June 2017 - Leverage Marketing

Getting More Out of Paid Search Ads: Interview with Michael Holeman

June 29, 2017/0 Comments/in PPC /by Leverage Marketing

Writing great copy for paid search ads is no easy feat—it requires a combination of creativity, analytical thinking, and a ridiculous amount of testing. To learn more about how to create paid search ads that resonate with customers, I spoke with Michael Holeman, one of Leverage’s paid search analysts and the co-creator of our new RightWord lexical analysis tool.

What benefits do you think advertisers get from search ads that they don’t get from other ad formats?

The biggest benefit is the ability to get your chosen message in front of potential customers right when they’re searching. Most traditional advertising, and even other digital advertising, is about raising awareness and trying to guess where your audience is. Text ads that show on search results pages get your ad copy in front of the audience at their moment of need.

What are the most important ad optimization strategies for businesses that are just starting with paid search marketing?

There are a lot of strategies that go into an effective paid search campaign. You obviously have to think about things like campaign settings, keyword selection, and organization, but once the campaign is set up, the most important ongoing optimization strategy is ad testing. You’ve figured out your keywords and the right time to have your message appear, but now you have to match that with the right message.

What tips do you have for improving calls-to-action in paid search ads?

Test, test, test. And test a variety of messages—different verbs, different focuses—to see what resonates. For example, if you’re an ecommerce business, you might want to try testing a very direct call-to-action like “Shop Now” against something that’s a little more informational, like “Browse Our Selection,” just to see which one your audience is going to respond to better.

What are some of the biggest mistakes you see businesses making in their ad copy?

The biggest mistake is having a lack of variety and imagination. If you’re only testing small changes to the same basic theme, you’re not giving yourself a lot of room to grow, and you’re going to get stuck in a rut with your ad copy. To get more specific, one of the biggest ruts people get stuck in is writing ads that focus too much on the product or service without really speaking to the needs or benefits of the customer.

Let’s say a business is increasing their PPC budget and looking for a way to save time on ad creation and testing. What should they do to help manage/automate the process?

A PPC analyst can often manually manage a young or small account. As a rule of thumb, if an account has fewer than 20 active ad groups, then one person can handle manually checking A/B tests, using a statistics calculator to test for a winner, pausing the “loser,” and creating new ads. It can be tedious, but for a small account, it’s doable.

As the account grows, it’s best to start looking for tools that will help you automate the testing process. There are a lot of tools out there that will help identify and flag which groups have a winning ad…there are a number of AdWords scripts and third-party platforms that will handle this as well. These range from thin, smaller platforms that will handle a few optimization tasks to multi-platform ad management services such as Marin.

How do you identify the words and phrases that will best resonate with readers when you have a limited number of characters to work with for your ad copy?

As you test, it’s important to go back into your testing history to see if you can discern any patterns regarding what’s worked and what hasn’t. Also, understanding a business’s products/services and the needs they’re fulfilling can help you choose the type of ad copy that you want to test. The ad copy length limitation is something you’re always coming up against. You have a short amount of space to make your pitch, so you want to look at every single word you’re using and make sure everything that goes into your ad copy is helping to convince the customer.

You and Tiger Sivasubramanian, our Director of Paid Search, recently built an advanced language analysis tool called RightWord. What pain points led you to create your own tool rather than just using what was already available?

Identifying patterns across ads can be simple enough to do on smaller accounts, but it’s not something you can scale without some sort of technology. With bigger accounts, you’re not just comparing one ad against another, you’re comparing a whole set of ads that have won against a whole other set of ads that have lost across time to find patterns. It can be really hard to see that bigger picture when you’re looking at individual tests over and over again.

All of the ad optimization tools out there focus on speeding up the process of testing Ad A vs. Ad B. There were none available that would allow us to look at an entire account over a given timeframe and try to pick up any patterns about which kinds of ads were consistently winning or losing. We built RightWord as a tool to help us get those insights.

What does RightWord do?

