Pouring money into a paid ad campaign that’s destined to fail isn’t a sound growth strategy. Time and again, companies breaking into online ads don’t see success due to the same issue: they aren’t known to their audiences. There’s no trust, no recognition, and so the cost per click remains high and rising.
In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, Rand identifies the cycle many brands get trapped in and outlines a solution to make those paid ad campaigns worth the dollars you put behind them.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re chatting about the number one reason so many paid ad campaigns, especially from new companies and companies with new products or new ventures that they’re going into, new markets and audiences they’re addressing, fail. They just fall apart. I see this scenario play out so many times, especially in the startup and entrepreneurial world but, to be honest, across the marketing landscape.
Here’s how it usually goes. You’ve got your CEO or your CMO or your business owner and they’re like, “Hey, we have this great new product. Let’s spread the word.” So they talk to a marketer. It could be a contractor. It could be an agency. It could be someone in-house.
The marketer is like, “Okay, yeah, I’ll buy some ads online, help us get the word out there and get us some traffic and conversions.”
Then a few months later, you basically get this. “How’s that paid ad campaign going?” “Well, not so good. I have bad news.”
The cycle
Almost always, this is the result of a cycle that looks like this. You have a new company’s campaign. The campaign is to sell something or get exposure for something, to try and drive visits back to a web page or a website, several pages on the site and then get conversions out of it. So you buy Facebook ads, Instagram ads, maybe LinkedIn and Twitter. You probably use the Google Display Network. You’re probably using AdWords. All of these sources are trying to drive traffic to your web page and then get a conversion that turns into money.
Now, what happens is that these get a high cost per click. They start out with a high cost per click because it’s a new campaign. So none of these platforms have experience with your campaign or your company. So you’re naturally going to get a higher-than-normal cost per click until you prove to them that you get high engagement, at which point they bring the cost per click down. But instead of proving to them you get high engagement, you end up getting low engagement, low click-through rate, low conversion rate. People don’t make it here. They don’t make it there. Why is that?
Why does this happen?
Well, before we address that, let’s talk about what happens here. When these are low, when you have a low engagement rate on the platform itself, when no one engages with your Facebook ads, no one engages with your Instagram ads, when no one clicks on your AdWords ad, when no one clicks on your display ads, the cost to show to more people goes up, and, as a result, these campaigns are much harder to make profitable and they’re shown to far fewer people.
So your exposure to the audience you want to reach is smaller and the cost to reach each next person and to drive each next action goes up. This, fundamentally, is because…
The audience that you’re trying to reachhasn’t heard of you before. They don’t know who you are.
They don’t know, trust, or like you or your company product, they don’t click. They don’t click. They don’t buy. They don’t share. They don’t like.
They don’t do all the engagement things that would drive this high cost per click down, and, because of that, your campaigns suffer and struggle.
I see so many marketers who think like this, who say yes to new company campaigns that start with an advertising-first approach. I want to be clear, there are some exceptions to the rule. I have seen some brand new companies that fit a certain mold do very well with Instagram advertising for certain types of products that appeal to that audience and don’t need a previously existing brand association. I’ve seen some players in the Google AdWords market do okay with this, some local businesses, some folks in areas where people don’t expect to have knowledge and awareness of a brand already in the space where they’re trying to discover them.
So it’s not the case always that this fails, but very often, often enough that I’m calling this the number one reason I see paid ads fail.
The solution
There’s only one solution and it’s not pretty. The solution is…
You have to get known to your audience before you pour money into advertising.
Meaning you need to invest in organic channels — content or SEO or press and PR or sponsorships or events, what have you, anything that can get your brand name and the names of your product out there.
Brand advertising, in fact, can work for this. So television brand advertising, folks have noticed that TV brand advertising often drives the cost per click down and drives engagement and click-through rates up, because people have heard of you and they know who you are. Magazine and offline advertising works like this. Sometimes even display advertising can work this way.
The second option is to…
Advertise primarily or exclusively to an audience that already has experience with you.
The way you can do this is through systems like Google’s retargeting and remarketing platforms. You can do the same thing with Facebook, through custom audiences of email addresses that you upload, same thing with Instagram, same thing with Twitter. You can target people who specifically only follow the accounts that you already own and control. Through these, you can get better engagement, better click-through rate, better conversion rate and drive down that cost per click and reach a broader audience.
But if you don’t do these things first, a lot of times these types of investments fall flat on their face, and a lot of marketers, to be honest, and agencies and consultants lose their jobs as a result. I don’t want that to happen to you. So invest in these first or find the niches where advertising can work for a first-time product. You’re going to be a lot happier.
All right, everyone. Look forward to your comments. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
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Voice technology was everywhere at CES this year – toilets included – which means we are undoubtedly in an era dominated by voice assistants. This, in turn, means the way consumers perform even the most mundane day-to-day tasks is changing.
And, as a result, the way brands and marketers interact with said consumers is changing, too. The time respond to this technology is now.
Here’s a closer look at ten ways voice assistants are impacting marketing strategy.
1. Voice assistants are emphasizing the Featured Snippet.
The most obvious change in marketing as a result of voice assistants is the emphasis on featured snippets.
