks.

Hell, at the last Brighton SEO event, 5 of the talks were about link building. Even though it might have been practical and knowledgeable advice, there is a tendency to mislead with this information.

Which leads to the myth that ranking is all about the backlinks. 

And yeah, links do play a role. But they’re not the be-all and end-all. There are a ton of factors that will help your SEO – and there are plenty of things you should be focusing on instead of backlinks.

So, let’s get to work on debunking this myth.

Backlinks do have SEO value

The more quality backlinks you have (i.e. the more links to your website there are), the more credible your site appears. This can help boost your rankings and make your content appear higher in the results page.

Notice the emphasis on quality there. That’s because it’s not just about the number of backlinks you get. Where they come from makes all the difference.

Links from trusted websites is the bullseye you should be aiming for and will give you the biggest boost to your rankings. In contrast, if your backlinks come from low-authority websites, it can drag your website down with them.

That’s why black hat SEO tactics like paid links are a risky play. You’re buying links with no real insight into what kind of website they’re going on.

To get the most SEO benefit, you need backlinks from trusted sources.

Honestly, getting these backlinks is time-consuming. It can be a lot of hard work striking deals with these websites, and even expensive work with some people requesting to be paid for their links. 

And it might not be worth the work. There are other things you should put your time and attention into.

Great SEO means value first 

A great SEO strategy isn’t born out of thin air. It’s a combination of different factors working together.

Some factors are more important than others. Your SEO hierarchy should go like this:

1. Get your technical SEO elements together
2. Create valuable and meaningful content 
3. Build your links 

For the purposes of this article, let’s say you’ve got a fair grasp on your on-site SEO.

From here, you shouldn’t be jumping to backlinks. What you should be focusing on is quality content that your readers are actually interested in.

Quality content is plastered over Google’s webmaster guidelines and at the forefront of their ‘Don’t Be Evil’ mantra.

It was also the focus of their Medic update and, in all likeliness, will influence future core updates.

It’s all quality, quality, quality.

In terms of SEO, your quality pages are the ones that satisfy the EAT acronym. For those unfamiliar, it stands for:

• Expertise
• Authority
• Trustworthiness

In simple terms, you need to provide high-level content that’s accurate and puts your business as a leader in your field. In addition, it needs to be trustworthy and believable. Don’t mislead your visitors or sell them lies. It just doesn’t work.

It may sound hard, but it isn’t as difficult as it sounds. Research into what question your customers are asking – and give them the answers.

On the plus side, if you create content that people actually want to read – chances are they’ll share it naturally. So, you’ll still get your backlinks.

High backlink numbers don’t have a big SEO impact

Backlinks are important for SEO. But out of all the ranking factors out there, it’s not as impactful as you might think.

In Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table Of SEO Factors, they list backlinks as having a weight factor of +1. This means that although they have a positive impact on your SEO, the number of backlinks is not as impactful as other tactics.

Under the links section, it came third behind Value (+3) and Anchors (+2).

This tells us that like we’ve pointed out before, your content comes first. You need to make sure that you’re actually providing useful information that people care about, as this will score you the most SEO points.

Bare in mind, backlinks are ranked so low in this table based on the number alone. We’ve covered this briefly, but it’s a great reminder that getting backlinks anywhere and everywhere possible can have a detrimental effect in the long run if they’re not on high-authority websites.

That’s why the anchor text is more highly valued. This is the physical text that someone uses to link to your website.

So, let’s say Kimmy’s Salon has just released a piece of content on how to correctly balayage hair. The keywords they want to rank for are things like: ‘Balayage’, ‘how to balayage hair’ and ‘the right way to do a hair balayage’. You get the picture.

On another blog about summer winter trends, someone links to this content using the following text:

“Want to get this celebrity hairstyle? Find out how to perfect your balayage”. 

That text includes your keyword. This is good news because when the page is crawled, it gives the robots insight into where the page leads and the content on it. It’s so much more useful than just linking to a brand name like ‘Kimmy’s Salon’.

Having backlinks is great! But the anchor text that is used to link to your website, and the content itself will have a much bigger SEO impact. 

Backlinks aren’t the most important SEO factor

Backlinks are useful. They do help your SEO and should be used. The problem is that they shouldn’t be your only priority.

Backlinks are the cherry on the top of a great SEO strategy cake. But they are not your number one.

If you want to increase your rankings, work on providing valuable, quality content and building a sound SEO strategy.

For more information on backlinks and how they effect your SEO, check out Adzooma’s SEO Performance Report which analyzes your website and identifies immediate actions you can take to improve. The report will show you:

• The total number of backlinks your website has
• The number of websites that link to your website
• Your website authority, which is a score out of 10 to measure the quality & quantity of backlinks to your website

The report is available to all Adzooma users, try the basic version for free to get a taste of what this report can offer. Not an Adzooma user? Sign up for free, here.

TL;DR

• Buying followers is still legal in the UK and 50 followers can be bought for as little as $3 on Twitter.
• Fake followers don’t bring any engagement, they’re solely for vanity purposes.
• Real followers can be gleaned by using automated following systems, but there are drawbacks.
• Ultimately, though, buying followers isn’t worth the money. Success is earned and not bought.