It looks at all the ad tests that have happened in a given timeframe and assigns a score to each word in each ad–regardless of whether it’s a winning or losing ad– and totals up the scores for each word across time. So now we can know not just which ads won, but if there were any words that consistently outperformed or underperformed.

How does that help you improve ad copy?

The RightWord report is just a bunch of numbers when you first get it, but analysts can look over it and make inferences based on the data and what we know about the psychology behind some of these words. The report gives you a better understanding of why certain ads win or lose. The better you understand this, the more you can write ads that fit into the winning framework.

RightWord also helps you test more efficiently because you learn what to avoid. If I know a certain type of message consistently underperforms, then I know I don’t have to keep testing it. Now we can focus all our testing energies on not just good vs. bad, but good vs. better.

Our paid search team is now using RightWord to gain new insights into our clients’ pay-per-click advertising. To learn more about how we can use RightWord to help your business, contact us!

Does B2B Influencer Marketing Make Sense?

Influencer marketing—the practice of partnering with influential individuals to communicate a brand message—is hardly a new concept for B2C companies. In fact, back in the 1760s, the pottery company founder Josiah Wedgwood was using endorsements from painters, architects, and even royalty to promote his products. There’s centuries’ worth of evidence that influencer marketing can be an effective tool for B2C brands, but what about B2B companies?

If you own a B2B company, you might be under the impression that because you’re targeting a narrower audience than your B2C peers, influencer marketing just isn’t worth it. However, B2B influencer marketing can be incredibly effective, as long as you’re working with the niche B2B influencers that your target buyers follow.

How Influencer Marketing Can Benefit B2B Brands

B2B influencer marketing example from American Express

Collaborating with niche influencers—including industry analysts, conference speakers, and other thought leaders—can help you:

Humanize Your Brand

While you may be selling your products or services to businesses, it’s important to remember that it’s still people who are doing the buying. And those people aren’t likely to connect with your brand if you hide behind dry industry jargon and generic lists of product features. B2B influencers give your brand a human face and inject personality into your message, helping you appeal to your target audience and stand out from competitors.

Capture the Attention of Difficult-to-Reach Leads

One of the biggest challenges in B2B marketing is capturing high-quality leads at the right time. Industry influencers who align with your brand can reach a highly-targeted audience at different stages of the buyer’s journey, and with the right message, they can nudge those audience members towards your business.

Build Trust

When you invest in influencer marketing for B2B, you’re making an investment in your brand’s reputation. B2B influencers have dedicated a lot of time and effort to build trust with their audience, and when they make a recommendation, their audience listens. If you find an influencer who believes in your product or services, you’ll earn the trust of their followers.

3 Standout B2B Influencer Marketing Examples

Hopefully, you’re starting to see how powerful B2B influencer marketing can be. If you’re still unconvinced, check out these examples of B2B influencer marketing campaigns that had a major impact:

GE’s Instagram Series Takes Flight

General Electric was ahead of the curb with B2B influencer marketing: way back in 2013, they invited six influential Instagram photographers to tour and document their newest aviation facility. The company also shared an Instagram post inviting six aviation fans to join them on the tour by posting a sentence about why they were the biggest GE #avgeek. In less than 24 hours, the post got over 1,000 likes and over 130 comments.

Since this initial campaign, GE has launched their #GEInstaWalk series on Instagram. They now regularly invite some of Instagram’s best photographers and biggest tech aficionados to tour and take pictures of their cutting-edge facilities.

American Express Shares Design Tips with SMBs

American Express wants to appeal to small business owners, and one way they do this is by teaming up with experts who can address the pain points small business owners often experience. As part of their Love My Store campaign, they partnered with HGTV Design Star winner Emily Henderson to make a series of videos about in-store design. In the videos, Henderson visited different stores and offered the owners advice on using design and signage to attract more customers. American Express also invited small business owners to post photos of their storefront with the hashtag #LoveMyStoreAmexContest for a chance to win a one-on-one consultation with Henderson.

