We’ve created guides on how to increase your traffic via SEO, PPC, email and more, but in this blog, we’re going to tackle what’s different about 2024.

There are lots of changes coming, but savvy marketers will only need to make a few changes to get more website traffic in 2024.

SGE’s Impact on Website Traffic

2024 is going to be the year that Google launches its AI-powered search.

The Search Generative Experience, also known as SGE (neither of which are great names, if we’re being honest), will be an update to the way Google responds to people’s questions.

Instead of the results page we’re used to — made up of information taken from websites — people will get an AI-generated response at the top of the search page.

Technically, this response is still made up of information taken from websites, but it doesn’t direct users to websites in the same way.

It’s going to be easy for people to get the answers to their questions from Google’s SGE instead of visiting a website.

Your website included.

This definitely feels scary. One study showed that websites saw a traffic drop of between 18 and 64% in SGE tests.

But, some websites saw a big increase in organic search traffic.

How can you be one of the businesses that can increase website traffic rather than lose it?

By being prepared.

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Luckily, the team at Thinkplus have started doing the hard work for you.

We’re figuring out how to rank in SGE and getting great results.

Some of the most important factors for ranking your website in Google’s SGE are:

• Extremely closely matching the information you publish with the phrase you are trying to rank for.
• Providing simple information with high readability.
• “Getting to the point” and giving the user the information they need very quickly on the page.
• Being a trusted source of information on the topic.
• Already ranking in the “regular” organic search results.

Check out our blog for a more detailed guide to ranking in Google’s AI search.

Hyper-Personalised Search

Because of SGE, we expect to see people starting to make more personal searches.

Google has trained the masses to ask questions (we use that term very loosely) like “Best family car 2023” instead of “Which car do you recommend for a family of four with two dogs who love the outdoors?”

And now Google is going to retrain them.

The more information the searcher gives Google, the better the answer.

This means they may not want to visit websites that will have content targeting a broader audience.

Because of this, it’s going to be more important than ever to understand the niche searches your audience are making and create content to answer their questions.

That way, Google is more likely to include your blog post as a reference in the SGE answer, instead of a competitor who has created a broader blog trying to cater to everyone.

To find out the specific questions your audience is asking, speak to your sales team.

They speak to potential customers daily and will be asked niche questions often.

Thinking back to the car example, the second search sounds like the type of question someone would ask in a car dealership.

This is how people will be searching in 2024.

You might be wondering how this will help you get more traffic to your website. Does it matter if you’re appearing as a reference website in the AI answer if the searcher can get everything they need from search?

Yes, you’re likely to see a drop in traffic, but these hyper-personalised AI responses from search engines will help more qualified traffic reach your website.

They’ll see your website coming up alongside the personalised answers they get from AI and be ready to purchase once they reach your site.

It’s also important to remember that search isn’t the only place you should be getting your traffic from.

You don’t want to rely on search completely. You need to branch out to survive.

It sounds like it’s going to be a lot of work, but in the next section, you’ll see it doesn’t have to be.

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Omnichannel Marketing

A big mistake marketers make is treating every marketing channel like it needs brand-new, bespoke content.

It doesn’t have to be like that. Even if you’re trying to connect with slightly different audiences on different platforms.

Instead, you can create a big piece of broad content, like a white paper or eBook.

Then, you can cut that content down into smaller pieces, such as blog posts, videos, podcasts, emails or social media posts.

This will help you increase website traffic way more efficiently, and you’ll be sending out a consistent message across all platforms.

Not only that, but you can adjust the tone of voice to suit the platform you’re on or the audience you’re writing to.

This more personalised approach will help you drive traffic towards your website, whether that’s towards the bigger piece of content or right to your product or service pages (as long as they’re relevant).

There are other ways you can connect with your audience on a personal level which are new for 2024.

More Personal Content

Google is somewhat self-aware.

They realise that although AI responses can be helpful, people still want that human touch.

They want to hear from real people.

So, they’re adding new features to give that more personal touch.

And, if you take advantage of these features, you’ll increase traffic to your website easier than competitors who are still struggling with SGE.

These features from Google are Perspectives and Notes.