THE MYTH:

Growing your brand online is a time-consuming and often frustrating process. But it’s an important one. With more followers, you can get your message out to more people, which will eventually lead to more sales and profits.

If you’re not seeing results fast enough, the temptation could be to just buy followers. This gives you a large audience of engaged people ready to interact with your content, instantly. Instead of months or even years of hard work, one small payment will leave you ready to reap the rewards of social media.

THE TRUTH:

Oh, if only it worked this way.

I can see where the temptation to buy followers comes from. Building a following online is slow. It’s an arduous task and involves a lot of hard work and meaningful content.

Buying a following is a dream that promises to cut out that hard work for just a small fee. Oh, how deliciously, deliciously tempting.

But… it’s not that easy.

This is a mythbuster article after all. We can’t have you believe that this is all you need to do.

What is meant by buying followers?

Generally, when it comes to buying social media followers, there are two different ways of spending.

1. Buying the numbers

This one is exactly how it sounds. It’s where you buy a certain number of social media followers for a set price. A quick search shows several websites that offer this, with prices starting as little as $3 for 50 followers.

But be under no impression that these are real people. Most of the accounts on offer from these websites are fake. They’re spam, inactive or robotic accounts that never see a real person.

In fact, nearly 48 million of Twitter’s active users are automated accounts disguised as real people. That’s nearly 15% of the platforms total usage.

The bots are everywhere. And they can be yours for a low, low price.

2. Buy an automated following system

This one is a little riskier but has the potential to bring in real accounts.

It works by following people from your own account and hoping that those people will follow you back. There’s a lot riding on this hope, with no guarantee of actually getting the numbers.

There’s not really a sophisticated targeting system here either. You can give them preferences, such as location, hashtag usage and gender. But that’s it. There’s no judgement on the accounts themselves and whether these people are actually your customers or not.

The chances of:

• It finding a potential customer
• Having them follow you back
• Getting them to engage with your content once followed
• And having this person stay a loyal, long-term follower

Are slim to none. Sorry.

Your follower count is just a number

Buying followers will increase your follower count. That’s it. Just the number. It doesn’t mean anything.

What you should be focused on is engagement. This is how you win over customers and create a loyal online following of people who will actually buy from your business.

Buying followers does not buy you engagement.

Most of the followers you buy are fake. There’s no one there at the other end, which means there’s no one to see or interact with your post.

So great. You look like you’ve got a high following. But that number is meaningless because you’re just shouting out into an empty void. You may as well howl at the moon instead, it will bring you just as much attention.

Don’t believe us? Many people tried and failed with this before. For example, Hootsuite bought 1,000 followers. They put out a post, seeing what engagement it would bring in from these fake followers.

It delivered nothing. Not even a single like.

You don’t just miss out on engagement here. You also make your posts less likely to be noticed by others.

Without engagement, fewer people will see your posts. That’s because of a lot of social media algorithms, Instagram and Facebook in particular, use engagement to determine the popularity of a post.

The more popular a post is, the more people will it. That’s because they want its users to find content that they’re actually interested in. If you went on a social media platform and only saw things you hated, you wouldn’t use that platform again.

So, popular posts get shown to more people.

If you want to get your posts seen, you need to focus on engagement. Not your follower count. And sadly, buying followers gives you the exact opposite.

Buying followers plays havoc with your metrics

It’s hard to get an accurate insight from your data if you’re paying for followers.

Let’s say that you have 500 organic followers. On average, your posts get 50 likes. That means that 10% of your audience is engaging with your posts – which is a pretty good metric.

But if you pay to up your follower count to 10,000, this metric gets messed up. It drops your engagement rate to just 0.5%. That’s an appalling number and not a true representation of what’s actually going on.

Followers you pay for aren’t real people. They’ll always skew your data and mask what’s really going on.

What’s more, your followers might start seeing through these numbers as well. If they go onto your account and see a high follower count with very little engagement, they might assume that you’ve paid for the followers.

This takes away any FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) effect that a high count would bring. After all, if you had to pay to get people to stay, there’s no incentive for them to do it naturally.

Is buying followers banned?

In the UK, buying followers is still legal. But with a court case outlawing the sale of social media followers and likes after an investigation into the American company Devumi, it may not stay that way for long.

The whole case itself is a fascinating subject. If you’ve got time, we’d recommend The New York Time’s write up of the investigation. It’s a pretty lengthy read, but a thorough overview of how the company operated and created these fake profiles.

Most social media platforms have procedures in place to try and remove ingenuine accounts. But they’re like grey hairs – once you get rid of one 10 more take its place. That’s why when you buy followers you’ll find that your follower count may fluctuate. It’s just replacing the ones that have been deleted. But social media platforms are getting smarter.

As of November 2018, Instagram is pushing systems that will remove “inauthentic” likes, followers and comments from accounts and posts.

Any posts that do this now violate their community guidelines. If you’re a repeat offender, it’s likely that you’ll trigger a reaction from Instagram’s moderators and potentially lose your account. It’s just not worth it.

