Joe Martinez is the co-founder of Paid Media Pros. While he is hands-on in all aspects of PPC, his true passions lie in Display, Remarketing, and YouTube. He is a regular contributor to Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, and WordStream. He has also written for PPC Hero, SEMrush, Unbounce, Leadpages, Optmyzr, and AdStage. He has hosted webinars for SEMrush, Unbounce, Quora and Bing Ads. He regularly speaks at conferences such as SMX Advanced, SMX West, SMX East, HeroConf, Confluence Conference, Digital Olympus and more. Finally, he was named a Top 25 Influential PPC Expert by PPC Hero in 2017 and 2018.
• Top Rising Influential PPC Expert in 2016 by PPC Hero
• Top 25 Influential PPC Expert in 2017-2021 by PPC Hero
• Regular columnist on Social Media Examiner and WordStream
• Guest blogged for SEMrush, PPCHero, Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, Unbounce, Optmyzr, Leadpages, and AdStage
• Conference Speaker: INBOUND, SMX Munich, SMX Advanced, SMX West, SMX East, HeroConf, Pubcon, MnSearch Summit, Confluence Conference, more…
• Presented international webinars for SEMrush, Unbounce, Quora, and Microsoft Ads
Joe can be reached on Twitter @MilwaukeePPC or via LinkedIn
Recent Shows with Joe Martinez
475 | Paid Media Advertising for 2022 w Joe Martinez and Michelle MorganInterview / podcastThe second part of the Joe Martinez and Michelle Morgan (Paid Media Pros) interview. We discussed how marketers have to adapt to new platforms and metrics inside the new paid ad setting we are finding ourselves in, in 2022. The theme of the show today is Adapt, and do that nimbly. Join the Paid Media Pros as the share some great thoughts in studio with the EDGE!
What have we lost from going virtual for our marketing conferences?
There’s a lot of people that are selling paid media services, but not really delivering.
What changed in paid ad marketing 2021 and what to expect this year
We’re going to have to adapt to the dynamic search ad paradigm
Losing the Google Partner badge?
Are these really Google reps making recommendations?
The loss of ETAs
The changes – embrace them and get there before your competition does.
The only time the platforms will do anything…It’s because you left.
Privacy changes in Facebook and the rest…
Investing to build the awareness if your brand is unknown
[...]
February 2, 2022- 473 | The State of Paid Media Advertising w Joe Martinez and Michelle MorganInterview / podcastJoe Martinez and Michelle Morgan of Paid Media Pros join the EDGE team IN STUDIO! They have so much information to share with our listeners when it comes down to changes in privacy and how it affects digital marketing. We went everywhere. Have a look at the time stamps…..can’t contain it all in one description. This is where we have to go as digital marketers this year and into the future.
Marketing in college and foundational education, not tactics.
Foundational Understanding: Knowing the New Media Audience
Don’t pick tactics that are measurable all the time: adapting to the lack of tracking
Privacy in digital marketing: what you need to know
Google’s first major step in privacy: Google’s FLoC
What are marketers facing with privacy challenges in 2022
Our lawmakers have no idea: we need a panel of digital marketing representatives.
Going to the target audience, not just the big platforms
What are first-person cookies?
Having a good offer is more important than the platforms you’re on
You’ve got to roll with authenticity first
The brands that will be nimble will win
CRMs: Are you keeping your own data
What about the small audience data set?
Building an understanding of your audience
If you’re going to win at online marketing, you’ve missed the window when it was easy.
When you give away stuff, you’re going to build a bigger audience
What is your differentiator?
[...]
January 21, 2022
- 441 | Product Marketing in a Hyper-Sensitive Climate with JD Prater and Joe MartinezInterview / podcast
Prater & Martinez are back! This time around, we talk about brand perception shifts throughout the Pandemic, inclusive marketing and how audiences are way smarter than everyone thinks.
Examples that Joe and JD have seen of permanent brand perception and buying choice of consumers we’ve experienced through the pandemic
How Big Tech’s efforts to flag socially offending accounts have over-reached and harmed legitimate advertisers.