In other words, voice assistants like Google Assistant frequently pull answers to voice queries from sites that are ranked in position zero for given queries, thus making getting a featured snippet a popular optimization tip for voice search. And, coincidentally, Danny Sullivan, former chief content officer at Search Engine Land publisher Third Door Media and current public liaison for search at Google, just published a blog post “reintroducing” featured snippets, including an explanation of what they are, as well as how Google is working to improve them.
“Conventional SEO strategies are predominantly focused on the way users perform text searches,” said Tom Caulton, digital marketing executive and SEO consultant at digital marketing firm Dijitul. “It’s predicted that by 2020, 50% of all searches are to be voice initiated. Therefore, it’s now more important than ever to optimize your website for the different types of searches.”
2. Voice assistants are yielding more web traffic.
In addition, Matt Jones, SEO executive at online tutor platform Tutorful, said Google Assistant will now tell users they can open the Google Home app to see more at the end of a verbal answer.
“So not only are you raising brand awareness through the initial answer, Google is now directing users to head to the app and navigate to your website to read more,” he said. “As time goes on, this will become more and more common with more users navigating to websites – meaning you’ll get more traffic coming through to your site from voice assistants. It’s also worth noting that these users have fairly high intent.”
3. Voice assistants are resulting in better content – and better stories.
As voice search has yielded longer queries with more natural language, voice assistants are changing the way marketers tell stories.
“The first thing that comes to mind when I think of how voice assistants are changing marketing is the Alexa Super Bowl ad,” said Anna Crowe, product marketing manager at Search Engine Journal. “In the closing moments of the ad, [she says], ‘Thanks, I’ve got this.’ This is Amazon telling us they’ve got our back. Alexa has it. They are taking care of things in the background that we don’t have time to think about.”
Voice assistants have also been pushing brands to create new kinds of content.
For his part, Justin Shaw, managing director of One & Zero digital marketing agency, pointed to the Ask Purina Alexa skill through which dog owners can ask Alexa questions about their pets, enabling Purina to be an authority in the space on a broad spectrum of dog-related information, which, in turn, builds trust and mindshare.
“For brands to get their message across they need to think about their customer experience, both in how their audience engages with content, but also the ways in which their products can integrate with AI from a technological standpoint,” he added.
Steve Pritchard, search content manager at mobile network giffgaff, agreed voice assistants are driving diversity and variety in marketing.
“In order to keep up, marketers need to revise their communication production process to make sure they can deliver a variety of content across a broader range of channels,” he added.
4. Voice assistants are driving new forms of advertising.
And, naturally, voice assistants have prompted advertisers to think about how they can capitalize in new ways.
Robb Hecht, adjunct marketing professor at Baruch College, called voice assistants “the true first interactive tool in the home that provides brands the capability to dynamically offer up ads in the future that could be user controlled.”
In other words, he said, “Today, Alexa and Google Home don’t offer much advertising outside of allowing brands to build content and sponsor skills or apps within Alexa. Skills are functions that allow Alexa to react to a customer’s audio commands.”
But, he added, that may soon change if Amazon allows brands to sponsor skills directly.
“In the future, we can imagine ‘pick your story’-type advertising,” he said. “So, for example, if Ford wanted to advertise on Alexa, they might do so within a skill about ‘how to buy a new car.’ As the user answers various questions, Alexa responds with differing answers or information choices, based on how the user responds.”
5. Voice assistants are enhancing personalization.
But voice assistants also offer the potential for far more personalization for individual consumers.
Per Tyler Riddell, vice president of marketing for eSUB Construction Software, the specificity of a voice search helps give details about a user’s context, which yields a more personalized result.
In addition, both Google Assistant and Alexa can recognize individual voices, offering catered results for things like messaging, briefings, shopping and music.
And Pete Meyers, marketing scientist at SEO software firm Moz, said Google has been pushing toward individual voice print identification on all of its devices, which has even more implications for personalization, like using someone’s voice to access their own settings, search history, etc., just as logged-in search normally does. But, he said, it’s still early.
“Unlike a computer or phone, where profile switching takes a couple of steps, this would be automatic,” he said. “I could ask for something like, ‘My flights,’ and my wife could turn around and ask the same question ten seconds later and get an entirely different answer.”
Meyers said there’s also been talk about factors like a user’s accent or emotional tone triggering different results from a voice assistant, but, he said, “that’s longer-term and there are a lot of potential issues to overcome.”
6. Voice assistants are yielding more insights.
The ability to distinguish voices and manage account profiles also means marketers will have more insights into multiple users in a single household who make different purchase decisions, have different brand preferences, wish lists, music playlists and other personalized characteristics, said Miné Salkin, digital marketing manager at Absolute Marketing Solutions.
7. Voice assistants are better enabling retention.
For his part, Marty Weintraub, founder of Aimclear marketing agency, said it’s fabulous for marketers to have the ability to inject retention and up-sell brand messaging with assistant information design to enhance customer service.
“At the heart of all assistants is a flow chart, a diagram, if this then that, so the system knows where to go next,” he said. “That sort of system has been around forever – think airline or hotel systems on the phone. With AI and machine learning, the system can learn and skew assistant verbiage towards effectively applied flow. Online assistants may learn more easily than fixed systems.”
