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It’s no secret that PPC advertising is a highly crowded and competitive space. Many businesses in the same industries borrow tried-and-true strategies to get their ads to appear in search results—and one such strategy is revenue management. For online advertisers and marketers, that means honing and refining pricing around anticipated and sometimes dramatic spikes in demand and dips in supply that yield the strongest results and highest ROI for your PPC campaigns. While it takes constant adjustment, flexibility and more than a little patience, when implemented with the right technologies and approach, it can take your PPC strategy to the next level, giving a boost to performance and adding to your bottom line in the process.
If you’ve worked in the travel or hospitality marketing industries, you’ve likely heard of terms such as lead capacity, revenue capacity or revenue management. Or put another way, you might have heard it like this: “Sell the right product to the right customer at the right time for the right price.”
Essentially, the principle is based on the idea that people are willing to pay more money for the same product or service when they really need it, or when there’s inventory scarcity. Businesses can take advantage of this, adjusting their prices to maximize potential revenue based on these factors.
For example, you try to book a hotel in Munich during Oktoberfest and discovers it’s double the price it was last month. Or when your friend booked her plane ticket to Seattle last week and today you’re paying 30% more to book the same flight. This is called price discrimination, and businesses use it all the time, especially when selling online, to maximize revenue and profits.
Revenue management requires anticipating consumer needs and influencing their behaviors to purchase the same products/services at a higher price than they normally might. Normally this strategy is limited to businesses that offer fixed, time-limited resources, like hotels, concert venues and airlines.
While there are a variety of market variables that can affect price fluctuations in revenue management, the potential benefits are too good to pass up.
PPC management is a little different from the regular revenue management strategies you see these industries utilize, but it’s based on the same concept. It’s possible to make quick, regular adjustments in price based on market variables. The only difference is that you’re trying to attract the most consumers to your website who will efficiently convert or make a purchase. Your goal is to get the cheapest cost per click with the highest potential revenue from your PPC ads.
It’s possible to optimize for this because of the way PPC bidding works. Google Ads prioritizes which ads to rank first in search results based on ad relevance and how much you bid at an auction. Advertisers that bid more money have a better chance of their ad getting placement.
But not all search engine users have the same value and revenue potential for PPC advertisers. Bid high for every relevant keyword you come across, and you’ll end up spending more money to reach both higher- and lower- quality leads. Adjust your bidding strategy based on a user’s revenue-driving potential to optimize PPC strategy.
It’s possible to understand the potential revenue value of a user based on the keyword searches they’re using. Keywords help illustrate the intention of the user, so you can bid knowing if they’re more or less likely to click through and convert. Once users do click on your ad and you pay for it, that indicates an additional level of interest as well.
Because it’s keyword-specific, every keyword is going to have historical performance data combined with bid landscape data from publishers, which when totaled, present a keyword-level relationship between the projected click volume at a given bid level. Essentially, it’s the keyword you’re targeting and the associated content you present with your ad that illustrate the level of user interest.
You can use this information to optimize your PPC strategy. Beyond that, you’ll need to optimize your landing pages and subsequent lead nurturing strategy to close the deal and realize revenue.
Relying on revenue management principles is a valuable way to optimize your PPC campaigns to peak performance. But there’s a reason not many people in the field use this strategy: it isn’t easy to execute. You must be prepared to make small changes in your bidding strategy based on ongoing insights that come in weekly or even daily.
You could argue that the strategy is more trouble than it’s worth — too much monitoring and manpower is needed to operationalize it. But in reality, most marketing managers that use any sophisticated bid optimization strategy do so with automation, not extra people.
Using an automation technology doesn’t only make it possible to use a revenue management strategy at scale, it also helps ensure your changes are more accurate and optimized. The people that manage a normal PPC program are more likely to miss opportunities and unnecessarily waste ad spend than a machine optimized for the job.
Even a well-equipped paid search program won’t have the resources necessary to keep up with and fully take advantage of revenue management as a strategy.
Say a business has two team members of their paid search program charged with making bids and bid adjustments. In order to do this, they’d need to react to a variety of market variables to make the right bids at the right price to maximize clicks from high quality PPC leads. And these market variables are constantly changing, making last week’s evaluation irrelevant in today’s market.
They could tackle the problem by focusing their efforts on higher volume keywords. But then they must completely overlook the long tail keywords that also have optimization potential. The average SEM program actually spends with 18 percent inefficiency on keywords with few clicks or conversions.
And by focusing on reviewing higher-volume keywords, they likely wouldn’t have time to also evaluate the impact of their efforts on revenue overall. With a program having around 50,000 keywords and a goal of making 100 bid adjustments a week, they’d still end up falling behind on their PPC goals in the long run.
An automated tool, on the other hand, has the ability and capacity to calculate an optimal bid for all 50,000 keywords. It could even do this daily, regularly analyzing the latest incoming market information and using it to make accurate adjustments, regardless of how much data is coming in or how many keywords they needed to track.
Machines are already better than people at computing, so it makes sense that an automation tool would be able to better recognize patterns to take advantage of. Some opportunities are subtle, take place over large timeframes, or can contribute to other segments of that program as well. Instead of evaluating each keyword individually, an automated tool can take a portfolio approach, maximizing the marginal utility of each keyword.
Of course, using automated technology to manage PPC requires a financial investment, but it’s worthwhile if you take full advantage of the tool. Automation can help you reduce wasted ad spend and better target likely-to-convert PPC leads with your ads. Once you have an automation technology saving you money and driving revenue, it pays for itself and then some.
While revenue management isn’t a unique approach, most advertising managers aren’t taking advantage of its principles to improve their PPC program. That’s because they either don’t have the skills to try it, or know they don’t have the manpower to make the most of it.
And they’re right, of course. Revenue management is a sound economic principle that takes a lot of investment and refining to operationalize. Market factors such as time, date, location and device are constantly changing. How can they really keep up with the insights to get maximum yield?
They can’t, unless they enlist help. Adding more team members to your PPC program might help you stay on top of the task a little longer, but eventually everyone falls behind. Those serious about adding value to their PPC strategy and increasing ROI are best off investing in an automation technology to handle the changes faster, better, and with more precision.
While these fundamental economic principles might seem simple, striking the right balance for your keyword bids to generate the highest value for your organization takes time, effort and a lot of educated calculations. Achieving just the right combination will entail studying market trends and strategically leveraging a variety of factors, such as time, date, location and device, to your greatest advantage. As with almost anything else, you can’t expect to go it alone with a man-powered staff, regardless of their experience or expertise.
Those serious about mastering this strategy need to invest in an automated tool designed to fill critical knowledge gaps in your PPC program—a move that could turn around missed opportunity and wasted spend into accelerated performance and increased ROI, while opening the door to more and even better opportunities down the road.