Are Ad platforms too hyper-sensitive?
We will have more inclusive marketing in the future.
Audiences are smart, passionate and the most vocal they have ever been.
You can’t please everyone
The world of product marketing and demand generation
Product Marketing in a Hyper-Sensitive Climate
Consumers are being more self-sufficient and embracing different digital trends. There has been a spike in the number of consumers that shop online. As people change their shopping behavior and brand preferences, they are sticking with it. Brand perception and buy perception have both changed permanently.
Changes in Consumer Behavior
Ecommerce or not, digital marketers have loosened the reigns on ad scheduling as consumers began changing their buying behavior. Some non-commerce companies were putting out Google ads on weekdays during regular business hours because more people were buying during this time. This change in consumer behavior pushes brands to get deals started earlier to keep up with all the other brands, especially with many direct-to-consumer brands.
The past year has created a different buying space. Buying became more than just transactions in some respects as consumers began looking at brand alignment. Consumers started thinking more about the brand’s messaging. For some, it became less about getting the lowest price and more about who the brand was. A lot of brands weren’t ready for that type of nuanced approach. Due to less focus on the transactional nature, it became a challenge to create a brand overnight if they hadn’t already done proper marketing messaging.
A Focus on Brand Sensitivity and the Effects on Advertising
A growing amount of advertising had to be pulled from certain types of causes and messages that had previously been overlooked surrounding certain political issues. Channels started to crack down, subsequently affecting many advertisers.
A certain brand could have nothing to do with a controversial topic, but because channels have begun more machine learning, good brands unrelated to the topics are being affected. Machine learning is not perfect in this respect, but there are too many brands out there to have a manual support team to stop the bad advertisers. This is constantly being dealt with, and machine learning was necessary to aid it.
Hypersensitivity to Brand Messaging
With channels becoming more hypersensitive to brand messaging, it becomes a question whether it’s worth getting the message out. Brands can be built on something people relate to, and while a brand can be vocal about something, if they’ve made that audience loyal, they know the audience will back them. Brands want to reflect their values and allow their customers to feel seen as well. However, some brands jump on topics just for the controversy.
Brand alignment can be difficult, and brands must tread tepidly because the consumer can process things incorrectly. If the mark of the message is missed, it can get a bad response. The hypersensitivity has also opened more doors, which will likely lead to more inclusive messaging with marketing and more ownership of messaging with brands being held more accountable.
Advertisers will be affected by this hypersensitivity. For ad platforms such as Facebook and Google, agencies must be verified as the advertising party on behalf of the brands, tie them to the brand. Advertisers will now be just as accountable for the actions and mistakes of the brand. While advertisers should be mission-aligned with brands they work with, it can be a difficult situation.
These channels and platforms are so big that it’s hard for them to control everything properly. The channel wants to do what’s right by actively blocking ads and bad accounts, but the good advertisers see the consequences.
The Audience’s Accountability
The audience is smarter, more passionate, and more vocal than ever. An audience will know if a brand is faking it, which can be detrimental for that brand. While the brand must recognize this, there is guilt to the consumer as well.
Companies are adjusting to new consumer behavior, and it’s becoming a pressure cooker. Any company that is digitally present should have a crisis management policy. But at the end of the day, you can’t please everyone, and anything can be read through the wrong lens. If a company takes a stand and says that it reflects its values and the values of the customer, then it can turn out well. Brands can also make a statement and have it benefit their bottom line when they stand with it.
The World of Product Marketing and Demand Generation
Product marketing and demand generation consume the outputs of product marketing and inject them into marketing machinery that consistently delivers content to prospects at scale. People need their stuff, and there needs to be a continual funnel of creation.
Product marketing is responsible for the product; they own the marketing strategy for that product. Part of that marketing strategy is working with the demand gen team, whether growth marketers or performance marketers, who can help build the creation funnel.
Demand generation teams can help find the proper messaging and content, help understand who the target audience is and should be, write ads, and help the design team. Demand generation teams now have a product marketing team that can help and lead the strategy because they’re the ones that are on the line for the success of the product.