Perspectives

Perspectives is the name of a filter Google is adding to its search. This filter allows searchers to see insights from real people.

This could be in the form of a Reddit thread, answers on Quora, YouTube reviews, TikTok opinions and more.

This feature will help users get a fully human perspective on their search rather than just a generic AI answer.

To get more traffic to your website using Perspectives, you need to start by taking a look at which of your keywords trigger the Perspectives filter.

Then, you need to take a look at the content that’s appearing. Is it Q&A style, product demos or something else entirely?

Once you have a clear idea of what’s appearing in perspectives for your search terms, you need to find a way to appear in that content.

You can do this by replying to user questions on Reddit or Quora or by working with influencers to create user-generated content to appear in Perspectives.

As a result, you’ll get a boost in website traffic.

Notes

Notes is another recent feature that Google has announced.

It gives people the option to leave a note on search results to let other users know if it was helpful for them, which will increase website traffic if the Notes are positive.

We have yet to see this feature in action.

But we’ve always got an eye on anything that might change how digital marketing works.

It’s going to be more important than ever that your page titles and meta descriptions are accurate to the page they’re linking to. If not, people aren’t going to get what they need from your page and won’t be happy in the Notes.

However, if you create something high-quality and helpful, they’ll be more likely to leave a Note praising your work.

As with anything like this, people are more likely to leave a message when they’re unhappy rather than when they’re pleased.

So, the most important thing you need to take from this is that the pages on your website need to be good, and users should be getting what they expected from your site after clicking through from Google.

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The Impact of PPC

PPC is going to be another way to increase website traffic in 2024.

It will be helpful to any business, even those who have prepared for SGE and tested it ahead of time.

When SGE is launched to everyone and the algorithm is settling in, things will be turbulent for a while.

Using PPC to support your organic content will be a must if you want to keep a steady flow of traffic to your website.

Our PPC team predicts that SGE will be helpful for search ads.

Because people will be making more specific, personalised searches, you’ll be able to serve them the best ad for what they need.

Especially if you’re using Performance Max, which uses machine learning to serve ads to the right person at the right time.

This will help you increase website traffic while Google is a bit more turbulent and help you connect with potential customers when they’re ready to buy.

In 2024, it will be more important than ever that your PPC ads stand out from competitors. They should include your USPs, and any images should be eye-catching.

Avoid using AI-generated images where you can, as people are going to be wary of ads that show images that don’t quite match what’s on offer.

How to Increase Website Traffic in 2024

In the coming year, there are a few areas you need to focus on to get more website traffic.

• Pay attention to SGE and test ranking now before it gets rolled out to everyone
• Try ranking in SGE in different ways
• Explore other ways to rank, such as Perspectives
• Add a more personal touch to your content; this will help you stand apart from the generic AI answers
• Use omnichannel marketing to get a wide reach while saving time
• Use PPC to boost your traffic and help you appear in the AI-generated response.

What to Read Next

• How to Rank in Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE)
• 5 Powerful Lead Generation Strategies for 2024
• What is Google Gemini? What Marketers Need to Know

What to Watch Next

What to Listen to Next

• Copy This UNBEATABLE SEO Strategy in 2024
• How to 10X Your Conversions (Like a $5M Business)
• Avoid These Digital Marketing Strategy MISTAKES in 2024

The post How to Triple Your Website Traffic in 2024 appeared first on Thinkplus.

A few practices you should follow to create fantastic law firm PPC ads include:

• Engaging copy that gives the viewer a reason to click
• Add an eye-catching headline
• Use great visuals (in ads that use visuals)
• Adapt your ads for different audiences and searches
• A/B test your ads to see what resonates with your audience
• Monitor analytics like click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, engagement and return on ad spend (ROI)
• Adjust ad creative (that’s your copy and visuals) if you see a performance dip.

Download our free guide, which includes a PPC checklist to ensure your ads are well-optimised.

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What Are PPC Campaigns?

Pay-per-click advertising, more commonly known as PPC, refers to all online advertising, not just the ones where you pay for each click.

PPC ad campaigns include Google search ads, YouTube ads, banner ads and social media ads.

There are more types of PPC ads, but these are the ones you’ll use most in your law firm’s PPC campaigns.

