the connected business: driving growth through digital · 2019-02-24 · the connected business:...

rocketagency.com.au

The secrets for compiling a winning digital marketing strategy in 2019

The Connected Business: Driving Growth Through Digital

Stephen Mumford Senior ConsultantP +61 02 8310 2324 M +61 411 605 [email protected]

© 2019 Rocket Digital Agency Pty Ltd All rights reserved. Confidential and commercial in confidence.2 3

Chapter 1 / Digital Marketing in 2019

Chapter 2 / 2019 is the Year of... Video

Chapter 3 / Email: Engage and Nurture

Chapter 4 / SEO is Alive and Well in 2019

Chapter 5 / Content Strategy – Where to Begin

Chapter 6 / Social Media Marketing in 2019

Chapter 7 / Remarketing – A Basic Strategy is No Longer Good Enough

Chapter 8 / Deconstructing ‘Thought Leadership’

Chapter 9 / Setting Up Conversion Funnels

Chapter 10 / Personas Are Great, But…

Chapter 11 / Paid Search: Friend or Foe?

Chapter 12 / Digital Strategy Checklist: Pitfalls to Avoid in 2019

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Table of Contents


about what you have to say unless they are ready.

Optimise videos on your website and they will add value for SEO, index them properly on YouTube and you will also reach an audience hungry for information. YouTube and other videos are displayed in the SERPs, so video SEO is becoming much more important – like using text overlays and closed captions, in addition to your description, title and file names. Live video is also gaining popularity, with a rising number of businesses using it for interviews, product demos and “behind the scenes” glimpses of events, life in the office, how products are made, etc. With the ever-decreasing costs of video production and the increasingly high-quality smartphone cameras, businesses and marketers, particularly in the B2B arena are leveraging personalised video messages rather than phone calls or emails, an integral part of a renewed focus on account-based marketing that is sure to continue in 2019.

1. Digital Marketing in 2019Digital marketing evolves at lightning speed. Most now agree that investing in digital marketing isn’t the peripheral, ‘add-on’ option it used to be. For many years it has been where businesses compete to reach and influence their desired audience, period. It won’t be long before we refer to most elements now considered to be digital marketing as simply ‘marketing’.

Individual digital tactics can be effective, but they won’t in isolation move the needle towards long-term success. Regardless of the industry you are in there are multiple touch points both online and offline that drive your prospects towards making commercial decisions.

The Online Marketing Institute states that it takes 7 to 13 or more touchpoints to deliver a qualified sales lead. Almost every single purchase, no matter your industry or your product, typically requires multiple touchpoints across multiple channels—online and offline.

At Rocket we know there’s no digital ‘silver bullet’ that will transform your fortunes. The purpose of this guide is to list fundamental considerations you can’t afford to ignore in 2019.

With the digital revolution at a mature point we’re all trying to move prospects through increasingly complex and nuanced buyer journeys. The balance of power shifted to the customer a long time ago and winning mind share from an increasingly fickle, time-poor audience presents multiple challenges. Having said that, there have never been as many opportunities to leverage channels that help the modern marketer to target and segment their perfect prospects as we have at our disposal today.

Every marketer has their own distinct challenges, and they vary even within the same industry segment. Lead quality and revenue generation is normally the lens through which success is measured, but it’s also about finding the right balance between short and medium-term objectives, as well as setting expectations internally where possible that certain strategies will pay dividends over the longer term.

For many years most digital marketing conferences, thought leaders and pundits have positioned video as the “next big thing”. In 2019 it is safe to say that it is the big thing. If you aren’t investing in video within your marketing efforts then chances are you are falling behind. If you have any doubt over where to invest your content-based efforts this year – think video. No other form of content enables a marketer to succinctly crystallise a message and engage a prospect in the way video can. It’s also a myth that short form video is the only way to go; prospects are watching longer and more inciteful videos, particularly if they are looking to become more informed or educated about a particular topic.

If content is king, then context is queen. We’ve long advocated that content, served at exactly the right moment, is the glue that binds a digital marketing strategy together. Equally important is the nature of the message relevant to the stage your prospects are at in their buyer journey. Put simply, they may not care

70% 72% 52% 65%

Source: Wyzowl - State of Video Marketing 2018

of consumers say that they have shared

a brand’s video.

of businesses say video has improved their

conversion rate.

of consumers say that watching product

videos makes them more confident in online

purchase decisions.

of executives visit the marketer’s website and 39% call a vendor after

viewing a video.