SAP Captures an Online Audience with Influencer Interviews

SAP, an enterprise software company, decided to use B2B influencer marketing to get more mileage out of Sapphire, their annual user conference. The company identified authors, academics, and independent business consultants who could speak on topics that appealed to SAP product users, and then invited those influencers to participate in interviews at the Sapphire conference. SAP used Facebook Live to broadcast these interviews, extending their conference content to over 80,000 people who didn’t attend. In addition to sharing their videos on Facebook, they also leveraged the interviews to create blog content.

Ways Your Company Can Use Influencer Marketing

expert roundup influencer marketing example

Example of expert roundup blog post from American Webmasters Association

It’s not just big brands like American Express and GE that can benefit from using B2B influencer marketing. Here are a few ways B2B companies of any size can start working with niche influencers:

Collaborate on a whitepaper. You could ask an influencer to co-author a whitepaper or eBook, but if the influencer you want to work with doesn’t have the time for such an extensive project, they could simply contribute several “Expert Tips.”
Write an “expert round-up” blog post. These blog posts often pose one question (e.g. How has social media marketing changed your business?) and collect responses from several industry insiders. If you curate this type of piece, ask the experts who contribute to help extend the post’s reach by sharing it with their social networks.
Invite an influencer to co-host a webinar. Attract more participants to your next webinar by inviting an influencer your audience respects to co-host. Not only will working with an influencer boost your authority, it will also add an interesting perspective to the webinar that you might not have gotten otherwise.
Write a guest post for an influencer’s blog (or vice versa). In some cases, an influencer might be willing to write a guest post for your blog in exchange for you contributing a post to theirs.
Conduct an interview with an industry expert. You could conduct the interview over the phone or email if the expert is remote, but if they’re in the same city, see if you can do a video interview. This will give you visually appealing content to share on your site and social media.

Remember, there are many different ways you can work with B2B influencers, but none of these strategies will be fully effective if the influencer’s message doesn’t align with your brand. Do your research: instead of just chasing the influencers with the most fans or followers, look for micro-influencers who resonate with your target audience.

3 Simple B2B SEO Strategies for Beginners

June 21, 2017/2 Comments/in SEO /by Bob Kehoe

If you have a B2B company, SEO might not currently be your number one priority. Maybe your product or service is highly specialized, your resources are few, or you’ve always relied on traditional marketing channels to bring in regular leads.

However, if you’re not implementing any sort of B2B SEO strategy, your business is probably missing out on a lot of potential customers. While following best practices for B2B SEO may seem daunting, it is worth the effort. We’ve written before about how search engines have changed the way we seek out valid information, and have discussed how mobile technology will continue to drive our interest in getting our questions answered while on the go. And with 61% of B2B decision makers beginning the buying process with an online search, sites that don’t rank well are missing out on internet users who are getting ready to become leads. These customers are actively looking for someone to give their business to, and a coordinated B2B SEO strategy helps them find their way into your inbox.

Luckily, B2B SEO doesn’t have to be a massive drain on your resources. Following a few B2B SEO best practices can take your site a long way, and reaching out to SEO experts is a great way to get the most out of your efforts. To get your B2B SEO strategy off on the right foot, use the following tips to your business’ advantage.

Create Awareness & Visibility

Growing your B2B company with SEO means you’ll need to find ways to drive more traffic onto your site. From an organic search perspective, this means that you want the links leading to your site to shine and draw clicks from the searchers who see them. A simple way to do this is by customizing your page title tags and meta descriptions to convey important information and draw the customer in. Increasing your click-through rate (the percentage of people who click on your site’s link off of the search results page) communicates meaning and trustworthiness to search engines, who reward sites with high click-through rates with high rankings on results pages.

To write these titles and descriptions effectively for B2B SEO, you’ll want to see your business from your customer’s point of view. What role does the searcher perform at their company? How deep is their knowledge of what you offer? What is important to them? If the buyer isn’t someone who would know much about your highly technical product, draw their click by courting their priorities (such as price or customer service), and use basic language that doesn’t leave them confused. Conversely, if your buyers tend to focus on the features of what you offer and like to ask nitty-gritty questions when considering a sale, use language that conveys your company’s expertise and knowledge on the details.