Regardless of the industry, we all strive for higher and higher return on investment -- ROI -- in our campaigns and other endeavors that drive marketing revenue. Logic would dictate that we spend the minimal amount while attempting to achieve the highest possible return. Yet striking just the right balance for optimal returns takes some strategic planning, a few educated calculations, and maybe even a little luck.
On its face, it stands to reason that the more insight and visibility you have into your customers, your marketing revenue, and their data, the more efficient and streamlined your processes and the more value you can generate for your organization. But what exactly does that trajectory look like or entail? What kind of visibility should you have? And how can you leverage your insights to not only ensure but increase your marketing ROI?
There is no magic formula. Because every organization's business needs, objectives, and challenges are unique, so too is their pathway to generating value and higher returns. That said, for many organizations, that recipe for success often shares common elements that include visibility, insight, action, and attribution. In order to give ROI a healthy boost, organizations will have to find a way to strike just the right balance that works best for them.
There are a wide variety of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that marketers can use to assess the value of their marketing initiatives. But at the end of the day, soft metrics (like brand awareness) do little to illustrate ROI from your efforts.
Metrics that focus on marketing revenue are musts in today’s digital landscape. According to a recent study:
CMOs and other managers want to know what drives marketing revenue and ROI?
Most like to take a simplistic view, citing financial buy-in, a better understanding of the customer journey, and analytical insights, among other things. But marketing ROI is as multifaceted as the digital space it exists in. There is a combination of correlated factors that affect and help illustrate ROI. Miss one of them, and you’re missing the whole picture.
Achieving maximum visibility is one of the biggest challenges marketers face in the digital age. At the same time, it’s one of the most important factors for success. The more visibility you have into your audience touchpoints and how they’re interacting with your ads and brand, the easier it is to understand which elements of your campaigns are working and which aren’t.
Whether it be content type, target keywords, platforms, channels, or bidding strategies, more visibility means more useful KPIs. Nearly every kind of business has a multi-touch sales cycle where simple campaign attribution strategies come up short.
That’s why the most serious marketers agree there’s a need to invest in tools and technologies to gain visibility beyond what advertising platforms themselves have to offer. And the greater your lead volume, the more opportunities there are to optimize your strategy and improve ROI when you have more visibility.
Luckily, there are a variety of tools out there that help you gain broader visibility, allowing you to customize and prioritize the data most important to you. The best tools will summarize holistic cost and performance data across channels. They’ll also include dashboards with instant reporting and built-in trending that you can personalize within the interface.
Of course, visibility is only the first piece of the ROI puzzle. However, oftentimes using the software and integrations that provide the most data about your audience also serve up the most noise. More visibility is always better, but only if you can gain actionable insights from it. And while visibility is essential, it’s only the first step.
So how are you supposed to turn this bank of data into actionable insights that drive ROI? Also, how are you supposed to attribute certain data points to the revenue changes you’re seeing?
Data ≠ insights. Once you have broad visibility, your next challenge is make sense of the data it provides. Indeed, while many businesses understand the value of and invest heavily in business analytics, the vast majority of companies are unable to leverage big data to their advantage:
So when assessing the value of analytics technologies for your business, don’t focus on data volume alone. You’ll only be able to maximize ROI from the insights you glean, not from data.
Instead, you need to be able to answer important questions like:
Ultimately, your ROI will come from the changes you make to your marketing strategy based on the insights your business analytics provides. If you’re unable to draw actionable insights from your data, then there’s no real link between visibility, insights, and ROI for your business.
It’s also important to note how the quality of insights you derive affects ROI. Even the most basic analytics reports from AdWords or the like can offer some insights for long-term strategy improvement. Most often, these limited reports do little more than point out gaping holes in your strategy, or big mistakes that waste your ad spend. Make these changes, and you’re left wondering what other minute adjustments you can make that will have a huge impact on ROI overall.
Serious CMOs need analytics technology that captures the whole customer journey and provides actionable insights to drive ROI.
In order to capture revenue-driving insights from your analytics, you first must track every possible interaction in your customer journey. Once you have this visibility, use it to understand important points about your audience. You can:
It’s important to gain these insights and track performance in both the long and short term. Making adjustments to improve your customer journey is relevant annually, monthly, weekly, and even daily. And the age of your insights is an important factor for potential ROI impact.
Meanwhile, the average SEM program actually spends with 18% inefficiency on keywords with few clicks or conversions -- representing a lot of wasted opportunity and room for improvement. While data-savvy managers can capture some revenue-driving insights from analytics reports, new data is coming in all the time. It’s humanly impossible to keep up with and act on the minute changes in data insights in the short term. However, these seemingly small gradations in data are actually the biggest opportunities to improve conversions and reduce wasted ad spend, driving more ROI in the process.
How so?
Again, it’s in your technology. Use business analytics software that automates data analysis and can derive important insights for you. AdWords has made major steps in the past few years to fill this need, introducing artificial intelligence (AI) technology to suggest campaign changes to your team. But it still lacks the visibility most businesses require, deriving less valuable insights as a result.
In truth, the best quality insights come from analyzing a full database of information in real-time, using a technology that learns from and predicts future performance. The most advanced options use machine learning to map out for you where your performance is headed given the most recent data points.
If step 1 is achieving broad visibility, and step 2 is deriving insights from your data, then step 3 is making informed adjustments to better optimize your marketing strategy. These are all tactics that can help you maximize your marketing revenue return and realize more ROI. And again, the speed and scale at which you can make changes from your insights will impact their value immensely.
Contrary to popular belief, top industry marketers aren’t relying on teams of data scientists and advertising managers to make minute campaign adjustments around the clock. They use automation. In the advertising realm, you can use business analytics automation to:
In order to truly maximize your ROI, you need to have processes or technologies in place that broaden your visibility, help you derive key insights, and assist you in quickly acting on these insights for greater effect. You should automate what you can, but also use a technology that has the features and flexibility for you to develop your own optimization strategy based on your own data analysis.
In the end, the process of obtaining more ROI from your business analytics circles back around to visibility. You need to be able to fully and accurately attribute your ROI back to the optimizations you’ve made based on your data insights. Otherwise, you’re simply making adjustments that you believe should increase ROI without actually knowing if they actually do.
Digital sales funnels are complex, and there are a lot of factors that can cause leads to convert or fall out. It’s best not to assume your optimizations are the most effective strategies available to you. There very well could be other, even more, relevant changes you can make to maximize ROI. Accurately attributing your efforts allows you to channel in on this.
But most marketers still struggle with this, either by lack of understanding or lack of necessary technologies. According to The Lenskold Group, nearly two-thirds of companies don’t use tracking or simple single attribution models.