If you don’t have a mature product marketing team, you cannot meet the consumers. Product needs have changed, consumption has changed, and alignment has changed. If product marketing does not recognize these other dimensions, it won’t meet the new dimensions in the future.
Product marketing was responsible for knowing the product and the audience; now, it needs to help the marketing team, sales team, and customer success team succeed. The demand gen team could be generating leads; then, the sales team is closing those leads. The success team needs to be creating FAQs while the demand gen team is sitting in the middle of these three teams.
The key is to look at the entire landscape instead of just looking at what the ad platforms are doing. More diverse eyes on content will help the marketer make the ad better to help it resonate with a broader scope of consumers.
[...]
August 16, 2021
- 439 | Fractional, Personal Marketing and the Changes in Consumer Privacy with JD Prater and Joe MartinezInterview / podcastWe’re joined by two experts in this interview! JD Prater and Joe Martinez join us to discuss relationship-marketing, client fears and the hot, hot topic of data collection. Marketing is changing fast, and it’s time we start to unpack what the heck is going on.
What does JD and Joe see evolving in the digital marketing space, taking in consideration the year and a half we have been through with Covid.
Innovation comes from constraint
JD’s new gig at Osmos and Joe’s new move to run his own shop
Do companies really get the new relationship-marketing strategies?
Client fears on a non-mainstream platform
When the light bulbs go off with a client and a tactic
Any time you can specialize….
The loss of targeting – privacy laws
The data collection mindset for marketers
Last stop: Google’s FLoC. What the FLoC is happening?
Fractional, Personal Marketing and the Changes in Consumer Privacy
As machine learning continues to thrive, marketers are pushed to work alongside AI and guide it. Companies slowly embrace marketing on smaller platforms upon seeing that it is reaching audiences. Privacy policies changing are also being recognized as beneficial for the consumer, keeping the consumer as the priority.
Meet Prater and Martinez
JD Prater is the Head of Marketing at Osmos. He not only has a finger of the pulse of product marketing but is a seasoned product marketer that excels at go-to-market strategies. He develops product narratives that resonate with the audience and grows revenue.
Joe Martinez is the Co-Founder of Paid Media Pros. He’s an international paid media writer and speaker. Previously the Direct of Client Strategy at another company, Martinez now hosts a YouTube channel called Paid Media Pros.
New Innovations
Innovation coming from constraint is apparent in the way marketers have had to become more innovative over the year. For certain accounts and clients that were struggling, budgets began shrinking, forcing marketers to get clever.
It was an opportunity to explore other big and small channels, such as LinkedIn or Google. Marketers were able to do and test out a lot of different intent-oriented messaging to fill better the lattice that is the buyer’s journey and connect at different levels.
Platforms are making it easy for the everyday person to set up a campaign and drive leads. The adoption of digital marketing outside of marketers is getting people results without having to do a lot.
However, machine learning not governed by crucial business goals—the work a digital marketer will do—sometimes runs you into a cliff. AI thinks it knows what you’re looking for, but it may not match your content with people you’re trying to reach, even though the campaigns are spending your money fast regardless.
Prater’s company, Osmos, has an AI-powered transformation that takes messy data and makes it clean. To do this, a human must give the AI the guidelines of what to do. It comes down to what makes a good conversion. Did the user convert into a customer, or were they a paying customer? This is where humans must guide the AI, which enables the AI to give us more data to understand what’s working and what’s not working. Understanding the consumer model, behavior, and probabilistic concepts gives more maturity over AI.
Fractional Marketing: Is It Being Embraced?
This type of relationship-authority trust marketing is foreign to mass marketing but can get it once they see what it does for them. Planting a brand on smaller platforms, such as Reddit or Quora, has benefits but can’t be scaled.
It creates a relationship with the customer, being done with a level of intent, from both creative messaging and subject matter expertise, while continually paying back to that channel. Clients may question why these channels are worth going to but explaining that they are reaching the audience where they are, which is what good marketing is—trying to hone in on the audience and how they can deliver value to them.
Where is your audience? Clients want to be where the people are. Google and Facebook may be where the people are, but the mentality needs to change. Other platforms offer specific targeting options and unique ad formats that keep track of what is the best for a company.