These numbers show the importance of incorporating video into your digital marketing strategy in 2019:

TaskLook at your 12 month marketing strategy. Is video getting the appropriate attention?

2. 2019 is the Year of... Video


Marketers are coming back to email in a big way. Our most successful clients are typically using email marketing in their marketing mix. It’s no surprise that this has coincided with a flourishing growth in the choice of marketing automation platforms geared towards the mid-market. More sophisticated email workflows and on-boarding strategies are now in the hands of the SME market rather than being purely the preserve of enterprise level businesses.

Email has impact, is pervasive, and inexpensive to execute. When executed well, email can undoubtedly be a low-cost driver of actions and revenue.

Most digital mediums place restrictions on how you can represent yourself and the brand – think of the rigid, uniform structure of Google Ads and Facebook advertising with strict limits around length and form. Email enables a much wider degree of control over your content and creative messaging. Email has the potential for immediacy – especially with our smart phone addiction. Many would confess it’s the first thing we check in the morning and the last thing at night. An email address is a passport to reach people and develop on-going dialogue pre and post-sale, across virtually all industry segments.

Email enjoys great acceptance with businesses and customers alike. The number of worldwide emails sent and received per day in 2018 was over 230 billion. That said, some would no doubt have been more

effective than others… You still need to think through the prism of right message to the right person at the right time. Provide recipients real value.

“Even in a more highly regulated climate of privacy and data protection, an email database is an incredibly important asset.”Even in a more highly regulated climate of privacy and data protection, an email database is an incredibly important asset. But there are do’s and don’t’s that can be overlooked. A level of segmentation is non-negotiable. You will burn previous bridges by not personalising your communication, at least at some level. You’re only seconds away from the delete button or worse, the unsubscribe option.

A trend we’ve had success with in our own communications are text-based, ‘stripped-down’ communications. Less gloss, with more of a 1-1 feel. In B2C there are clearly opportunities for more expression, we’d expect to see a continued use of GIF’s in emails, countdowns (to develop urgency for sales and promotions) and even menus within an email to minimise distracting navigation.

3. Email: Engage and Nurture

Nurture Series

TaskReview your email strategy: Are you segmenting your communications to prospects? Are you adding value with your content?

CountdownGif / Cinemagraph

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4. SEO is Alive and Well in 2019Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room – SEO is far from dead. Google remains, far and away, the largest referrer of traffic to websites around the world:

May 2017 Feb 2018 Gained/Lost

Google Images 21.8% 22.6% +0.8%

YouTube 3.6% 4.3% -0.7%

Google Maps 1.2% 1.3% +0.1%

Yahoo 2.4% 2.4% 0

Bing 2.4% 2.2% -0.2%

Facebook 1.5% 1.4% -0.1%

Amazon 2.3% 2.3% 0

Core Google Search 64.8% 61.6% -3.2%

Pinterest 0.5% +0.5%

Twitter 0.4% +0.4%

The table above is US based data. But it breaks down search engine usage in a way that we haven’t seen presented for the Australian market. It doesn’t show search engine market share per se, but rather digs into the percentage breakdown of searches generated from different types of search engines. This explains why a search engine like Bing may have 10% market share, but will drive less traffic than that in the data above. The above shows that Google search is still the significant driver of web-based intent. And organic Google still accounts for the vast bulk of traffic from Google, not Google Ads as many believe. Extensive analysis compiled by Rand Fishken of Moz.com published in October 2017 stated 20 organic Google site visits occurred for every one visit from a Google Ad.

Considering that within the Google eco-system, organic remains the largest referrer of traffic. The process of optimising websites to appear for relevant organic searches is alive and well, it’s just a very different proposition from what it was even a few short years ago. Cheap and nasty SEO tactics fell by the wayside years ago and do more harm than good to a businesses’ reputation and brand.