It’s your job to ensure your conversions and lead nurturing efforts are attributed to the right campaigns. There’s no best way to do this because each business has a unique sales funnel with disparate touchpoints and value for its bottom line. That’s why the best approach enabling the most visibility and understanding is to customize your campaign attribution strategy.
Don’t rely on first touch, last touch or other pre-defined attribution strategies. Create an attribution approach that works best for you. Leverage a technology that allows you to use any attribution method -- even from third-party software -- to gain better insights.
Complete visibility means gaining insights that are both broad and granular. Beyond the individual campaign level, you also need to measure the impact of your efforts on your ROI long-term (quarterly, yearly, etc.). That’s because adjustments with a short-term impact could also lead to significant gains later on. Full visibility means also having a clear understanding of the combined and weighted impact of your campaign performance long-term.
Even ignoring the benefits of proper attribution for maximizing ROI potential, most marketing managers understand the importance for buy-in. So often businesses invest in advanced analytics technologies but are unable to (A) make sense of their data, or (B) prove that their data insights are directly responsible for increasing revenue. Marketing managers understand that both these things are essential if they want to garner long-term buy-in from higher-ups in the business.
There are a lot of technologies out there that give you the tools you need to broaden visibility, insights, and even ROI. Very few assist you in gaining the understanding and attribution reporting you need to illustrate that it’s worth the investment. The best business analytics software is equipped to illustrate their value for you, making your job a whole lot easier in the process.
Of course, gaining a deeper understanding of your audience’s demographic makeup, needs and behaviors has deeper implications for your business -- and not just about gaining insights to improve your marketing efforts. Deeper, more accurate insights can impact many different aspects of your business, from communications and customer service to product development.
Understanding what channels, platforms and content are most effective with your audience makes it easier to cater to their needs. At the same time, understanding the marketing climate, developing a strong positioning strategy, and launching effective ad campaign strategies are all key factors for new product success.
Visibility and insights don’t just make better marketers, they make better businesses. Because the better you understand your audience, the more opportunities you’ll have to be customer-centric. The implications for ROI are significant when you focus on your customers in all areas of business, marketing or otherwise.
Maximizing marketing ROI isn’t a linear process, it’s a circular one. You need a combination of distinct elements working harmoniously to achieve it. Altogether, you need:
When it comes to maximizing marketing ROI, you can’t have one of these elements without all the others -- they all fit together to create a sound ROI strategy that is bigger than the sum of its parts. Instead of starting with visibility and working your way through each step, start with the big picture. Invest in an analytics software that has the ability to assess a holistic picture of your unique marketing environment, while providing all the features you need to gain visibility, find insights, take action and attribute your efforts. By figuring out how all these pieces fit into the entirety of your marketing strategy, as well as how expanded visibility and insights lead to elevated ROI, you’ll ultimately be creating processes and strategies that can be repeated and built upon, setting you up for even more successful campaigns down the road.
How do you activate and improve media performance? Well, by the thoughtful integration of digital buying, of course! Is converging your direct and programmatic buying into a unified platform really that simple? The short answer is—not always. That’s why we’re here to clear the air and share a practical guide of tested methods to get you there!
According to Forrester Research*, 75% of agencies are headed towards convergence, while only 17% have fully achieved this state. More importantly, most agencies know that failing to evolve media buying practices means potentially jeopardizing their future. However, there is a bright side—and a solution! The convergence of direct and programmatic buying, along with a holistic system for internal collaboration, allow agencies to focus on the innovation and advancement of their media buying solutions. Can technology help achieve this?
What agencies prioritize in tech buying to create a more holistic system for internal collaboration:
We believe that the thoughtful integration of media buying can be achieved if and when it’s powered by a unified media platform. Read more about how to get there with our guide, Converge Direct + Programmatic. TheBlueprint -- and get started on your convergence today!
*Methodology: In this study, Forrester conducted an online survey of 104 advertising and/or marketing agency professionals at the manager level or above with responsibility for or influence over media buying strategy to evaluate digital media buying.
*Source: A study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Centro, June 2018
*Base: 104 media buying strategy decision makers at US advertising and/or marketing agencies
Keeping up with the trade pubs and latest trends in the ad tech world can be tough and time-consuming. We took it upon ourselves to de-clutter the space, and compiled a list of articles, reports, and other bits of awesomeness you may have missed, but should definitely read. Enjoy the latest list for October 2018 below!
The CMO Survey - 2018 [20-minute read]
A recent survey of marketers and a subsequent report by Duke University, the American Marketing Association (AMA) and Deloitte, proves to be chockful of interesting nuggets. One particular note is these marketer’s utilization of 3rd party data when compared to their 1st party data over the coming years – an expected decline of 11.4% of 3PD, and an expected increase of 70.0% of 1PD (page 60 of the PDF).
How Much Is Your Private Data Worth – And Who Should Own It? [4-minute read]
With data breaches from Equifax, Facebook, and Target, who should really own your data? In short, people, not companies, should have rights to their data, and people, not companies, should be able to sell it as they see fit, as argued by Stanford’s Business school publication.
Programmatic Is Fastest-Growing Part Of Digital Display [1-minute read]
Many news and industry outlets have long been reporting the expansive growth of programmatic advertising. It seems inevitable that an eventual plateau would surface but contrary to any such thought, the popularity of programmatic continues to grow quickly. A new report from the eMarketer illustrates the YOY growth (26.3%) accelerated by the largest ad platforms in the digital media game.
How Cheap Are Fraudulent Ad Impressions? [2-minute read]
Fraudulent ad impressions cost a fraction of the real thing, however, simply raising your price floors isn’t enough. In order to truly combat fraud, stop treating scale as the only metric that matters. Fraudsters know that buyers want cheap impressions so they create them for nothing.
Hearst Releases New Marketplace For Connected TV Advertising [1-minute read]
Hearst Television Inc. is launching an over-the-top (OTT) advertising marketplace. The marketplace includes programming owned by the company and in partnership with companies already affiliated with Hearst, such as Roku.
The anti-Netflix: Free, ad-supported video streaming services are growing [4-minute read]
Good news for advertisers who like video ads - you’re in luck! Despite the popularity of subscription services in the OTT market, ad-supported platforms are gaining popularity. New free video streaming services that viewers are flocking towards, are enabling more advertisers to take advantage of an influx of digital video consumption.
Snapchat, Amazon Team Up To Form Mobile-Commerce Power Duo [1-minute read]
Snapchat and Amazon are teaming up to bring you the ultimate shopping experience. Snapchat can now link shoppers directly to Amazon, taking on Instagram and Pinterest. Hopefully the experience will improve, because unlike Pinterest and Amazon’s own experiences, I could never get my app to successfully search.
How visual recognition is set to change advertising [2-minute read]
Visual recognition, or computer vision, software is helping develop a deeper understanding of the images and videos shared by consumers through textual and sentiment analysis. How will this advancing technology be applied to advertising?