As a result, brands can weave retention and up-sell into the assistant’s flow.
“For example, as users zero in on the hotel room they seek, know to test the up-sell interjection after the user enters a credit card with which the hotel has a partnership, saying, ‘a $57 upgrade gets you 7X credit card points, say yes to take the offer or no to complete booking,’” he said. “There is little friction. It’s great branding for the credit card partner and the user might feel special.”
Weintraub also pointed to user data, which can help refine assistant verbiage.
In other words, when the assistant knows the user is close to re-upping a cell phone contract, the assistant can offer the user a free month to do it now. And if the assistant knows the user has been checking out Samsung phones, but has been a long-time iPhone user, the assistant knows to echo the existing online offer or sweeten the pot.
“The key here is the ability to gather data and business intelligence. Assistants can monitor market conditions, meaning competitive intelligence,” Weintraub said. “Marketing is the same as it ever was: We communicate by design, testing timing, words used, etc. Dream what you wish your assistant can know and apply creativity to solving marketing challenges with clever marketing flow. After all, assistants are a UI, not a strategy.”
8. Voice assistants are pushing products in new ways and enabling new experiences.
According to Anna Lebedeva, head of media relations at SEO tool SEMrush, one of the greatest ways voice assistants are disrupting marketing is the way they can push companies and products to customers.
Take Domino’s Pizza, for example.
“Prior to the Super Bowl of 2016, they synced with Amazon’s Alexa to promote voice-enabled pizza orders. And they justly got big buzz out of it,” she said. “But what was different is the positioning of that move – they promoted the idea of having no need to actually do anything to order a pizza – you can simply lie on your couch watching the Super Bowl, give Alexa a command and receive your pizza from the nearest Domino’s. Isn’t that impressive?”
And that, in turn, created a new experience.
“Locally focused advertisers can learn a great deal from the way Domino’s employed voice assistants in its brand positioning – it simply pointed out that no one needs distractions on Super Bowl Sunday, so logging in to an app, or, worse, switching on your laptop or making a phone call to order a pizza delivery is so 2015,” she added. “In 2016, you can do it all with your voice – just as when you’d ask your mother for an ice cream and it would be right there with you without any extra effort. That’s what the new wave of marketing looks like: marketing for the sake of human comfort without any additional push.”
Nikki Lam, SEO account manager at Power Digital Marketing, noted the rise of voice assistants is a reinforcement of something digital marketers have known for a while: Consumers want everything as quickly and easily as possible without sacrificing quality.
“Whether it’s restocking their laundry detergent, finding healthy recipes, or comparing pricing on shoes, consumers are favoring brands that nail speed, convenience and quality experiences,” she said.
Brett Downes, SEO manager at digital marketing agency Traffic Jam Media, agreed voice assistants should soon have the ability to integrate with a user’s favorite brands so they won’t need to sign into a specific app/website each time, but can rather access brands with simple commands, like, “What’s my bank balance?” for a bank app, “When’s the next train to London?” for Google Maps, and “I’m hungry” for Just Eat.
“This simplifies and increases the efficiency of queries and objectives,” he said.
Lam pointed to brands like PayPal, Patron and, yes, Domino’s, as good examples.
“PayPal customers can send money with a simple, ‘Hey Siri, send Sam $20 using PayPal.’ Patron’s Bot-Tender offers consumers personalized cocktail recipes from bartenders via Amazon Echo and Domino’s customers enable the brand’s Alexa skill, they can order their favorite pizza on Echo without lifting a finger – or their butt from the couch,” she said. “A virtual door has opened, allowing brands to interact with consumers in endless ways on more platforms. These voice interactions are molding branding into a set of interactive experiences that consumers are happily opting into.”
9. Voice assistants are emphasizing conversation.
Because voice assistants have names like Alexa, Siri and Cortana – and related personalities – interaction with them is much more conversational.
“With their conversational UI, voice assistants are embracing humanity into technology, with customers communicating with these gadgets like a friend, not a machine/computer,” Downes said. “Brands are able to connect with a wider demographic, especially children and seniors.”
Through third-party skills, Purna Virji, senior manager or global engagement at Microsoft, said brands can reach their customers in more natural and compelling ways. And, thanks to skills suggestions, she said Cortana can understand a much wider range of topics and recommend the right skills for users.
“You don’t need to remember the name of every skill she has – just tell her what you want to do and she will suggest three or more relevant skills that can help you,” Virji added.
And, noted Beerud Sheth, CEO of AI and bot developer Gupshup, conversations are proving to drive conversions.
“A rich, engaging, meaningful conversation catered to the user’s needs is more likely to convert to transaction or, at the very least, identify a lead,” he said. “Conversations offer brands a chance to fully understand customer requirements and to position their products just right. Just like in offline retail where a good shopping assistant can convert customers and upsell or cross-sell products, while an overly aggressive salesperson will likely drive customers away. Whether your brand appears to be a friendly shopping assistant or a used-car salesman will now determine your conversion rate.”
10. Voice assistants are underscoring the importance of editorial.
And, at the end of the day, advancements in voice assistants and related content increases demand for writers and editors.