You’ll also want to consider what the customer is looking for when they perform a search. Ask yourself what each page “answers” for the customer; in other words, what phrase would a customer type into the search bar and find this page helpful in their search results? Check out the “Searches Related To ___” section at the bottom of search result pages for more ideas on what customers are looking for when they’re seeking out your offering. Work those key search phrases into your titles and descriptions to match the searcher’s intent with your content.

Leverage Existing Assets

Many B2B companies have content assets such as blogs, whitepapers, eBooks, recorded webinars, or podcasts. Maybe you’ve been using these assets to help inform customers on vital industry updates, or educate them prior to a sale. Maybe you’ve even pursued some promotional efforts with these assets. Luckily for your time and wallet, leveraging these existing pieces can add a lot to a B2B SEO strategy.

First, assess how visitors access this material on your site. Is it buried in a sub-sub-sub-sub-category page, or locked behind a paywall? If visitors and search engine crawling mechanisms can’t easily read or access your content, it’s a missed opportunity to seize a little more space on search result pages by answering searcher questions with your content. Consider leaving some of your content accessible to all visitors to ensure indexation and drive traffic. Having content exclusively for subscribers or customers is a great lead generation tactic, but leaving some pieces open is a B2B SEO best practice for driving customers to your site and gaining essential trust.

Example of an effective content hub on a B2B website

Another aspect to consider: Are your assets original content that your team wrote, or is it mostly recycled or copied information from other resources? You don’t want search engines to crawl your content and deem it identical to other pieces across the web—there’s a good chance yours won’t compete with the original pieces very well, and your site could even see penalties. Focus on creating original content and editing or removing duplicates from your site.

Convert Site Traffic

B2B SEO is just as much about generating qualified leads as it is about driving traffic to a site. If an SEO campaign was driving tons of traffic but none of those visitors were converting, the value of SEO to that site just wouldn’t be that high. Furthermore, search engines like to see that visitors stay and engage with a site, rather than bounce off quickly, and sites with good visitor engagement also tend to see ranking boosts.

For an SEO campaign for a business-to-business company to really pack a punch, consider pursuing conversion rate optimization tactics to get conversions from as many qualified visitors as possible. This can be accomplished in several different ways, and the more metrics you can examine, the more complete of a picture you’ll get about your users and their experience on your site. Some basic conversion rate optimization techniques you can try are:

A/B testing with a tool such as Optimizely to tweak site your design with different call to action buttons or copy
Examining Google Analytics to identify common exit pages (viewers’ last page before leaving your site) and pages with high bounce rates (pages that viewers land on and exit quickly) to determine if there are any trouble spots where your site is losing viewers
Adding SEO-friendly pop-up boxes via tools such as OptinMonster that encourage microconversions (such as newsletter signups) and help you turn casual readers into relationships, leads, and eventually customers

If you’re ready to supercharge your B2B SEO strategy, it’s time to get in touch with an agency that understands the B2B world and its unique SEO needs. At Leverage Marketing, we know the ins and outs of B2B lead generation and are motivated to drive the qualified leads you’re looking for. Check out our SEO services today, or sign up for our newsletter for regular doses of digital marketing knowledge right in your inbox.

How to Build a High-Quality Landing Page that Converts

June 14, 2017/3 Comments/in PPC, SEO, Web Design /by Bob Kehoe

When considering top landing page designs, most industry experts will tell you that every landing page is unique and has its own requirements. They’ll tell you that landing page elements will differ depending on whether you’re promoting a service or a product, and what that service or product does will also change what’s on the landing page.

Yes, of course, every landing page will differ. Landing page best practices dictate that each page should provide unique value to consumers. That’s absolutely true.