Digital Tech Lights A Fire Under Out-Of-Home Advertising [7-minute read]
Out-of-home advertising is going through a bit of a renaissance. In a world that was once ruled by offline/analog experiences, advertisers now find the majority of OOH ad purchases are digital. An increasing number of ad tech players are creating opportunities to buy ad space on signs, billboards and screens to push fresh types of creative and execute other creative feats with greater measurement options. The increased appeal comes from the ability to now impact lower-funnel metrics and tie information back to campaign sales data, driven by big-budget advertisers like Netflix, Spotify, and McDonald's, who have been creatively leveraging digital OOH to more effectively target consumers in local markets.
The world of online advertising saw a historic shift at the end of June 2018, as Google rebranded the nearly 18-year-old Adwords platform under the name Google Ads. The rebranding effort goes far beyond mere marketing semantics, both simplifying Google’s advertising options and offering unprecedented opportunities for automating PPC campaigns. The renaming and re-organizing effort was part of a threefold transformation, in which the following new platforms were created:They say that the game of chess takes an hour to learn and a lifetime to master. The same goes for keyword bid optimization.
If you have any kind of PPC advertising strategy in place, it’s likely you have the basics down. You probably have figured out how much money you can spend and determined the CPC range that falls within your budget. You’ve probably identified ads, ad groups, and keywords. You’re probably focusing your campaign on ROI and are adjusting your bids accordingly. You probably have decided between manual and automated bidding, and know whether you’re going to channel your efforts on clicks, impressions, or conversions. You might even have a well-thought-out and structured AdWords campaign.
That said, digital advertising is fundamentally different than it was just a few years ago, incorporating image recognition, voice search, augmented reality, and chat messaging - all of which represent a new direction for the industry, and a myriad of new data that you could potentially leverage to your advantage.
And while you may have a great start in the process, there are likely a host of underrated, yet profitable, ways to conduct bid optimization of keywords that you could be overlooking. While seemingly insignificant, each missed keyword or inaccurate bid represents money left at the table. Over time, that could add up to copious opportunities -- and thousands to hundreds of thousands of ad dollars -- that are irrevocably lost.
Like anything else, understanding the nuances of bid optimization takes time, effort, and a lot of trial and error. In the interest of accelerating the learning curve a bit, here are a few ways you can refine and nuance your bidding process to fully leverage all of the available data to your greatest advantage, maximize your ROI, and truly get the most out of every PPC advertising dollar spent.
When making a bid, it’s often tempting to cast your net wide when targeting search queries, with the expectation that only a small percentage of those consumers, directed through retargeting and other multi-touch attribution points, will actually reach the point of purchase. However, you also risk bidding on search queries that are in close alignment with top-of-funnel marketing activities that may be several steps removed from the moment of sale.
With this in mind, it’s also good to remember that not all keywords are created equal -- some keywords indicate that the buyer is doing some reconnaissance while other keyword queries actually signify that the buyer has intentions to purchase an item. For example, a series of keywords such as “Donna Karen summer dresses size 8” indicates that the consumer may be further along in their buyer journey than someone entering “summer dresses,” and thus, may be closer to making a purchase. Subsequently, marketers can increase the percentage of actual conversions by identifying specific keywords that clearly demonstrate intent -- with the confidence to know that they will likely result in conversions.
To that end, it’s sometimes more strategic to bid on specific long-tail keywords. While they have lower search volume and subsequently less competition, they can also be tightly targeted and ultimately more effective. For example, “shoes” may have millions of searches a month, with stringent competition and a hefty price per click. ”Mens trail-running shoes” may get fewer searches but might cost significantly less per click, while also better honing in on your target audience. Among other things, long-tail bidding allows you to better focus your ad copy and create more relevant headlines, which in turn helps increase your CTR and quality score that can ultimately lower the cost of your bid.
As marketers, we frequently find ourselves in the position of halfway expecting the inevitable fire drill. And with good reason -- with countless variables ranging from technical difficulties, like a malfunctioning cookie, to user behavior aberrations, they can result in costly campaigns or outright failure to reach a key audience.
However, implementing intelligent machine learning technologies can detect those anomalies early on in the bidding process -- before they evolve into costly mistakes or miscalculations. An AI engine with the ability to identify and remediate a multitude of disaster scenarios as well as make decisions based on all possible outcomes can eliminate a lot of potential roadblocks that range from simple efficiency bottlenecks to detecting major threats to your PPC strategy that could have dire ramifications for your budget or bottom line.
It’s no secret that the more specific the data, the more definitively you can articulate its value to your organization. Thus, learning to accurately navigate and analyze granular data is critical to the success of any campaign.
For one, numerous marketing systems are not necessarily accustomed to identifying trends, relying instead on pre-trained algorithms. Granular data offers a distinct, strategic advantage, enabling companies to uncover opportunities that are unique to their specific customer bases and marketing goals. Rather than using a bid management platform to execute how a campaign should perform, marketers can develop a more opportunistic approach.
Organizations that implement a paid channel advertising platform offering highly granular data, such as geo-location info for customers seeking products near them, as well as multi-channel revenue integration to map new users to their customer funnel, will be able to identify and hone in on the most likely of customers, leading to higher conversions and a significant lift in revenue.
No one can envision all of the possibilities, both good and bad, that will affect their campaign. What may sound like a reasonable bid, may in fact be exorbitantly overpriced and detract from ROI. Similarly, what may sound reasonable might cost you clicks and conversions. And without possessing informed insight around all the various outcomes, advertisers have little to no time to adequately adjust their campaign strategy.
A bid simulator will provide the answers to an almost endless array of “what if” scenarios. Want to know if you would get more impressions by raising your bid? Or fewer impressions if you lowered it? How much do you have to increase your bid to significantly impact your conversion rate?
In addition, a bid simulator can provide handy estimates of the clicks, impressions, conversion value and cost that would have resulted with any given proposed bid. It could also display the same estimates based on a campaign-wide bid, or increase or decrease your campaign-level bid by a certain percentage. In short, it’s an easy way to take the guesswork out of bidding and avoid any sloppy, uninformed, or otherwise unnecessary mistakes.
It might be surprising but a number of PPC advertisers are either inadequately tracking conversions or aren’t doing so at all. But you can’t improve upon what you can’t measure. And if you aren’t adequately measuring your conversions, tasks like bid optimization will be imprecise at best, and will ultimately suffer because you’ll fail to identify the parts of your campaign that are successful. Thus, to ensure that optimization efforts are truly effective, it’s imperative to leverage a conversion tracking tool that allows you to obtain conversion code and track patterns around metrics for future optimization efforts.