“With the rise of Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Homepod and Google Assistant, your content not only has to be written well, without any grammar and spelling errors, but it has to read well, too,” said Stan Tan, digital marketing specialist at sign company Selby’s.
Everyone needs editors
Has the rise of voice assistants changed how you think about marketing yet? It will!
Almost every consultant or in-house SEO will be asked at some point to investigate an organic traffic drop. I’ve investigated quite a few, so I thought I’d share some steps I’ve found helpful when doing so.
Is it just normal noise?
Before you sound the alarm and get lost down a rabbit hole, you should make sure that the drop you’re seeing is actually real. This involves answering two questions:
A.) Do you trust the data?
This might seem trivial, but at least a quarter of the traffic drops I’ve seen were simply due to data problems.
The best way to check on this is to sense-check other metrics that might be impacted by data problems. Does anything else look funky? If you have a data engineering team, are they aware of any data issues? Are you flat-out missing data for certain days or page types or devices, etc.? Thankfully, data problems will usually make themselves pretty obvious once you start turning over a few rocks.
One of the more common sources of data issues is simply missing data for a day.
B.) Is this just normal variance?
Metrics go up and down all the time for no discernible reason. One way to quantify this is to use your historical standard deviation for SEO traffic.
For example, you could plot your weekly SEO traffic for the past 12 months and calculate the standard deviation (using the STDEV function on Google Sheets or Excel makes this very easy) to figure out if a drop in weekly traffic is abnormal. You’d expect about 16% of weeks to be one standard deviation below your weekly average just by sheer luck. You could therefore set a one-standard-deviation threshold before investigating traffic drops, for example (but you should adjust this threshold to whatever is appropriate for your business). You can also look at the standard deviation for your year-over-year or week-over-week SEO traffic if that’s where you’re seeing the drop (i.e. plot your % change in YoY SEO traffic by week for the past 12 months and calculate the standard deviation).
SEO traffic is usually pretty noisy, especially on a short time frame like a week.
Let’s assume you’ve decided this is indeed a real traffic drop. Now what? I’d recommend trying to answer the eleven questions below, at least one of them will usually identify the culprit.
Questions to ask yourself when facing an organic traffic drop
If there was an algorithm update, do you have any reason to suspect you’d be impacted? It can sometimes be difficult to understand the exact nature of a Google update, but it’s worth tracking down any information you can to make sure your site isn’t at risk of being hit.
2. Is the drop specific to any segment?
One of the more useful practices whenever you’re looking at aggregated data (such as a site’s overall search traffic) is to segment the data until you find something interesting. In this case, we’d be looking for a segment that has dropped in traffic much more than any other. This is often the first step in tracking down the root cause of the issue. The two segments I’ve found most useful in diagnosing SEO traffic drops specifically:
Device type (mobile vs. desktop vs. tablet)
Page type (product pages vs. category pages vs. blog posts vs. homepage etc.)
But there will likely be plenty of other segments that might make sense to look at for your business (for example, product category).
3. Are you being penalized?
This is unlikely, but it’s also usually pretty quick to disprove. Look at Search Console for any messages related to penalties and search for your brand name on Google. If you’re not showing up, then you might be penalized.
Rap Genius (now Genius) waspenalizedfor their link building tactics and didn’t show up for their own brand name on Google.
4. Did the drop coincide with a major site change?
This can take a thousand different forms (did you migrate a bunch of URLs, move to a different JavaScript framework, update all your title tags, remove your navigation menu, etc?). If this is the case, and you have a reasonable hypothesis for how this could impact SEO traffic, you might have found your culprit.
If you’ve lost rankings, it’s worth investigating the specific keywords that you’ve lost and figuring out if there’s a trend. Did your competitors launch a new page type? Did they add content to their pages? Do they have more internal links pointing to these pages than you do?
GetStat’s Share of Voice report lets you quickly see whether a competitor is usurping your rankings
It could also just be a new competitor that’s entered the scene.
6. Did it coincide with a rise in direct or dark traffic?
If so, make sure you haven’t changed how you’re classifying this traffic on your end. Otherwise, you might simply be re-classifying organic traffic as direct or dark traffic.
7. Has there been a change to the search engine results pages you care about?
You can either use Moz’s SERP features report, or manually look at the SERPs you care about to figure out if their design has materially changed. It’s possible that Google is now answering many of your relevant queries directly in search results, put an image carousel on them, added a local pack, etc. — all of which would likely decrease your organic search traffic.
8. Is the drop specific to branded or unbranded traffic?
If you have historical Search Console data, you can look at number of branded clicks vs. unbranded clicks over time. You could also look at this data through AdWords if you spend on paid search. Another simple proxy to branded traffic is homepage traffic (for most sites, the majority of homepage traffic will be branded). If the drop is specific to branded search then it’s probably a brand problem, not an SEO problem.
9. Did a bunch of pages drop out of the index?
Search Console’s Index Status Report will make it clear if you suddenly have way fewer URLs being indexed. If this is the case, you might be accidentally disallowing or noindexing URLs (through robots.txt, meta tags on the page, or HTTP headers).