Faced with this stark reality, and the end of the ‘quick wins’ promised by dubious SEO practitioners, a lot of businesses have abandoned organic search completely. It is easy to see why marketers have abandoned the SEO ship: with no short cuts available it takes a deeper level of time, effort and expertise to pass the ‘relevancy’ test and rank in Google. Marketers are in the results game and the stakes are high and expectations often centre around the next quarter, not the next year. It is little wonder that with hungry sales teams to feed many are lured towards the instant gratification of paid channels.

Breakdown of Searches on Major Web Properties

Source: https://www.slideshare.net/randfish/the-search-seo-world-in-2018/10-Via_Rands_BlogCore_GoogleSearch616Google_Images226YouTube43Yahoo

SEO Still Matters

Successful businesses are rightly diversifying their marketing mix: they pay due regard to more traditional marketing channels such as channel partnerships, a direct sales force, and of course word of mouth referrals.

All of these have their place, but they inherently overlook the fundamental paradigm shift in how businesses now make purchasing decisions. The balance of power has completely shifted. Information is now firmly in the hands of your prospective clients, which is especially significant in the more nuanced and complex buyer journeys we are increasingly exposed to.

“Start with the premise that over 70% of buyers won’t engage with a sales person until they’ve undertaken their own research.”Start with the premise that over 70% of buyers won’t engage with a sales person until they’ve undertaken their own research. If your business isn’t active organically then it’s missing out on opportunities to have credible influence over conversations and deliberations that are taking place by decision makers online. It is also placing increased pressure on alternative channels such as paid search. That is how a committed, effective strategy around SEO pays dividends, and mitigates the inherent risk of an over-reliance on paid advertising.

The point of SEO isn’t about ranking a website and

TaskSpend 30 minutes comparing your main web properties with competitors on www.semrush.com. Then ask yourself whether you have a clear, concerted and goal orientated SEO plan in your organisation.

driving traffic. For the marketer, the ultimate end-game is to drive revenue from a marketing channel that produces quality leads and sales. To achieve that, SEO does lean on quality content that speaks to the needs of the prospective audience, and undoubtedly that demands a more sophisticated, journalistic skill-set than the SEO copywriter of days gone by. Closer collaboration between marketers, and product and client service teams is needed to produce content that is truly useful to your audience. It follows that defining SEO purely by rankings and traffic and attempting to retro-fit a website to fit a search strategy misses the point entirely and is doomed to fail.

The Gift That Keeps Giving

SEO demands an investment in time and resources, but consider this: more or less every other marketing channel you care to name involves an on-going cost for the leads generated. This includes Google Ads, TV, Radio, Print, Trade Shows etc. When a business has momentum through organic search, leads and enquiries don’t have a hard cost per acquisition. In a longer, more drawn out sales process SEO is the ‘net’ that captures prospects during the stages of awareness and consideration and hence fuels the fire for nurturing and re-engagement through remarketing and retargeting.

These misconceptions are still clung to by many senior business leaders who haul in jaded marketers so ask why their website doesn’t ‘rank no 1’ for a term they have typed into Google. No wonder many marketers distanced themselves from SEO altogether.


5. Content Strategy – Where to BeginThere is undoubtedly an overlap between content strategy and SEO and it’s not productive to try draw too many distinctions between the two. High quality, relevant content will strengthen a website and therefore has the potential to benefit organic search. That said, a long-term focus on relevant content to support lead generation is a very different proposition.

It is little wonder that marketers struggle with content strategy. Many marketers become reactive as they face conflicting external pressures from within the business: satisfying regulatory updates from legal teams, supporting short term sales campaigns and updating offline collateral are just some of the issues that can impact their focus.

The ‘long burn’ of content strategy is quickly brushed aside in favour of providing what the sales team ‘wants this month’ or is reduced to playing catch-up with emerging content that competitors are producing. The good news is that there are some small, systematic steps that can be followed to get the ball rolling on content strategy.

Awareness Consideration Purchase/DesigneBooks

Guides/tutorialsHow to videos

BlogEducational articles

Comparison tablesCase studies

Customer reviewsProduct spec sheets

Service landing pagesProduct landing pagesProduct descriptions

“how” “fix” “clarity” “help” “what” “upgrade”

“which” “best”

“reviews” “vs” “pros and cons”

“reviews” “buy” “where” “best”

Here’s a Clue: User Intent

In search, keywords are the indicators of user intent. In recent years, and with the advent of machine-based learning, Google’s algorithm is more adept than ever at serving up results that understand the true intent behind the search terms a person is typing in.