Smaller platforms have these nuances and innovations because they have unique audience targeting. Anytime you can specialize in one of these smaller platforms and audience targeting, you’re going to do well. Each industry finding a platform that their audience is on provides different ideas, which is why there has been better adoption among marketer’s clients.
Privacy Issues and Their Effects
A lot of targeting ability will be lost soon due to Apple changing the existing user permission protocol. Apple requires explicit permission to share a user’s data, which will affect marketing. Without the ability to pull from data, there is less ad optimization. How will campaigns be affected? How are marketers going to evolve?
A company running a lead generation campaign will be able to collect information lost from new policies. To do better marketing and get information back from channels, you must help other branding platforms and channels to focus on using that information from lead-gen campaigns.
The collection mindset is necessary before anything else. You can spend time getting legitimate customer information through on-channel features like lead-forms across platforms. When the user stays on the channel, those actions are being recorded.
These new regulations are protecting consumer privacy, which is what people want. People don’t want their data tracked, and this privacy will become the new norm. Poll in as much as possible to gain information and have a connection with the audience.
FLoC
Google’s FLoC, the posited federative learning of cohorts, is positioned as the replacement signal for third parties. We will learn more about the audience using deductive reasoning as opposed to direct cookie tracking. The most influential audience, which is based on Google search history, won’t be affected. The user will be happy about the privacy they are gaining.
Navigating the Future
What you’ve been used to won’t be available, so start prepping for the future now. Understand your marketing options and make sure your data policy is tight. Marketers are bettering how they determine what to put in front of the customer to trust the site and want to give their information. Innovation and policies are making people realize that we need to do better for the customer experience. In exchange, you have the opportunity of a higher conversion when done correctly.
[...]
August 8, 2021
- Quora PPC Options with Joe Martinez of Clix MarketingInterviewWhen host Erin Sparks spoke with special guest Joe Martinez, Director of Client Strategy for Clix Marketing in episode 326 of the award-winning EDGE of the Web podcast, they talked about how Quora is the up-and-coming platform digital marketers should be using.
00:23:29
Advertising Options in Quora
For those who are ready to discover the benefits of branching out beyond Google and Facebook for PPC results, Quora is a great option. Trying it out to get a feel for it easy, too. One of the best ways to do this is to engage in a simple remarketing campaign. Take the people who have engaged with your brand on your website, find them on Quora and see what kind of reaction you get from them. Then do the same thing with your customer list.
The next way to test the Quora platform is through specific topic targeting. When you create a campaign in Quora, you have the option to target certain topics or certain interests, and those are two different things in Quora. A topic in Quora means a “bucket” of questions. A bucket might be a brand. If there are at least a thousand questions about that brand, then they will be grouped into a topic for that brand, and you show people your ad as they’re engaging with that topic in the present moment. An interest, on the other hand, is something in which people have shown an interest in the past, meaning they had some previous engagement with a question, whether liking it or downloading it and so on. There are different levels of intent happening with topics and interests, so you should always segment those out into separate campaigns.
You can also target specific questions. Using keywords, you can find various questions with those keywords and select the questions you might want to target and get estimates for the number of impressions for each of those questions per week. You can also get stats on each question, such as how many times people have viewed the question. Question targeting has the highest intent because you know exactly where your ad will appear – with that question. And even time-dated questions (such as “best digital advertising options for 2017”) still get a ton of traffic and views, which can be another way to get your ad in front of those people.
One of the newest features on Quora, although it’s not a campaign per se, is the “promoted answers” feature. It’s a style of ad that is based on an answer you wrote. You can do all the same kinds of targeting with it as well. Doing this well requires your organic team to talk to the paid media team, which can be a challenge. But if your organic team is writing great answers to questions about your brand, you can promote an answer to vault it to the top of the page.
And the answer doesn’t have to have been written from the advertising account. If you have an engineer who is writing great answers, you can choose to promote one of those. Or even someone totally outside of your company whose answer is just right for you. If a consumer explains why they like brand X versus brand Y and it’s an awesome answer and you’re brand X, you can promote that question – and it’s not content coming from your company. It’s brilliant. What other platform offers that kind of innovative triangulation? And it’s very easy to do.