Search Console’sIndex Status Reportis a quick way to make sure you’re not accidentally noindexing or disallowing large portions of your site.
10. Did your number of referring domains and/or links drop?
It’s possible that a large number of your backlinks have been removed or are no longer accessible for whatever reason.
Ahrefs can be a quick way to determine if you’ve lost backlinks and also offers very handy reports for your lost backlinks or referring domains that will allow you to identify why you might have lost these links.
A sudden drop in backlinks could be the reason you’re seeing a traffic drop.
11. Is SEM cannibalizing SEO traffic?
It’s possible that your paid search team has recently ramped up their spend and that this is eating into your SEO traffic. You should be able to check on this pretty quickly by plotting your SEM vs. SEO traffic. If it’s not obvious after doing this whether it’s a factor, then it can be worth pausing your SEM campaigns for specific landing pages and seeing if SEO traffic rebounds for those pages.
To be clear, some level of cannibalization between SEM and SEO is inevitable, but it’s still worth understanding how much of your traffic is being cannibalized and whether the incremental clicks your SEM campaigns are driving outweigh the loss in SEO traffic (in my experience they usually do outweigh the loss in SEO traffic, but still worth checking!).
If your SEM vs. SEO traffic graph looks similar to the (slightly extreme) one above, then SEM campaigns might be cannibalizing your SEO traffic.
That’s all I’ve got — hopefully at least one of these questions will lead you to the root cause of an organic search traffic drop. Are there any other questions that you’ve found particularly helpful for diagnosing traffic drops? Let me know in the comments.
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February may be the shortest month of the year, but man, there was a lot going on this month.
From the predictable (if misplaced) anxiety about Google Chrome’s new built-in ad blocker to must-read SEO survival strategies for the coming voice search revolution, there was plenty for marketers of all stripes to get their teeth into this month.
In case you missed them, here are the most popular posts from the WordStream blog in February. Whether you’re an advertiser worried about how Chrome’s new ad blocker will affect your campaigns, a social media manager in need of a crisis management strategy, or a small-business owner who wants your ad budget to go a little further, there’s something for you in this month’s round-up.
Did you know that year-over-year search spend in AdWords increased by 24% last year? Or that the average CPC on the Google Search Network spiked by 14% in Q4 2017?
Some statistics are little more than tiny morsels of mildly interesting trivia. The stats above, and the other 33 like them in our most popular post of the month, should stop you in your tracks. Allen takes top honors in February’s round-up with this fascinating collection of statistics that could change the way you do business in 2018. Are you prepared?
The biggest news of the month was Google’s hotly anticipated launch of its built-in ad blocker for Chrome. The world’s largest online advertising company introducing an ad blocker in the most popular web browser sent many advertisers and marketers into a panic – but were their worries justified? You’ll have to read this post by Allen to find out. (Spoilers: they weren’t.)
A/B testing at scale is a pain in the ass. It takes a long time and requires a lot of work, making it about as appealing as having a wisdom tooth pulled. Fortunately, Google introduced Ad Variations at the end of last year as a way for advertisers to test their ad copy without getting stuck in the weeds when they should be, you know, running their businesses.
In our third-most popular post of the month, Allen explains everything you need to know about Ad Variations, why they’re so awesome, and how to start testing your copy at scale.
When it comes to buying a house, it’s all about location. When it comes to selling a house, where that house happens to be is only part of the puzzle that realtors have to solve if they want their commission.
In our fourth-most popular post of February, Margot offers seven highly actionable tips that realtors advertising on Facebook can take to make their realty agency – and their listings – all the more attractive to prospective buyers.
Although many costs in AdWords have risen during the past 12 months (see our most popular post for the details if you want to see just how much they’ve risen), it’s still a remarkably cost-effective way to get the word out about your business. That doesn’t mean that you can’t allocate your ad budget a little more wisely.
In this post, guest author Barry Feldman outlines seven ways to stop burning through your budget like a lobbyist at Mar-a-Lago. Barry explains some of the hidden traps that can sap your ad budget without you even realizing it, as well as proactive ways to take control of your ad spend and make sure every dollar of your ad budget is working as hard as you are.
Let’s face it – reporting sucks. It can be a thankless, time-consuming task, and that’s even if the results are good.
There is another way, weary marketer.
In this post, Brad Smith examines five of the best reporting tools available to beleaguered marketers who hate reporting as much as the White House does. Brad takes a look at each reporting tool in depth, outlines the pros and cons of each, and shows you some pretty nifty tricks you can use in good old Google Analytics to take the pain out of your reporting.
Considering how much capital, knowledge, and expertise major brands have at their disposal, it’s amazing how many brands still manage to royally screw up on social media. When brands make horrendous gaffes on social, many people take a moment to bask in the schadenfreude that comes with it, but what’s the poor social media person responsible for containing the damage supposed to do?
In this post, yours truly explains how to handle a variety of social media crises, from ill-advised tweets attempting to coopt national tragedies to make a sale, to “hacks” that look a lot like an inept social media manager tweeting from the wrong account. By the end of this post, you’ll have several actionable steps you can take to put out your next social media fire.
As any hardcore Instagrammer could tell you, captions are almost as important as the images they accompany. Without a snappy caption, even the most beautifully photographed brunch becomes just another dumb photo of somebody else’s food.