As a marketer it is critical to build up a detailed appreciation of what searches are taking place. Remember, the way your business prospects express themselves in search may not match the language you use internally to describe your products or services. Obvious, generic search terms have higher search volumes but can also lack clear commercial intent. Longer tail keywords will usually make up a greater share of the search by total volume and gives you a broader and more sophisticated picture of the sort of problems your prospects are trying to solve online. There are a variety of different keyword research tools available to assist with this, including the Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, MOZ and a host of others.

Start to organise the search terms into the different stages of the buyer journey and your sales funnel.

Conduct a series of Google searches to see what content is currently being ranked. This is a systematic process that will provide clear evidence as to what content Google already regards as being relevant. Then carry out an honest assessment of your current website to see what gaps you have and put careful consideration into what content you can produce to fill those gaps.

Often drowning in available collateral, marketers often struggle to see how content can be manipulated to support lead generation in more sophisticated buying cycles.

A guiding principle for both producing and recycling available content is to be mindful of the buyer journey that businesses and prospects are involved in and align particular types of content to the intent that is being expressed through online search.

It is equally important to solicit feedback from sales and servicing teams within a business. These teams need to step up to shed light on what clients really value and the information that was important to them during (and after) the sales process.

This feedback loop is too often overlooked. It’s not enough to produce content around what you think your prospects want to know.

The buyer funnel included later is a broad representation of the stages prospects go through. Many would rightly argue that this over simplifies the process, and it’s fair to say that journey isn’t always as linear and ‘convenient’ as the diagram suggests. In contemporary buying cycles your prospects can bounce around and move through different stages at different times but if they are consuming content that aligns with their needs at that particular time it will keep them engaged, position your business favourably, and add value.

TaskLook deep into a mirror. Ask yourself the following question: Is my businesses content something I’d read if I didn’t work here?


6. Social Media Marketing in 2019It’s hard to ignore social. It’s where we’re spending more and more of our time online and platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn have developed highly sophisticated advertising platforms. But prospects can’t be overly ‘sold’ to in social channels, your audience isn’t actively looking for you. Engagement comes first. Your potential customers are there, but they are busy doing other things and you can’t expect to interrupt them to start selling to them. Start by accepting the fact that only two percent of your organic followers will see anything you post. You need to buy your share of voice. Social media became a ‘pay to play’ space years ago.

“Remember, the people you target are individuals. They’re real people.” Remember, the people you target are individuals. They’re real people. Don’t get hung up on whether Facebook is a B2C platform or LinkedIn a B2B channel, focus instead on following your prospects online with meaningful messaging irrespective of the platform.

TaskSpend 30 minutes answering these three questions honestly:1. Are we ‘selling’ too early?2. Are we using all appropriate channels?3. Do we accept social as a ‘pay to play’ space in 2019?

Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn are proven channels to engage an audience – in B2C as well as B2B. Take as an example the Senior IT Director you have worked hard to engage via a relevant and impactful promotional email. She clicks through to your website to review the promoted content, an infographic that elegantly articulates the challenges she is grappling with. That senior professional is still a person with a life outside of work, someone who can now be communicated with through other digital channels, including social and display. This Senior IT Director does not ‘switch off’ from work at 5.30pm and then turn back on at 9am the next morning. She is multi-tasking through virtually all waking hours, balancing work, family and personal commitments. She is multi-device (phone, work computer and personal tablet), she checks work email outside of business hours and visits personal websites and social media during business hours. You aren’t trying to reach a business, you are trying to reach a human.

With highly sophisticated and powerful platforms that are incredibly data driven – we are the product. Although rising fast, CPC’s in social campaigns are often better than in Google Ads.

Emotion is always a strong pull – work first to capture attention and ‘delight’ your target audience but be assured logic isn’t far away in their decision making psyche. This is especially true of B2B buying cycles but also true of B2C buyers.