00:35:27
What do Quora Ads Look Like?
You do have the option to run text ads, but because the platform itself is largely text-based, you want to go with image ads because they really stand out. In fact, people routinely get double click-through rates with image ads on Quora. And Quora is beefing up the visibility of the ads on the site now, too, and especially on mobile.
And Quora has solid guidelines that keep the advertisers from abusing the system. The platform won’t allow excessive capitalization (which makes people feel like they’re being yelled at). Their guidelines sometimes get in the way, though. A company whose brand title has punctuation in the name is going to have trouble getting ads through because the platform thinks you’re trying to include multiple sentences in the headline of the ad, which would be a no-no. If you want to get creative, you can create an image ad that has a question that you then answer within the body of the ad. This makes sense because it’s a question-and-answer website, right? You could also promote an answer for the same purpose, but those image ads really stand out.
00:40:50
Stay Tuned for New Features
Without a doubt, Quora is a platform on the move when it comes to digital marketing and PPC. There are several features coming down the pike that Joe couldn’t talk about in detail but wanted to at least mention. One is going to be a remarketing option based on a current targeting option. Another is a new demographic targeting option that will be very specific. Quora has been a little slow on some targeting options because they’re very concerned about the privacy of their users and want to be sure they do these things right, which is a good thing for everyone.
Another feature coming out soon will be lead gen inquiry form ads. A user asks a question and gets not only an answer but also an inquiry form right there so they can contact the company. And of course, business accounts and profiles are now possible, which just makes a lot of sense so people can separate their personal accounts from brand accounts. Quora has now surpassed Pinterest in terms of monthly active users. It’s growing. The first thing is to just sign up for a business account and start exploring and building audiences, for free.
Connect with Joe Martinez, Clix Marketing, and Paid Media Pros
Twitter: @MilwaukeePPC (https://twitter.com/MilwaukeePPC)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joemartinezppc/
Instagram: @milwaukeeppc (https://www.instagram.com/milwaukeeppc/)
Clix website: http://www.clixmarketing.com
Clix Facebook: @ClixMarketing (https://www.facebook.com/ClixMarketing/)
PMP YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/PaidMediaPros
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September 17, 2019
- EP 326: Quora | Riches from Niches with Joe MartinezpodcastWhat’s one of the biggest Digital Marketing mistakes being made today? Spending all of your PPC dollars on Google and Facebook! You might be surprised how much of your audience are using Instagram, Quora, Waze, Reddit, Pinterest, Nextdoor, and others. And if you’re not including QUORA in your PPC plan, you’re missing out, especially with its ‘Promoted Answers’ feature! Our returning guest Joe Martinez, Director of Client Strategies at Clix Marketing, joins us in the studio to discuss all things PPC!
Our expert Joe has been a speaker and writer for many of the various sites we follow, including Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, WordStream, SMX, PPCHero, and Quora.
Joe also has recently started his own podcast to teach the world about Paid Media!
This episode was so informative, we invited Joe back for a LIVE Q&A session with our Facebook and YouTube viewers. We took questions on the air and had Joe react to them, as well as scraping some questions from Twitter from followers who used the hashtag, #EDGETalk326
The bonus episode is available to all subscribers of our podcast, as well as available here:
[...]
September 17, 2019
- EP 274: Everything You Need to Know About Quora Ads w/Joe MartinezpodcastWhile most of the advertising conversation is taken up by Facebook and Google, there are some lesser-known channels that can get you some great results.
Joe Martinez, the Director of Paid Search and Community, is a huge fan of Quora Ads and we wanted to have him on the show to get a break down of this advertising channel. What are Quora Ads? How do Quora Ads work? What type of results can you get with Quora ads? Get answers to all of your questions on Quora in this episode.
Plus – have you tried using Waze Local Ads? We have some great tips and ideas for you to try out Waze Local Ads…All on this episode of EDGE of the Web.
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July 5, 2018