In this post, Gordon lists 33 Instagram captions that took these posts from “good” to “great.” Each example has something unique to offer, so whether you’re hoping to increase engagement or broaden your audience, there are plenty of lessons to be learned from these Instagram captions.
Voice search is poised to be among the most potentially disruptive changes to the search landscape in recent memory. For every exciting innovation promised to us by emerging voice search technologies, there are dozens of challenges – particularly when it comes to SEO.
In our penultimate post of this month’s round-up, Hallam Internet’s Ellie Pollicott outlines four survival tips to ensure your site – and your traffic – survives the impending voice search revolution. How many of these strategies are you already using?
Writing good ad copy is a lot harder than it sounds. Fortunately, you have a wealth of firsthand experiences upon which you can draw when writing your ads – your customers’ feedback.
In our final post of this month’s round-up, guest author Robin Geuens tells you how to transform customer feedback from a wide range of sources into high-converting ad copy that drives results. Robin shows you how to gather and identify the best feedback to use in your copy, from social media posts and blog comments to customer reviews and client testimonials.
Like belligerent seniors complaining about how the bad weather aggravates their arthritis, marketers always seem to be talking about pain points.
Unlike a bum hip, however, the kind of pain points marketers typically encounter can be a little more complicated.
In this post, we’ll be diving into the world of customer pain points – specifically, what they are and how you can position your company as a potential solution. We’ll be taking a look at several real-world examples to see how marketers overcome some of the most common customer pain points, as well as general tips on how to make yourself indispensable to your prospects at the right time, in the right place.
Before we get to the examples, though, let’s start with the basics.
What Are Customer Pain Points?
A pain point is a specific problem that prospective customers of your business are experiencing. In other words, you can think of pain points as problems, plain and simple.
Like any problem, customer pain points are as diverse and varied as your prospective customers themselves. However, not all prospects will be aware of the pain point they’re experiencing, which can make marketing to these individuals difficult as you effectively have to help your prospects realize they have a problem and convince them that your product or service will help solve it.
Although you can think of pain points as simple problems, they’re often grouped into several broader categories. Here are the four main types of pain point:
Financial Pain Points: Your prospects are spending too much money on their current provider/solution/products and want to reduce their spend
Productivity Pain Points: Your prospects are wasting too much time using their current provider/solution/products or want to use their time more efficiently
ProcessPain Points: Your prospects want to improve internal processes, such as assigning leads to sales reps or nurturing lower-priority leads
Viewing customer pain points in these categories allows you to start thinking about how to position your company or product as a solution to your prospects’ problems. For example, if your prospects’ pain points are primarily financial, you could highlight the features of your product within the context of a lower monthly subscription plan, or emphasize the increased ROI your satisfied customers experience after becoming a client.
However, while this method of categorization is a good start, it’s not as simple as identifying price as a pain point before pointing out that your product or service is cheaper than the competition. Many prospective customers’ problems are layered and complex, and may combine issues from several of our categories above. That’s why you need to view your customers’ pain points holistically, and present your company as a solution to not just one particularly problematic pain point, but as a trusted partner that can help solve a variety of problems.
How Do I Identify My Customers’ Pain Points?
Now that we know what pain points are, we need to figure out how to actually identify them.
Although many of your prospects are likely experiencing the same or similar pain points, the root cause of these pain points can be as diverse as your clientele. That’s why qualitative research is a fundamental part of identifying customer pain points.
The reason you need to conduct qualitative research (which focuses on detailed, individualized responses to open-ended questions) as opposed to quantitative research (which favors standardized questions and representative, statistically significant sample sizes) is because your customers’ pain points are highly subjective. Even if two customers have exactly the same problem, the underlying causes of that problem could differ greatly from one customer to another.
There are two primary sources of the information you need to identify your customers’ pain points – your customers themselves, and your sales and support teams. Let’s take a look at how to get the information you need from your customers first.
Conducting Qualitative Customer Research
One of the best ways to learn your customers’ biggest problems is by really listening to them.
Recently, we held our first Customer Insight Round Table event, in which we invited 11 WordStream customers to spend some time at our offices in Boston to share their experiences – good and bad – with us openly and honestly.
A WordStream client evaluates a series of problems and proposed solutions
during our first Customer Insight Round Table event
As part of this process, we asked attendees to participate in an Ideation & Design workshop, a collaborative, hands-on session in which our customers identified some of their biggest challenges as online advertisers. This helped attendees remain focused on the problems they shared as advertisers, rather than as individual entrepreneurs and business owners, and also allowed us to focus on solving problems that were within our control.
We learned things about our customers’ problems that even the most detailed questionnaire could never unearth, and it gave us the opportunity to discuss those issues within the context of wider problems that our customers are experiencing. This gave us a remarkably detailed view of our customers’ pain points as well as a broader view of how the current economic climate and other factors are affecting real businesses.
This kind of event is invaluable to you as a business. Not only does it allow you to converse at length with the people who are actually using your products, it also creates an environment in which problem-solving is a collaborative process.