But there are nine essentials to a perfect landing page that nearly every one ought to feature. Include the following nine elements on your landing pages to tap into the deepest parts of marketing psychology and help your consumers learn why your product or service is the ultimate.

Essential Elements of the Landing Page Format

Each item includes a description underneath the mock landing page below.

To describe the elements of high-converting landing pages, we have created a fictional robot butler that specializes in cooking breakfast. We’ve optimized a landing page to solve a problem for consumers searching for phrases such as “no time for breakfast” or “robot that cooks.”

Information-Rich Heading – 1

Your heading, styled using the <h1> and </h1> HTML tags, should:

Summarize the purpose of your product or service
Capture attention with witty or clever copy

Your heading is the first thing the customer will see and will determine whether he or she stays to look at the rest of your landing page or bounces. Aim to sell your product or service in less than six words.

Visual Media – 2

Not every customer is a reader, so to appeal to the visual type (almost everyone), add large visual media to your landing page format that’s easy on the eyes. Images, animations, and videos should:

Demonstrate the action or purpose of your product or service
Evoke an emotion that will provide inspiration to continue down the landing page

Keep your visual media compressed but beautiful. Use tools like TinyPNG after resizing your images and animations to their appropriate size. This way, your landing page loads fast and doesn’t keep your customer waiting.

Explanation – 3

As the consumer scrolls down the page, he or she is building an understanding of your product or service and determining its value step-by-step. The explanation is your opportunity to influence the consumer’s thoughts and build onto the skeleton provided by your headline and visuals.

A good landing page explanation should:

Offer hard facts about your product or service
Highlight what makes your product or service different than that of your competitors

Before you begin explaining the benefits of using what you provide to customers, make sure they have all the information they need to apply benefits to real features you offer.

Benefits – 4

The benefits section of a high-converting landing page takes the raw facts about your product or service and shows the customer how those apply to his or her problem.

A successful benefits section should:

Concisely list how your features help
Begin the process of convincing the consumer that your offering is superior

Negative Impact (Problem) – 5

One of the most poignant elements of a good landing page is an appeal to emotion that stems from a problem the consumer is having. We can address the problem and its toll on the happiness of the consumer by identifying a negative issue that calls an unpleasant response.

The negative impact should:

Help consumers recall the problem for which they are seeking a solution
Stir the consumer’s emotions and concerns so you can appropriately address them

The purpose of the negative impact is not to upset the consumer. It is only to make him or her aware of the problem for which you are providing the solution.

Positive Impact (Solution) – 6

Pull your consumer back from the negative and introduce a positive solution in your landing page copy. Use language that conjures thoughts of pleasure and happiness.

The positive impact should:

Remind customers that your product or service is a viable solution to their problem
Restore emotions to a level at which consumers are prepared to purchase

The positive impact makes you look like a hero. After presenting the problem and your unique solution, most customers will be ready to dive into what you offer.

Testimonials – 7

Best practices for landing page conversion dictate that your customers have to trust you. Even if they love your product or service and are convinced that your solution is perfect, there is still a threat of loss.

Too-good-to-be-true merchandise and high-expectation, low-value service exist in droves in the real world. You need the backing of pleased customers to convince those with a lot to lose that they have nothing to worry about.

You can do so with testimonials, which can come in text, image, or video format. Testimonials should:

Provide real insight from actual customers about your past performance
Build undeniable trust with your potential customers

Contact Info – 8

Don’t forget! Your customers can’t get in touch with you to ask questions or request service without the essential contact info. Your contact info should:

Include a sales or service email address for corresponding directly with customers, a working phone number, and the address of your headquarters
Be easy to find – phone numbers at the top of the page are well-loved by customers, as are email addresses.

Make sure your logo is easy to find as well so that new customers begin building an image of your company’s brand and what they offer.

CTA – 9

Follow up your testimonials with a last call to action. Avoid impersonal or threatening CTAs such as Click Here or Submit. Instead, relate on a personal level with your consumer.

An effective CTA should:

Tell the customer how easy it is to get started with your company
Reassure the customer that you’ll guide him or her through the entire process.