LinkedIn is an obvious opportunity for B2B – it’s the biggest professional network by some margin, and its advertising opportunities are maturing. That said, LinkedIn can’t stand up in isolation, it needs to be part of a more holistic strategy but few can argue with the ability to identify a specific professional audience, offer them something of value. Think in terms of a well-crafted InMail campaign to drive prospects to a landing page, provide a specific offer (download) in return for an email address or simply cookie those individuals for further nurturing.

It’s worth the slower burn for those bigger B2B opportunities. Interestingly, there’s still some valid debate around what people are actually doing on LinkedIn (it can be quite self-serving) but that’s one reason that InMail campaigns have cut through: the target prospects don’t need to be logged into LinkedIn to get alerted in their actual email inbox.

Right Message To The Right Person At The Right Time


7. Remarketing – A Basic Strategy is No Longer Good Enough Remarketing makes perfect sense. Prospects rarely convert on the first visit and they need to be recycled through a well-considered, optimised and segmented buyer funnel. Employing remarketing continues to be a no-brainer in 2019. That said, it requires a defter touch than years gone by. The days of generic remarketing funnels based on a one size fits all branded ad set are long gone. Even if your goal is to reinforce brand awareness you need to have a strategy. Be mindful that creative can easily be lost amongst the competing assets of the pages on which they are displayed. If your audience sizes are appropriate we’d recommend highly segmenting display remarketing according to what content the prospects have viewed, and what stage of the buyer journey they have reached. It may be necessary to take prospects to a direct landing page rather than your original website if they have demonstrated intent and are now ready to reach out to you.

It’s important to use all avenues at your disposal: Google’s display network, RLSA (text-based remarketing ads serves to previous website visitors), YouTube and Social retargeting… all have their place when the end goal is re-engagement. Different platforms allow for different content and different messaging; imagery, written word and video. CPC’s in remarketing are normally much lower than top of the funnel search channels. It’s important to recognise that remarketing effectiveness cannot always be measured in clicks. Good remarketing display banners with a clear, succinct message are just as likely to prompt prospects to call you or even open up a Google branded search – not all remarketing pathways have a dotted line into hard conversions, even in 2019. Remarketing can be one of a number of valuable supporting activities that do not always generate a click, a form submission, or a sale. Nevertheless it helps those things to materialise further down the line. Many businesses see dips in overall sales when they make a short-term decision to cull remarketing based purely on Analytics last-click conversion data.

8. Deconstructing ‘Thought Leadership’There’s a lot of discussion surrounding ‘thought leadership’ – the need to actively demonstrate to a prospect that your business is a credible provider worthy of serious consideration.

It’s a term that can strike fear into the heart of marketers, who labour under the misapprehension that to achieve this they are going to need to create some lengthy, award-wining piece of research. Inevitably, the content never happens, and gets placed in the ‘too hard basket’. It’s time to dispel this myth once and for all.

Thought leadership content takes many forms: a short guide that answers the most frequently asked questions prospects have, an infographic that succinctly conveys how well you understand a developing industry trend or challenge, or a video in sixty seconds that illustrates your points of difference and imbues your business with a human personality.

The author needs to ask themselves the following simple question: “Will this be genuinely useful for my reader?”

“The author needs to ask themselves the following simple question ‘Will this be genuinely useful for my reader?’”Thought leadership isn’t necessarily about your company or specific product – but the intuition and value it provides, confers authority and credibility upon your business and positions you to begin a more commercial dialogue with that prospect.

eBooks need not be two hundred-page novels but should be concise, structured insights that deal with particular topics relevant to your prospects. In any

event your senior, time poor prospects won’t thank you for making them wade through masses of material to find the value in your content.

A smart content strategy also means re-using and re-purposing what you already have: crafting leadership content that is ‘evergreen’ and can be updated periodically and remains relevant to your audience will provide you with additional mileage. When content performs well, tweak it to suit each of your target personas. If your business is short of content then look to curate content from other leading figures in your industry, adding your own commentary to form an opinion piece and stimulate discussion and engagement from your prospects.

As a small business Rocket doesn’t have the resources to produce quality content on a daily basis. So instead, we try and publish 4-8 pieces per month. We have no focus on content length or dictate that content be created in a specific format. We have a very simple guideline to content creation. The allocated author needs to ask themselves a very simple question: “Will this be genuinely useful for my reader?”.