Conducting Qualitative Sales Research
The other research resource at your disposal is your sales team. Your sales reps work on the frontlines of the battle for the hearts and minds of your prospective customers every single day, which makes them an invaluable source of feedback on your prospects’ pain points.
However, as valuable as your sales team’s feedback can be, it’s important to distinguish your sales reps’ pain points from your prospects’ pain points; your sales reps’ problems may be very real, but you’re not building a product or providing a service to make your sales reps’ lives easier (at least, not in the context of this article).
It’s crucial to separate operational challenges from genuine customer pain points. For example, let’s say your reps are experiencing a slow quarter, and sales goals have been missed for two consecutive months. Here’s where things can get complicated. Facing the prospect of missing another sales target, your reps might be tempted to bemoan a lack of qualified leads or the quality of the leads assigned to them. While this may be a legitimate complaint, it’s got nothing at all to do with your customers’ pain, so you have to filter out the noise to get to the actual problem.
This word cloud of things advertisers would change about their campaigns
offers us a lot of insight into our customers’ pain points
Now let’s say that your reps tell you that they’ve had several potential deals fall through because the prospect told them that PPC is “too complicated.” This is a genuine customer pain point. This speaks to several potential pain points, including a lack of experience or training, a poor understanding of PPC best practices, badly allocated ad budget, a fundamental misunderstanding about your product and what it does, and dozens of other potential problems.
Regardless of what’s causing the pain, you now have a pain point you can counter in your marketing. Remember our list of pain points from earlier in this post? Let’s take a look at the pain points we identified, and see how we could address them in our marketing:
Financial: Emphasize lower price point (if applicable), highlight the average savings of your client base, use language that reiterates better ROI
Productivity: Highlight reductions in wasted time experienced by current customers, emphasize ease-of-use features (such as at-a-glance overviews or a centralized dashboard)
Processes: Mention current/planned integrations with existing products/services (i.e. Slack’s integration with Dropbox and Salesforce), highlight how your product/service can make typically difficult/time-intensive tasks easier
Support: Help the prospect feel like a partner by highlighting your after-market support, use connecting language (“us,” “we” etc.) in your copy
It’s important to remember that you can’t “prove” you can ease your prospects’ pain, and what works for one customer may not work for another. That’s what makes social validation so crucial when using customer pain points in your marketing; word-of-mouth recommendations and user reviews become much more persuasive when a prospect already believes your product or service could make their life better.
That’s why you should be using customer testimonials and other social validation tools in your marketing – a great review or glowing testimonial can sell your product far more effectively than even the most silver-tongued salesperson.
Mini Case Study: WordStream for Agencies
When it comes to PPC, agencies face many unique challenges. From balancing account management with sourcing new clients to improving performance and demonstrating ROI, life is far from easy for agency PPC professionals.
In May last year, we set out to learn what makes the average internet marketing agency tick – with particular emphasis on the challenges agencies face – by conducting a survey of more than 200 internet marketing agencies specializing in paid search from all over the world.
The results were fascinating, if a little predictable in some cases.
During our analysis of the survey data, we found that time management was the single greatest challenge facing agencies today. This was perhaps the least surprising of the survey’s results – it’s no secret that agencies are under tremendous pressure if they want to compete in today’s online advertising ecosystem. Even the most skilled PPC professional still has to spend time actually working in their clients’ accounts, making time management even more crucial for agency PPC managers.
We already knew that time management was a major pain point for agencies before we built WordStream Advisor for Agencies, but when we launched the tool, we wanted to really speak to our agency clients’ pain points. Take a look at this page intended specifically for prospective agency clients:
Although we also highlight WordStream Advisor for Agencies’ range of tools and the ease of use offered by the platform, time savings take center-stage throughout this page precisely because time management is agencies’ top priority.
Almost all of the copy on this page reiterates how much time agency PPC professionals can save by using our software, and this benefit-driven approach shapes the style, tone, and language of the entire page. In fact, we take our agency prospects’ pain points even further as we progress down the page:
We know that time management is our agency prospects’ biggest pain point, but this alone isn’t all our agency prospects are worried about. Remember how we said that balancing time between account management and finding new clients was another pain point experienced by many agencies? The screenshot above shows how we’ve directly addressed this particular pain point within the context of time management and efficiency – both Productivity and Process pain points that follow logically from the initial identification of time management as agencies’ major pain point.
Remember – it’s not just about identifying your prospects’ pain points, it’s also about emphasizing what solving this pain will help your prospects do. The clearer you can make this in your copy and campaigns, the more likely your prospects are to respond positively.
Leveraging Customer Pain Points in Online Ads
Now that we’ve explored the concept of pain points in a little more detail, let’s keep going with our examples of how to leverage this pain in your online ad campaigns.
Addressing Customer Pain Points in Paid Search Ads
You’ve conducted qualitative research into what pain points your prospects are experiencing, and now you’re ready to use this knowledge in your search campaigns. What does this look like?
The image above is an ad that was served to me for the search query “payroll services” on Google. Unsurprisingly, the top ad was for ADP, one of the largest payroll providers in North America. If you’re not familiar with the fascinating world of payroll services, this ad might not look all that tantalizing, but to anyone who actually works with payroll on a regular basis, this ad could be very tempting.