The Rest Is Up to You

Landing pages can include more, but usually should not include any less. You can structure your landing page to fit the flow of information better for your particular product or service, but ensure that each element is in your landing page and is easy to find.

What makes customers click through landing pages is a cohesive, uninterrupted experience that fully explains and promotes your product or service. Don’t cut corners on your landing pages, and follow best practices each time to achieve consistent, high-converting landing pages across the board.

Creating high-converting landing pages is one of our specialties at Leverage Marketing. If you’re having trouble getting conversions, try making your landing pages the Leverage way!

Your Key to Success: Google Product Listing Ads

June 7, 2017/1 Comment/in PPC /by Bob Kehoe

It’s time to leverage Google Shopping Ads to drive additional sales to your business. Google Product Listing Ads, or PLAs, are both efficient and affordable. They’re also a terrific way to drive clicks to your website. While marketers talk about PLAs alongside traditional paid search campaigns, they’re in an entirely different category. While both are based on a CPC (cost-per-click) model and can be managed from AdWords, that’s where the similarities end.

We’ll provide you with some tips for the best practices for Google Product Listing Ads so that you can succeed. With the right strategy and tactics that complement your other ecommerce marketing efforts, you can use Google PLAs to increase your sales and visibility.

What Are Google Product Listing Ads?

Google’s Product Listing Ads are unique in that they don’t use keywords but instead target by product and product category. While management for Google Product Listing Ads is taken care of through AdWords and Google’s Merchant Center, the process is slightly different than regular paid search campaigns. You’ll set a bid for your ads, but Google will determine the relevance based on information you set, including:

Google Product Category
Product Type
Image
Price
Color
Size
Availability
Brand

It’s important to be accurate and as descriptive as possible in these categories, as these and your bid are what Google will use to list your ads.

Google PLAs are shown in two places: at the top and upper right of search results pages. They’re the only ads in these spaces. When someone searches for something like your product, Google uses its algorithm to determine if your product fits into their search and shows a variety of ads. Make sure your product sticks out by using high-quality images and backgrounds that pop. With 35% of online product searches starting on Google, PLAs are an effective way to reach out to customers.

The Basics of a Google Shopping Campaign

Why should you start a Google Shopping campaign? You’ve already got a paid search campaign going to promote your website, so why spend additional money on specific Google Product Listing Ads? For one thing, you’ll be able to promote items from your local or online inventory specifically—and you can even target your best-selling items.

Google will only charge you when a user clicks an ad that leads to a landing page on your website. This system means you’re paying to boost traffic to your website at a low CPC and only forfeiting the minimum amount necessary to rank higher than the advertiser immediately below you. Google will rank your item and then correlate a bid that will show your item at the lowest cost to you (up to your max bid). You get to choose how much you want to pay so that you won’t overspend.

How Do I Succeed with PLAs?

Now that you know the basic best practices of Google Product Listing Ads, you want to know how to succeed on the platform. The first important tip is organization. Keeping your feed organized will help you flourish, so make sure to take advantage of drilling your products down by each subcategory. The better your categorization, the higher ranked your items will be in Google’s algorithm. Remember the same PLA can look different across different platforms, so test across mobile, desktop, laptop, and tablet to ensure ads look good in each.

Larger feeds with more than 1000 products tend to do better on Google Shopping, while smaller feeds won’t have the same impact. Choose relevant, targeted product images that stand out among comparable ads. Research your competition and take high-quality photographs of your items. Focus only on your bestselling items, especially if you have thousands of products, and utilize promotions and sales to help your ads stand out from the crowd.

Using Google Product Listing Ads as part of your paid marketing campaign is an innovative way to drive additional traffic to your site. Understanding how to build your product feed and optimize product listings will enable you to use PLAs to boost your sales effectively.

At Leverage Marketing, our PPC experts have the know-how to manage Google Shopping Campaigns and optimize Product Listing Ads like nobody’s business. Contact us today so we can make your PPC dreams come true.