Along the same lines, you can also designate values for various conversions -- a critical feature if you have multiple offers on your site. For example, this would allow you to assign one value for a product that was purchased and another value for gated lead gen content download. Among other things, this will enable you to achieve greater insights into the number of conversions sourced to a campaign, while also providing a deeper understanding of buying trends and the business value of those conversions.
At its core, Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) allows the keyword that triggered the ad placed somewhere in the headline, description, or anywhere else within the ad text.
This technique reflects the user’s actual search query in the ad itself, which makes it an especially effective means of bolstering website traffic. For one, your ads will gain relevancy, as they’re now directly relevant to the item being searched. And you’ll likely benefit from higher click-through rates -- simply because users are more likely to click on ads that have direct bearing on their interests and searches.
Like anything worthwhile, keyword bidding can be a daunting endeavor. Having a solid keyword strategy in place is a great start -- but it’s just a start. As you progress, your campaign strategy will likely adjust as you encounter unanticipated variables and roadblocks along the way.
Bid optimization will give you a financial leg up when encountering unexpected challenges down the road. While it might seem cumbersome and overwhelming, keeping your eyes open for opportunities to optimize at every turn could result in cost savings of thousands to tens of thousands on bids and customer acquisition, all of which add to your bottom line at the end of the quarter or year, while allowing you to realize even more value out your PPC advertising campaign.
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To learn more about how you can realize extra value out your PPC advertising campaigns, connect with our digital media experts today.
For years, when it came to PPC, Google was effectively the only game in town. Sure, there were other ad networks, but none with Google’s massive reach. Amazon is a relative newcomer to the PPC advertising arena, but the company has made huge advances quite quickly. Last year, the Amazon advertising business passed the $1 billion mark between Seller Central Ads and Amazon Marketing Services (AMS).
As an advertiser, which of these options is now the better choice for your PPC marketing budget? The truth is that you should explore and continue to use both. Each one has benefits for specific products and circumstances. Choosing the right one at the right time can mean better results for your business and a better return on every PPC advertising dollar that you spend.
Google offers a few different advertising opportunities. These include search ads that appear along with organic listings in Google's search results, display and text ads on third-party websites, and Google Shopping, which appears as a tab in search results for people who are looking for specific products to purchase.
Amazon advertising, by contrast, are those that appear on Amazon listings. When a user types a keyword into Amazon's search box, they are served organic results as well as Sponsored listings and Headline Search Ads. Amazon ads can also appear on specific product pages as Amazon display or product ads. For instance, if you go to Amazon and look at a product page for a specific bathing suit, you will also see suggested products below or beside the listing.
On the surface, Amazon advertising and Google ads do have a lot in common. They both operate on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. You will need to set budgets and watch them carefully to ensure that your advertising is well-optimized. Ad displays on both networks are triggered by keywords, which means that you need to carefully research what terms prospects use when they are seeking products like yours. Both are displayed before organic listings. Both are organized by ad groups and optimized for conversions.
Yet, despite the similarities, each of these ad networks has fundamental differences that will govern when you use them as part of a campaign. Google's ads can take your prospect directly to your website, while Amazon's take you only to your product page on Amazon. Unlike Google ads, Amazon ads do not retarget based on behavioral information from search, so you lose the ability to make a different, or better, impression on a potential buyer. In addition, Amazon ads are not available to every type of seller, rendering the decision between the two platforms moot for many digital marketers.
That said, if you are in a position to use both Amazon and Google, it's a great idea to keep them both in your repertoire. The key is using each one to its best effect and choosing the right strategy for each. Below are a few of the situations that will determine which network is best for your environment.
Buyers, particularly those who are shopping for high ticket items, go through a series of phases before making a choice to purchase. The metaphor of the sales funnel captures this process. It starts with product awareness, then goes through the interest development, the consideration of other market options, and, finally, making a purchase.
It can take seven to 12 touches before someone is ready to make a purchase. AdWords makes it easier to catch people at each phase of their journey -- from the time they’re first aware of the product to the time they’re ready to purchase -- and create marketing content geared toward their specific needs at every phase. You can create an ad that leads to a product comparison landing page, or one that leads to a free report on the problem your prospect is facing and how your product can be the answer to their dilemma.
The bigger a commitment for a product, the more nurturing you will need to be in order for your lead to convert. Targeting and retargeting someone through a series of AdWords ads as they progress can help you ensure that you are the one who finally convinces and converts them.
Winner: Google ads.
On the other end of the spectrum are people who have considered a purchase and are ready to buy, or those who will buy on a whim when they see a product that suits their needs. Amazon's targeting is all about that final conversion, making it the ideal place to put your ads for last-minute purchases.
With Amazon ads, you are dealing with people who are already looking to purchase. You are either promoting directly on Amazon through Sponsored Products or you are showing people ads for items for which they have already searched elsewhere. A quality display ad in either of these places can be the key to making someone decide to purchase the product that they have been considering.
Winner: Amazon advertising.
If you are looking at pay-per-click (PPC) for the first time, Google's interface can be dizzying. There are numerous options available, each with the goal of honing your technique to give you the best return on your money. However, those who are new or inexperienced may find that it can be difficult to use this platform to their best advantage.
Amazon's interface is far simpler to navigate. There are far fewer options to master, as well as far less competition on this newer, more specialized network than on Google, which has had decades to mature. If you are new to PPC and want to learn the ropes without risking too much of your budget, Amazon can be a great place to get started.
The good news is that much of what you will learn will transfer well to AdWords when you are ready to dive in. Both platforms use match types as well as positive and negative keywords. Both use a bidding system to allow you to decide how much you wish to spend per click on your ad. By starting with the simpler platform, you can get the basics down and gradually move on to the more complex filtering that will serve you well once you feel ready to graduate to Google ads.
Winner: Amazon advertising.
Say you are a company that offers high-end bluetooth speakers. This is a market where names like Bose and Sonos command large portions of the market. If you are going to get traction, you need to win people who might otherwise go straight for the big names and convince them to buy from you instead. So, wouldn't it make sense to capture the audience that searches for those names when they are looking for speakers?
When you advertise on Google, though, you have to be careful about using a competitor's product name among your keywords. You risk poor Quality Scores because their brand name is considered of low relevance to your product. A low Quality Score means that your ads will cost far more per click or will not be seen at all.
On Amazon, by contrast, you are able to target not just generic keywords that refer to bluetooth speakers, but also specific brand names and models. Amazon's quality scores do not take into account the same range of factors as Google's. On Amazon, you are competing purely on conversions. So, if adding a competitor's name to your keyword list causes prospects to visit your listings instead, you can gain conversions and increase your ranking on the site.
If you are able to advertise your products through Amazon's ads, you’ll definitely have an advantage when it comes to positioning your product and taking market share.
Winner: Amazon advertising.