One of the biggest financial challenges growing companies face is payroll. According to Paychex, payroll can cost anywhere between $20 and $100 per month in addition to a fee of up to $5 per employee per payroll run. This can make hiring new people a significant expense for some companies (especially when you factor in benefits and other costs), particularly newer, smaller businesses. From the get-go, this ad promises us two months of free payroll services, but that’s not what we’re interested in – we want to take a closer look at the ad copy.
The first line of copy – “Let ADP Take The Weight Off Your Business With Fast, Easy & Reliable Payroll” – hits all the right notes. For one, the use of the phrase “Let ADP Take The Weight Off Your Business” addresses the burden of payroll subtly and uses language that evokes relief, implying the relief prospects will feel when they let ADP handle their payroll.
The inclusion of “Fast, Easy, & Reliable” is also very clever, as these common adjectives all address pain points themselves, namely that payroll is a difficult, time-consuming pain in the ass that other companies can’t be entrusted with – not bad for three words of copy. Finally, you’ll notice the inclusion of several extensions offering that crucial social validation we mentioned earlier, as well as offers for a free quote, a demo of ADP’s payroll software, and the two-months-free offer highlighted in the headline.
Addressing Customer Pain Points in Social Ads
Social ads may be even more effective at addressing customer pain points than search ads. Why? Because many people browse social media sites like Twitter and Facebook in an aspirational way; we post updates that reflect the people we want to be, not necessarily the people we are right now.
As such, a well-designed social ad that directly addresses a prospect’s pain points could be powerfully persuasive.
We can see this principle in action in this Facebook ad for technical employment screening service Triplebyte:
This ad is particularly clever and an unusual combination of emotional triggers that addresses a very specific pain point – landing a new technical job.
If you know much about software development or are friends with any of the engineers in your office, you may already know that a developer’s choice of text editor – the software programs in which developers actually write their code – is a Very Big Deal, and this ad leverages this to great effect.
Firstly, the ad makes a bold, potentially controversial claim that developers who use Vim and Emacs, two of the oldest and most popular text editors out there, are twice as likely to pass a technical interview with Triplebyte than users of Eclipse, another text editor. Although this claim is based on real data, it’s also a clever emotional trigger. Developers who use Vim or Emacs might feel a smug sense of self-satisfaction when reading this ad, but it could also raise the hackles of developers who favor other text editors. This makes the ad very tempting to would-be Triplebyte clients, regardless of their text editor of choice.
Secondly, the ad addresses a very specific pain point among techies looking for a new gig – the fear of successfully passing a technical interview. Companies like Google are famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) for the deviousness of their technical interviews, and Triplebyte’s ad infers that by using Vim or Emacs, prospective candidates can put themselves ahead of the (ferocious) competition for top technical roles.
This might not be the most conventional use of leveraging pain points in a social ad, but it’s an excellent example of how well-crafted social ads can combine emotional triggers and address very specific pain points.
Addressing Customer Pain Points in Landing Pages
As our final example of how to leverage customer pain points in your marketing, we come to one of the most effective – and leakiest – parts of the conversion funnel, the humble landing page.
Landing pages are crucial to the success of many marketing campaigns, particularly PPC campaigns. Aligning your landing pages with the copy of your ads is a well-established PPC best practice, but your landing pages can also serve as another opportunity to reinforce why your product or service can ease your prospects’ pain.
Let’s take a look at how this works.
Below is a landing page for social analytics platform SimplyMeasured:
This landing page is one of the best examples of addressing customer pain points I’ve come across. The headline is very effective (“How to Make Social Marketing Decisions Faster”) but the strapline below it is even better. Not only is it benefit-driven, it also addresses two specific pain points in a single line of copy: using time more effectively – which could be either a Productivity or Processes pain point – and establishing ones’ self as the go-to social analytics person in your office.
These benefits are further emphasized further down the landing page in the copy. In the bulleted list of what readers will learn from the download, one of the benefits listed is “Make quick stunning presentations for your stakeholders.” This reiterates the promise of the strapline, which is as much about perception as it is about productivity.
This landing page definitely isn’t perfect (there are many more web form fields included on this landing page than those shown above), but generally speaking, it’s a great example of how to leverage customer pain points in your copy and use emotional triggers to make your landing pages much more appealing.
No Pain, No Gain
By now, hopefully you have a better idea of what your customers are really trying to do when they’re looking for companies or products like yours. Although many customer pain points are similar, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to solving your customers’ pain. Fortunately, nobody knows your customers like you do, so dive into your research and start helping your customers accomplish what they really want to do.
What other tips do you have for helping customers overcome pain points?
Then a few months later, you basically get this. “How’s that paid ad campaign going?” “Well, not so good. I have bad news.”
Now, what happens is that these get a high cost per click. They start out with a high cost per click because it’s a new campaign. So none of these platforms have experience with your campaign or your company. So you’re naturally going to get a higher-than-normal cost per click until you prove to them that you get high engagement, at which point they bring the cost per click down. But instead of proving to them you get high engagement, you end up getting low engagement, low click-through rate, low conversion rate. People don’t make it here. They don’t make it there. Why is that?