TaskSpend 30 minutes assessing what cross-device / cross-platform journey visitors experience after they engage with you digitally (website, EDM, social). Are users presented with a consistent narrative that supports the offline buyer journey? Think display retargeting, social channels and EDM (if applicable).


Tapping into the Awareness Takes Thought

The Awareness stage in the buying journey is where marketers can become unstuck. Reaching an audience that is unaware of your product or service can often require more subtle, more deft approach, and a certain amount of patience. Think of it as the early stages of a relationship, you need to build trust, not come across as ‘creepy’ or too eager. Being intimately aware of the benefits and value your product or service can bring to a business does not mean you can jump straight into that message, or that your prospect is ready.

First, engage your prospects by stimulating a response to your content. Build trust. Like a friendship in its early stages, giving is more important than taking. You can delight, incite fear, develop an emotional reaction but be mindful that at this stage they are not ready to be sold to. It’s for this reason that businesses should look to work through a systematic process of content ideation.

Marketers can struggle to step back from the tried and tested narrative of features and benefits. If your product or service saves time, then think more laterally on what your prospects could do with more time, and what that would mean to them. Everyone can relate to that. Also, take it one step further (if relevant) what could the future personal benefits to your prospects be? At this stage, your prospects may not care less about the specific features and benefits your product or service has to offer.

9. Setting Up Conversion Funnels Content marketing funnels are an effective way to developing awareness amongst a select target audience that doesn’t know about you or isn’t actively looking for your product or service. They do, however, require a commitment of time and patience. Whilst the end game is clearly to increase qualified leads sales, a business needs to measure the success of these strategies in incremental steps. The initial objective is to reach the prospect at the awareness stage, stimulate a response, and drive a level of engagement.

From there, it’s possible to build out audiences that are ‘warmer’ and more receptive. These audiences are then served up content and offers with real value, perhaps with a call to action that asks for a level of commitment such as a consultation or initial discussion. Now we can afford to start to position the business and value proposition, and this is most effective when offering a small piece of information that has real value, in return for a commitment from the prospect.

Whilst marketers will agree to this in principle, they are often guilty of wanting to put all of the amazing benefits and features in front of this audience before they are ready. It’s like the equivalent of proposing marriage on a first date.

Remember that if you do everything perfectly in your campaigns, but get your messaging or offers wrong, you will certainly underperform and quite possibly fail. This is a hard truth to swallow. So be brave. Think very carefully about what you need to say to have the most impact on your prospects’ behaviour. And then say it.

Awareness

Consideration

Evaluation

Purchase

Advocacy


The concept of buyer personas is nothing new. Understanding the triggers, motivations and potential objections that individuals may have is another founding principle of any digital strategy.

What most marketing guides won’t mention is that when it comes to marketing strategy and the realities of limited resources and finite time to drive quality leads, marketers need to to be ruthless as to which personas they target.

It’s unlikely a marketer can target every potential buyer persona and maintain an effective, segmented digital strategy. In order to maintain focus, and quality, decisions inevitably need to be made around which group or groups of buyers your business targets.

Prospecting campaigns tend to require a heavier investment in time and resources and any business needs to be judicious about exactly who they are intending to resonate with. Of course, being selective about your preferred audience will also ensure the content and messaging avoids becoming too generalised. This doesn’t preclude a business from telling the ‘full story’ through their website. It is still important to have dedicated sections of a website that speak directly to the silos that form part of your overall client mix. It’s also important to recognise that not all clients are equal: you need to be intimately familiar with the concept of lifetime value and be able to clearly relate that to your target personas. When you invest in content designed to appeal to your target personas, choose wisely.

10. Personas Are Great, But…A practical example might be a business that has a dedicated team that services inbound website enquiries and leads from smaller, transactional business owners, whilst investment in digital strategy focuses around outreach to land larger, more lucrative mid-size enterprises with senior decision makers and influencers that require a more intricate sales process.

“Being selective about your preferred audience will also ensure the content and messaging avoids becoming too generalised.”The rationale used to determine which personas to target will clearly vary between businesses. One approach is to focus on the greatest opportunity for new market share and revenue, which is clearly as good a reason as any other. Equally, a business may target a potential growth industry or customer profile they are not currently penetrating or a niche in which they have a competitive advantage but underperforming. Irrespective of what is decided, the point is to ensure that the persona groups targeted, and the adjoining strategy aligns with the overriding commercial objectives of the business.