The bottom line: you can’t buy social media success

Buying social media followers is a cheap way to up your numbers – but there’s just not enough benefits to make it worthwhile. And it’s a waste of money that you could be spending on improving your Facebook marketing, for example.

Buying followers does not give you engagement. It doesn’t capture the attention of your audience. Instead, it messes with your social media metrics and makes it more difficult for you to see what’s working.

At the end of all that, they might be taken off you for being ingenuine. What a waste.

But this doesn’t just stop at followers.

You can also buy YouTube views or Soundcloud plays. Again, we wouldn’t recommend doing this. It doesn’t mean anything if you have to pay for it. Work for it and earn followers naturally.

Simple methods of online lead generation just don’t work for small businesses.

Why? Because with so many other existing players in the market, there’s so much pressure to try innovative methods to generate leads and become profitable. It’s not enough to just run a few campaigns and get people to purchase your products or services.

You have to set yourself out from the competition. And if your competitors are using the same, simple lead generation tools and tactics as you – there’s no way to make your business unique.

THE TRUTH: 

There’s no denying that it’s harder to make your business stand out with so much competition around.

But that doesn’t mean that certain methods of lead generation don’t work. It just means that you need to adapt your strategy to ensure that you’re convincing your audience why they should buy from you alone.

And yeah, that’s easier said than done. However, it’s not impossible.

Most of the tools that you need for lead generation are easily available. You don’t need to to buy fancy technology or invest in overpriced tools to start your lead generation campaigns.

To prove that simple, online lead generation can work for small businesses, we’ve picked out 3 methods that you can start using today. 1. Advertise With PPC

1. Advertise with PPC

Pay-per-click campaigns (PPC) is the most popular form of paid marketing all over the world.

In these campaigns, you simply pay every time your ad is clicked and the visitor lands on your website. How much you pay depends entirely on the cost of the keywords and competition that you’re bidding on.

If the keywords you’re bidding on face a lot of competition, like “shoes” for example, your CPC (cost-per-click) could be rather high. But if you bid on less heavily competed for keywords such as “blue faux fur lined boots”, your CPC could cost mere pennies.

It’s all about context. 

The advancement that PPC has seen in the last few years is unparalleled to anything we’ve seen before. There are different kinds of campaigns to suit the needs of every business on the face of the earth. There’s rarely a business that has not found success with a PPC campaign. With the amount and the kind of inventory available today, PPC is every marketers’ dream.

You can optimize your campaigns based on the parameters you set for your business.

Measure the quality of leads generated through each and every single campaign and ad determines their value-addition with the help of attribution. The best part about the PPC campaigns is that you can scale the campaigns as you grow.

Our tip for making your business stand out? 

Lead with your benefits. Find that one thing about your business that no one else has (your USP) and put it front and centre.

Whether it’s that you:

• Offer free delivery 
• Have the cheapest price on the market
• Provide more colour ranges than anyone else
• Can personalise the product
• Offer a 5-year guarantee

Shout about it. Whatever it is, make it loud and clear, like this advert here: 

And, as we have a PPC platform, we have to point out how we can also optimise your PPC campaigns nice and efficiently when you’ve got them up and running. Just a quick mention there. Nothing major.

You can discover more PPC tips for small businesses here.

2. Get organic leads with SEO

While a PPC campaign gives you a quicker way to generate leads, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is key to grow your business organically.

For those unfamiliar, SEO is a way of getting your website found on search engines like Google. Get the full low down of what SEO is here.

SEO grows steadily and over time, can give you similar results as your PPC campaigns. But the two are best when working together.

Let’s look at it this way, SEO and SEM should be your twin engines that will help your business grow and become profitable. So, while you are focussing on your PPC campaigns, keep an eye out on your website rankings as well.

Adzooma’s SEO Performance Report will analyse your website and identify immediate actions you can take to improve. You’ll then get a more detailed breakdown of your performance into 4 key areas: keyword performance, onsite SEO, page speed and backlinks.

You can also compare your client’s performance with a competitor, showing how they compare with the competition. The report is available to all Adzooma users, try the basic version for free to get a taste of what this report can offer. Not an Adzooma user? Sign up for free, here.

3. Grow your audience with affiliate marketing

Nothing validates a product or service than a stamp of approval from its users.

Affiliate marketing is where other people promote your product and you pay them for the leads that they deliver. How much you pay depends on each affiliate. Basically, it’s a way of turning your most loyal customers into advocates of your products. 

Setting up the affiliate program is not very exhaustive but can be very rewarding. With a wide affiliate network, your brand’s reach can be very far and wide.

All you need to ensure is that you have an active affiliate network, keep your affiliates engaged with enough content and timely payment. You can scale your business up with your own affiliate program.

Need some inspiration? Check out what we’ve done for our own affiliate program.

Lead generation starts here

As a small business, you should never shy away from tried, tested and simple methods of lead generation for fear of not standing out from the competition.

Every method is there for your disposal. You just need to make sure that no matter what you do, you shout about your benefits and make it clear to your audience why they should buy from you.

Do this, and you’ll get lead generation success no matter what method you use. But the above 3 are a great place to start.