If you are looking to sell something new to a consumer audience, you may not be ready to launch a full website. However, selling and promoting your product on Amazon can be a great move -- over half of all online shopping trips begin on Amazon, more than 300 million people use the site, and it is estimated that 80 million Americans are Amazon Prime members.
Listing on Amazon and then promoting your item through Amazon ads can be a great way to see whether there is an audience out there for your new product. All it takes are great photos (a minimum of 1000 by 1000 pixels for zooming), a clear and compelling headline and a tightly-worded product description and you are in front of one of the largest available audiences of qualified buyers.
Even if you are selling products in brick and mortar locations or your own website, it makes sense these days to be on Amazon as well. A huge number of people go only to Amazon when they are making a purchase online. Listing on Amazon allows you to get access to this audience and borrow the trust associated with Amazon's name.
Winner: Amazon ads.
As soon as someone buys your product on Amazon, the interaction ends. They may return when they need to buy a product like yours again, but there is no ongoing relationship.
In some niches, it makes far more sense for the seller to create an ongoing relationship that continues between purchases. Google ads allow you to target people with whom you wish to create a sustained buyer/seller relationship. Where Amazon just allows the marketing of a single product, Google allows you to advertise in a way that enables you to get website traffic, information in exchange for gated content or sign-ups for a newsletter.
An ongoing relationship can be a powerful thing for your company's revenue over months and years. It’s well established that it takes more money and effort to convert a new customer as opposed to retaining an old one. Retention is far easier when you have a way to keep your business near the top of your customers' minds.
For example, take a company that offers dog food, toys and treats. Through Amazon ads, the company can get a single purchase from a qualified prospect. The customer may or may not be back when they wish to purchase again. However, if this company wished to create an ongoing relationship and win many purchases throughout the year, they could launch a Google ad to sign up for a free newsletter, instead of spending on an ad for one product. This newsletter, which could be delivered weekly or monthly, could contain advice about pet care, pictures of client pets, ads for new products and maybe discount codes for future purchases.
While this is not a strategy for every product or every campaign, it is one that is far more possible with the flexibility of Google ads than with ads on Amazon.
Winner: Google ads.
Amazon ads have a high conversion rate and can get you plenty of profits. However, traffic from these clicks never leaves Amazon's domain. If you are building visitors to your website, this is largely a dead end. You would have to depend on someone Googling your product name or encountering you through organic surfing at some later time.
Google ads allow you to send people wherever you want to send them. If you have many products and services to sell, your own dedicated website remains the best way to create and maintain that audience.
Build traffic by sending people to specific products or to the front of your site to show a wide selection. Suggesting other products of yours below listings featured in your ads gives you opportunities for upselling and cross-selling as well. You can send people to one listing, but also give them the opportunity to see related products that may make a good additional purchase or a good purchase in place of the original product they considered.
Winner: Google ads.
Do you have a supply line that allows you to make or purchase your product for less than your competition? Are you working on a strategy that involves making up through volume what you might lose on your net profit on every sale? Amazon ads can be a great tool for winning conversions.
On Amazon, price is one of the first things that your prospects will see. It appears in bold at the bottom of every ad. If you are in a position to offer a better price than your competition, Amazon can be the best place to be.
Amazon offers an additional advantage in the listing itself by allowing you to set a range of price points for different product variables. You have the option, for instance, of offering different prices on specific colors, models, sizes, and more. If you only offer a significantly lower price on one model, you can still benefit by competing on price in your Amazon ads.
Winner: Amazon advertising.
Amazon's devices, which include the Echo and the Echo dot, occupy at least 8.2 million homes at last count. By contrast, Google Home is now in about half a million houses. Amazon reports that people who use their devices increase their spending on Amazon by about 10 percent. Google added purchasing options to its devices last year, but are still playing catch-up against Alexa and Amazon.
If you have the type of product that is eligible to be sold through an Amazon device, improving your visibility on the platform can pay off.
Winner: Amazon advertising.
The most important thing to consider when deciding between spending on Amazon or Google is what you want to accomplish. Using the right product at the right time allows you to leverage the benefits of each. Both Amazon and Google ads have extraordinary value to offer digital marketers. Take time to learn about both and develop campaigns and strategies tailored to each platform. Over time, you will find that you are able to extract the most value out of these powerful advertising platforms to give you a better return on your PPC marketing investment.
PPC advertising, when managed well, can be one of the most cost-effective tools for reaching your audience. For one, it’s hugely scalable, allowing businesses with budgets ranging from under $100 to tens of thousands of dollars to put their ads in front of qualified audiences. It also gives you an excellent level of control over who sees your ad and what you pay for that exposure.
However, with all of the advantages PPC advertising provides, it is easy to allow budgets to bloat out of control. And often, PPC advertisers worry about whether they are getting enough for their money. The fears are often well-founded -- it’s estimated that 25 cents out of every dollar spent on PPC advertising are wasted because of poorly managed campaigns. While it can be upsetting to learn that you are spending money on clicks that are not benefiting your brand, the good news is that every change you make that your competitors miss puts you ahead. By carefully going over this list and correcting any errors, you can reduce valueless clicks, ensure that the right people see your ad, and that qualified prospects are enticed to click and buy.
By either not targeting, or leaving every campaign wide open, you’ll likely be left with a lot of wasted impressions and clicks. Each campaign should be carefully targeted to the people who are most likely to convert. Google Ads allows you to do a very high level of filtering so that you are putting every PPC ad directly in front of the right people.
However, targeting does not end by creating a campaign on your advertising network. The ad copy and your landing page should also be customized for this audience, as most people are more likely to respond to a message that speaks directly to them. By using the same language as your targeted audience, while focusing on their specific wants and needs, your PPC ads can more effective, which in turn, means a better ROI.
Clicks that send prospects to your homepage are wasted clicks. Why? Your homepage typically has too many choices for prospects and none of them are clearly marked. Instead, a specially-created landing page should be made or updated for every campaign.
These landing pages should have just the right information that your prospects need to make a decision. The design should be clear, with limited copy and a compelling call to action. By upping your quality here, you can get ahead of the competition.
Test different landing page designs and content to see which combinations work best with various audiences. Experiment with the call to action (CTA) placement both above and below the fold. Try different wording. Over time, you'll hone the correct message for each audience and make your ads work harder for you.
The keywords that you think best describe your product or service may not be the ones that your prospects are most likely to search for. To get yourself in front of the eyes of people who are ready to buy, you need to be able to think more like them.
How do you identify the right keywords? This will take some research into your historical performance. Look at ones with high click-through rates, Quality Scores, and conversions. Look at your Search Terms Reports in Adwords to find new keywords to add to your program. If you have a keyword that is getting three or four times as many clicks as other ones, it could make sense to create a specific ad targeted to that keyword. It could be that specific keyword captures what people are most likely to want when they come to your site. By creating an ad that focuses tightly on a high-performing keyword, you are more likely to create ads and landing pages that address what your current and prospective clients are looking for.