Marketers tend to have a love-hate relationship with PPC advertising. But few would argue that PPC is unchallenged in its ability to quickly position a business front of users with clear commercial intent. Prospects have turned to Google voluntarily and shown intent by their keyword search to solve their problems and find commercial solutions.

By design, PPC is scalable, and when a well-structured campaign has sufficiently matured there should be compelling and measurable data that enables a business to develop a consistent and predictable lead channel.

On the other hand, the cost of paid search is escalating quickly, with year on year rises of 25% or more not uncommon. There is no question that paid search in 2019 is more competitive and complex than ever before but continues to be a highly effective and fast acting lever in a successful digital marketing mix. In 2019 more than ever, accumulating good qualitative data to accurately assess the market opportunity and the true success of the channel takes a little time. If that time is a luxury your budget can’t sustain, or you lack the tools to conduct this analysis then paid search can be an expensive pool to fish in, and it may be necessary to reassess whether paid search has a viable place in your lead generation strategy.

11. Paid Search: Friend or Foe?

“Identifying profitable keywords relies upon robust reporting and tracking from the keyword through conversion to lead scoring and final acquisition.”


“Successfully managing this in-house tends to be the province of the larger enterprises that can afford to invest in multiple dedicated resources.”Third party agencies working closely with marketers tend to fit the mould for the mid-tier business.

Any investment in paid search also needs to be understood in a wider context. Paid advertising such as Google Ads is not just about reaching an audience at the bottom of the buyer funnel with a view to converting them minimal friction. A balanced paid search strategy should also seek to reach decision makers in the earlier, research-based stages of the buyer funnel. Targeting research terms can be a great way of bringing a prospect into your funnel, but it will fail if you try to sell your product or service too prematurely.

In this context, the key to a successful paid search strategy is to focus on helping the prospect with their problem first. Tailoring the message is the watchword here: too many marketers can’t resist the temptation to follow up nicely segmented, specific ad copy with a generic, verbose landing page that seeks to speak to every possible pain point their product or service can address. The primary objective is to solve a problem, provide valuable information and hence fulfil the promise of the ad copy.

Paid search therefore also has a clear role to play in acquiring prospects that need further engagement and may not convert immediately. A compelling offer or exchange of information that has real specificity and immediate value is needed here, rather than the tired old phrase ‘get your free white paper’. Fail to do that and you risk burning that prospect and driving up your overall cost per lead. If you do achieve an immediate enquiry that’s ideal: it’s your sales teams’ job to then open-up the wider discussion from there.

For B2B and B2C queries Google is providing an ever-expanding amount of devoted real estate on its results page to paid ads and other paid assets.

In 2019, making a serious investment in paid search without a reasonable level of integration with a CRM is like flying blind. When you add the true lifetime value of a customer relationship into the mix, it’s only with a CRM that tracks original lead source you are able to accurately measure the real ROI that paid search has delivered over time.

Marketers obsess over the average cost per lead, but it’s impossible to reconcile that with the cost per acquisition if you don’t know which of the keywords lead to new clients. Taken further, which keywords lead to your most valuable clients. Only then can a business be prepared to invest more aggressively in higher cost keywords with any sense of confidence. Until then, be prepared for more awkward conversations with sales teams and business owners over lead volume and quality. The only winner in that scenario is Google.

If you are using Google Ads to success, but not Bing Ads, then our tip in 2019 is to test your best performing keywords in a Bing Ads account. Bing owns roughly 10% market share in Australia and can be a cheap place to generate sales and leads in conjunction with Google Ads.

It Takes Know-How

Google and Bing Ads are more complex to manage in 2019 than ever before. These ad platforms have moved swiftly from reasonably simple platforms with low competition to incredibly complex and competitive interfaces. Managing an effective PPC demands a level of domain expertise, and even if the right search terms are identified, there are so many other moving parts to consider. Campaigns evolve dynamically and need day to day oversight. End to end attention to detail is a non-negotiable: PPC performance will be seriously compromised if ad groups are poorly structured, bidding strategies aren’t forensic enough or ad copy is slightly mismatched with the true intent behind the search.