Do you typically include price in your ads? Testing the performance of different price points can help you get a much better return on your investment. While many sellers are hesitant to drop profits by dropping prices, it is a strategy that could pay off well in the long term. For example, if you drop a sale price by $2 per unit, but double your conversions as a result, in the end, you will get a far better ROI.
Do people respond better to $20 or to $19.99? How about the difference between price points over $20 and those under? Don't necessarily assume that cheaper is always going to perform better. In some cases, consumers will decide that the higher priced item is naturally better quality. By playing with your prices, you can see which price point works best psychologically with your audience.
And don't just limit your testing to pricing. You can also test the performance of dollar discounts versus percentage discounts. A $4 discount on a $20 product is the same as a 20% discount, but each will have a different impact on your clientele.
While many of the suggestions here are more labor intensive, this one can save you both time and money. Platforms that offer automated rules make it possible to automatically adjust your campaigns based on criteria you set up in advance. You can even automatically run A/B tests. Think of it as cruise control for your PPC advertising. You can schedule ads in advance, adjust bids, pause low-performing keywords or ads and control your overall budget. Automated rules are especially helpful for those times when you may not react as quickly to changes, such as overnight or during long weekends when you are away.
By setting some of these tasks on autopilot, you can ensure that changes are made as soon as the system notices that they are needed, instead of manually adjusting when you have time to get back into the account. Pausing an ad that gets a lot of clicks but few conversions, for instance, can help increase your conversion rate for your PPC advertising as a whole.
Many PPC advertisers do not monitor this metric as closely as they should. Your impression share is the number of impressions your ads receive, divided by the estimated number of impressions for which your ads were eligible. If you are missing out on a large number of impressions, it is a sign that something is out of whack. Maybe your budget is not appropriate for the keywords you are competing on. Or, you have issues with a rank that is not what it should be. Google Ads can tell you what you need to do to get your marketing back on track. Make adjustments to increase your impression share and to get your ads in front of the right audience.
This report does a lot of your measuring for you. It will tell you, at a glance, which changes you or another team member made that caused your metrics to either improve or fall off. Looking at these can make it easier to tell what is helping your ROI and what is hurting.
When you identify a change that hurts your return, make a note to put that strategy on the back burner. But, when you discover one that gives you an improvement, figure out what elements can be transferred to other ads and other campaigns. Over time, you can identify the very best practices to consistently get better performance on your PPC ads.
Negative keywords are integral to a PPC advertising campaign with a high ROI. However, some advertisers do not bother to build out this list and use it to its full potential. Adding negative keywords helps you keep your ads out of view of people who are not likely to convert to customers.
Just as keywords define what your campaign is about, negative keywords help you exclude the things that it isn't. For instance, if you run a sushi restaurant, "best sushi" would be relevant while "best sushi recipes" would not.
Finding the best negative keywords for your campaign involves the same process as finding positive ones. When doing keyword research, carefully look at the suggested related keywords in results. Those that do not apply to your business can be safely excluded. Some advertisers also eliminate keywords that are likely to lead to clicks but yield few conversions. For instance, "free" is a commonly chosen negative keyword because many advertisers believe that people looking for free advice or services are unlikely to pull out their wallets when it comes time to purchase.
You only have so many characters in a PPC ad. On Google's text ads in search, your limit is currently 30 characters for each of three headlines, 90 for each of two descriptions, and 15 for each path. Make them all count.
Is there a shorter, punchier word that can be used? Do you need every article and conjunction? Play with your text until it is perfectly optimized for impact.
One of the keys to well-optimized ads is to make they are as action-oriented as possible. Ask questions. Suggest actions. Tap into emotions. The more direct you are and the more on-target your ads, the more likely you are to win clicks and conversions.
When we are pursuing organic traffic, we're counseled to get as high up in the rankings as we can. However, going for the top spot all the time may not be the best use of your PPC advertising money. Different spots on the page may give you different results and make it more likely that you are going to catch a customer's eye and win their business.
The top ad spot may not be the one that has the best conversions for you and your brand. Try altering your bid so that you come in at number 3 or 5, then watch your conversions. If you find that a lower bid actually gives you a better conversion rate, you have a double win. Not only are you getting better conversions; you will be able to lower your spending per click, leading to a significant improvement in your ROI over time.
Your call to action is the most important copy in both your ad and landing page. And both need calls to action that are clear, concise and actionable. Decide what you want your prospect to do, then ask them to do it.
Customize each CTA for every ad. Using the same wording that everyone else uses can cause bored consumers' eyes to glide right over your ads without making an impression. However, if you have a CTA that is a little different from the norm, you may compel someone who normally ignores ads into reading and responding to yours.
Be innovative while always staying within the rules. For instance, you might not be able to say "click," but you can ask for other actions. "Call now," "buy" and " sign up today" are all offers that can compel your reader to take the action you want. If you have a lot of mobile users, you can even use "tap now," which is both a permitted phrase and a more accurate description of what you want the readers to do when they see your ad.
Google, Apple, and creators of other browsers have been steadily moving toward building a more secure internet. And future precautions include warning visitors when they come to a site with an expired SSL certificate or one that is potentially insecure.
Desktop users are used to navigating past these notices -- they'll typically close them and go on their way, particularly when they are dealing with a familiar site. However, on mobile devices, these warnings are imposing, often taking up the entire page.
When someone comes across this kind of warning while they are surfing, they may decide that they are not willing to continue to the page. Sometimes it is because they are worried about the harm the page might cause their system. Other times, especially on mobile, it is because they are unable to close the pop-up to see the full page. In either circumstance, their actions will leave you with a wasted click.
Thus, updating your security can result in a dramatic change. In one case study, one small tweak resulted in a 400% increase in conversions without any additional changes.
It might seem counterintuitive, but sometimes you can get better results by forgetting everything that you know. When we all pursue best practices, such as proper headline capitalization or action-oriented CTAs, all of our ads can start to look the same. Temporarily abandoning the rules can help you stand out.
As an example, try removing all punctuation and capitalization from an ad. Try going for a more wordy, but less detailed description. Look at other things that you regularly do and then try doing something else.
While often a different way of doing something is simply wrong, other times, it's just different. And different might be what you need to stand out from the digital noise that defines the current online landscape.
If you are nervous about this approach, try doing it with a small budget for a short period of time. You can even A/B test this technique against a more conventional ad that uses the same keywords and budget. In some cases, you will find that the rules are there for a reason and that your rule-breaking ad does not get you the results you want. However, in others, you might find that a rule-breaker is just what you need to shake up your strategy and improve your PPC advertising ROI.
Every action that you take toward a better-managed PPC advertising campaign is an action that gives you an edge over your competition. If you are running tightly managed PPC campaigns while they do the minimum or worse, you can easily spend less on the same advertising exposure while getting better results. What has worked in the past may not be the same strategy that will work in the future, and the business that adjusts is the one that will thrive. Over time, this will mean a better return on every click and a chance to make every penny in each advertising campaign work harder for you.
Like any industry, digital marketing comes with its own set of policies and best practices aimed at helping customers create value, streamlining processes, and enabling them to execute a more effective online marketing strategy.
But what are the drivers behind those practices? What are some of the elements they share that make them effective?
Leveraging insights garnered from our own industry experts, we took a look at some of the practices and protocols that have led to the best results for digital marketing campaigns, while also examining how those practices have changed over time.
Among other things, that means knowing your company, your industry, your competition, your customer and your products and services. Many companies either lack this fundamental data or focus on simply pumping out copious information without context, so knowing whether that information has value for your customers is critical to the overall success of your campaign and digital marketing strategy in general. Deep knowledge of the market, industry and digital trends will help you focus and refine your message and better target your audience, while positioning you as an industry thought leader, equipped with the foresight to take your campaign to the next level.
As many marketing executives can attest, the return on investment for your marketing budget can be difficult to prove - in general, around 60 percent of small businesses have difficulty proving the value of their social media marketing efforts. That said, marketers who can prove the ROI resulting from their decisions are 1.6 times more likely to see a budget increase. Though it might take some systemic changes to your analysis processes, tracking and calculating the ROI of your digital marketing activities can deliver stronger results by shining a light on what works best for your business, while providing tangible proof to your superiors that your efforts are contributing to the bottom line and creating value for the organization.
Nobody likes rambling, long-winded jokes that fall flat at the punchline. Your digital marketing strategy should take the same approach. It’s likely not surprising that these days, the average person has around an 8-second attention span. That means your marketing message needs to grab the viewer's attention immediately while also packing a lot of insightful and relevant information in a very short span of time.
It might sound simple, but because many aspects of digital marketing are complex and easily misunderstood, many businesses simply toss money at marketing challenges rather than taking the time to truly understand what those challenges are and how to change their outcomes for the better. Thus, it's often difficult for business executives to improve their results, gain insight into where their strategy is lacking or why their current approaches aren’t effective. By having a solid grasp of the forces that drive the results, you can develop a better plan to take advantage of success metrics or improve areas where the results are poor.
Not that long ago, a business tried to broaden itself to reach as many prospective customers as possible. Today, that means reaching somewhere in the area of 1.8 billion people who are expected to do business online. With a population of potential customers that large, it's vital to shift that focus from reaching as many customers as possible to reaching the right customers. By focusing your digital marketing on the most profitable customer demographic for your business, you'll see better profitability with less work.
Analytics are often implemented to help improve machine learning and attain insightful information about industry trends, your activities and your website. However, those statistics are only as good as the data you provide. Getting bad data because you have a conversion pixel in the wrong location can skew your projections, analysis and insights, while also causing you to misinterpret the information and pour more money into an aspect of your marketing that isn't as profitable as you think it is.
Your website visits, Facebook likes and conversions are only part of the picture. To fully understand how to optimize the process of moving prospects to sales, you need to take the time and have the tools in place to follow your leads through the entire customer journey - from initial contact to after-sale follow up. Avid attention throughout the entire process is critical - especially for real-time analysis and pivoting in response to unanticipated challenges. If, for example, you find that you're losing half of your leads at a particular point in the process, you then have the ability to change the course at that point to see if you can improve the outcomes from that part of the funnel on.
When you're spending an exorbitant amount of your marketing time on your blog, analytics and social media sites, it can be easy to forget to update your website regularly. However, while you might get significant traffic to your website from your other activities, it might not be from sales. Take the time to regularly review your website and update it to provide a better overall user experience and information that is up to date with your company's current activities and offerings.
Sure, you know that almost everyone has a smartphone, but does that really impact your business' bottom line? In short, absolutely! In 2015, Google announced that mobile searches had passed traditional desktop searches for the first time, and that change has accelerated over the past few years. Thus, it’s imperative that mobile is strongly considered when devising your marketing plans and strategy, including ensuring that both the content you create and your website are mobile-friendly, in order to retain visitors and improve the overall customer experience.
Among the changes that digitization and disruption have brought to the market is the need for businesses to remain agile in their operations, including marketing. The market is shifting faster than ever before and your business needs to be able to move quickly to meet that challenge. Make sure that your marketing plan allows flexibility so that you can respond quickly to these changes and take advantage of changing market conditions the way that newer businesses like Airbnb, Uber and other market disruptors have done.
It's easy to simply turn on a conversation bot and pre-plan your social media posts for the next month, but that doesn't mean you should ignore your social media in the meantime. When a customer has an issue and tries to resolve it via social media, your company could look impervious to the needs of its customers if the post is ignored. Check all your social media accounts on a daily basis to make sure that any prospective smoldering PR fires don't turn into a blaze. Taking the time to provide personalized attention to your customers could make the difference between a customer who is thrilled with the service they received and one who will leave terrible reviews.
With the sharp rise of people asking Google, Siri and Alexa for information, you need to make sure that your information is available in a way that Google, Apple and Amazon AIs can find, as well as understand and deliver to new prospects. Keep the information in short segments - for example, a five minute podcast discussing industry issues on a daily or weekly basis that people can listen to while getting dressed for work, sitting at their kids’ soccer practice or making dinner. This ultimately will allow you to grow your business without a lot of extra work and expense.
Everyone wants a renowned thought leader in their industry to talk about their products, services or business. But beyond that, influencer marketing can have a strong impact on your company's reach in the digital world. In an environment where millions of updates, tweets and blog posts are published every minute, consumers are turning to influencers to get a vetted perspective on the best possible products, brands and services. By using an influencer to push your product, you're not only getting their followers to notice you, you're getting their stamp of approval on your product, which goes a long way to improving customer trust and increasing brand loyalty.
Though people have shorter attention spans these days, longer pieces of content are still ranking highest among Google searches simply because they provide depth of information that shorter pieces can’t. How do you decide whether to use short-form or long-form content? The simple answer is that you don't. Use a combination of both, from an every-character-counts tweet to a free, gated ebook aimed at generating leads. By varying content length and style, you can reach your customers at every point in their daily life, whether they’re taking a few seconds to catch up on Twitter or settling down for a few hours' of reading time.
By maintaining a solid grasp of the current best practices, while understanding why they are important, you'll be able to better focus your digital marketing efforts and budget where they'll have the biggest impact in your company. What’s more, you’ll also be able to track progress and make better digital marketing decisions by having more insight into the drivers behind these changes.