The Paid Search Paradox

At the same time the cost of running paid campaigns is increasing, marketers are being forced to re-evaluate how they assess and report on the effectiveness of PPC campaigns. PPC can no longer be distilled down to a ‘dollar in dollar out’ line item to measure an effective ROI.

This is perfectly acceptable to businesses that have locked down their most profitable keywords and thrive on higher value, lower volume sales, but it does place more pressure on organisations operating in smaller niches where the size of the transaction with another business is modest, with no potential for an on-going life time value.

In addition, whilst a properly integrated CRM will help to join the dots between keywords and new customer acquisitions, it will inevitably shed light on the other channels that should be attributed with credit in moving these earlier enquiries along through to final conversion.

This doesn’t undermine the role of PPC as a lead source, rather it reinforces the fact that in an extended buying journeys PPC will inevitably work in combination with other channels such as EDM nurturing, remarketing and organic search to create multiple touch points in the path to conversion.

Task 1Run a ‘search terms’ report for all of your paid search over the past three months. Ensure that at least 80% of these are relevant to your buyer journey and that you have a negative keyword strategy in place.

Task 2Ensure that you can connect a real-world sale in your organisation down to the specific keyword that the user entered into Google to find you via Google AdWords. If you can’t do this, you need to commence a CRM / Feedback Loop project to tie these elements together.


12. Digital Strategy Checklist: Pitfalls to Avoid in 2019The list below is a list of the 16 most common mistakes that we see in house marketers making in digital marketing in 2019. We encourage you to work through the checklist and ensure your business isn’t failing in any of these areas:

1. Brands refusing to bid on their own name in paid search and ceding this territory to competitors.

2. Businesses with large databases that are never hit with emails (or hit infrequently).

3. Businesses doing email marketing campaigns with no segmentation in place.

4. Brands with copy and messaging that doesn’t communicate in simple terms what the brand does or the benefit.

5. Brands that only play in channels which they deem “to be B2B or B2C” depending on their focus.

6. Brands spending indiscriminately with large media houses (often in programmatic) without any real understanding of media mark-up.

7. Businesses relying on last click attribution to make decisions.

8. Brands running search campaigns in areas where search volume doesn’t exist, or to satisfy a need for ‘vanity rankings’.

9. Organisations trying to generate leads running brand uplift campaigns. Resources need to be spent at all stages of the funnel.

10. Businesses over optimising their websites for SEO. Keep content natural, don’t force the syntax or sentence structure of website pages to accommodate keywords.

11. Inflexibility and staying in your comfort zone. Too often we deal with marketing departments that don’t push back against Board and Sales departments. If you don’t think an idea will work express this early and forcefully.

12. Holding back information. The days of brands owning the buyer journey are long gone: be transparent and share information that your prospects will value, including pricing.

13. Organic social media. We still see businesses wasting resources posting organic updates on their Facebook platform. Facebook is a ‘pay to play’ space: only three percent of your followers will see organic updates, and less of those are likely to be the prospects you are targeting.

14. Content creation for content creations sake. Don’t publish content on any platform unless it is genuinely useful to people outside of your organisation.

15. No clear deliverables for content. If content strategy is daunting then set some shorter-term parameters: plan and develop a six-month calendar of meaningful content pieces, along with the channels you will use for amplification, and understand up-front how you will measure success.

16. Not having goals in the form of hard numbers. What does digital success look like? Set a number that shows success and be ruthless in achieving it.

Things I need to action:

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A Final Word...

Need more leads or sales? We’d love to help. Simply get in touch with the Rocket team!

There’s no gold ticket to developing and changing your digital strategy overnight, and any one tactic alone won’t work. The winning strategy is going to be a combination of techniques such as SEO, paid search, email marketing and remarketing. Empowering

informed decision makers will drive your strategy further per dollar, capturing the attention of your prospects when researching and ready to buy.

In all of the strategies that we put together, we ultimately focus on digital marketing that drives leads and sales. If you’d like to talk individual strategy for your business,

we’d love to speak with you.

Stephen Mumford Senior ConsultantP +61 02 8310 2324 M +61 411 605 [email protected]

the connected business: driving growth through digital · 2019-02-24 · the connected business:...

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