Google search ads appear at the top and bottom of the search engine results pages (SERPs). The placement isn’t just based on spend. Google also takes into account the quality of your ads.

In Google’s AI Search Generative Experience, SGE, ads will be included in and around the AI-generated answer.

YouTube ads appear in a few different places. Video ads can run at the start, middle or end of YouTube videos. The user can skip some of these ads, and you only pay if they watch 30 seconds or more of your ad. Other YouTube ads are unskippable; users must watch them to get to their main content.

Banner ads also appear on YouTube next to some videos. In-feed ads are another option. They appear among the other search results.

Banner ads run on websites around the internet. These are often run through Google ads, too. The image below shows three different banner ads on the Lawyer Monthly website.

Social media ads run in different formats depending on the platform you use.

It’s best to use social media ads to retarget people who have visited your site in the past. It’s unlikely people will make an impulse purchase with a law firm, which is what many social media ads are designed to do.

Retargeting past visitors on social media reminds them of your USPs and why they should hire you, which is useful if they shop around.

Using a mix of these different types of ads would be the best PPC strategy for your law firm, but we suggest prioritising Google search ads to start with.

Common PPC terms

PPC campaigns are full of jargon. Here are some of the most common PPC terms and how they relate to your ads.

Click-through-rate (CTR)

CTR is the ratio of users who click on an ad to the number of times the ad is shown.

For example, if an ad is displayed 100 times and is clicked on 5 times, the CTR is 5%.

Cost-per-click (CPC)

CPC is the amount you pay each time someone clicks on your ad.
For example, if you pay $1 each time your ad is clicked and the ad is clicked 100 times, the spend is $100, and the CPC is $1.

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Cost-per-impression (CPI)

CPI is the amount you pay for every 1,000 impressions (views) of your ad.

For example, if an ad campaign costs a total of $20 and receives 10,000 impressions, the CPI is $2 ($20/10,000 impressions).

Conversion Rate (CR)

CR can be measured in a few different ways. It can be the percentage of website visitors from your ads who complete a desired action. It could also be the number of people who just click your ads. It depends on what you’re counting as a conversion.

For example, if 100 people visit your website and 1 becomes a client, the conversion rate is 1% (1 client/100 visitors). We increased the PPC conversion rate for a client by 207%.

Cost-per-acquisition (CPA)

CPA is the cost of acquiring a new customer.
For example, if an ad campaign spends $1,000 and acquires 100 new customers, the CPA is $10 ($1,000 total cost/100 new customers).

Call-to-action (CTA)

The CTA is the text or graphics in your ad that’s meant to prompt a desired response from the viewer.

For example, “Get a free consultation” or “Find out if you have a case”.

Why Should Law Firms Use PPC Ads?

There are a few reasons why PPC ad campaigns are important for law firms. Not only do they help you reach your ideal customer faster, but they can also help you compete with AI.

Law firm PPC is often expensive because of high competition, but the benefits are huge.

And, if you create strong PPC ads, you’ll get a good return on investment (ROI).

The benefits of PPC for law firms

Targeted reach

PPC allows you to target your ads precisely to your ideal clients based on location, demographics, keywords, interests, and more.

This helps you connect with clients actively searching for legal services with a message and CTA that resonates with them.

Measurable results

With PPC, you only pay when someone clicks your ad. This makes tracking and optimising your ad spend easy based on metrics like cost-per-click and conversion rate.

Flexibility

PPC campaigns can be adjusted quickly based on performance. You can change targeting, bids, ad copy, landing pages, and more to improve results.

Competitive edge

Good PPC puts your law firm’s ad in front of people right when they are searching for legal help.

This allows you to stand out from competitors in online search results — especially when there are so many poor ads out there.

Cost-effective

PPC costs are only incurred when someone clicks your ad. This is often a more affordable way to reach potential clients than traditional advertising. It’s easy to turn PPC up or down, depending on your goals and budget.

How to Create a Successful PPC Campaign for Your Law Firm

Every successful PPC campaign needs a solid plan and strategy behind it.

Keyword research

Review your SEO keywords and identify the keywords you want to target with PPC.

• Have you seen a drop in traffic from a keyword you rank in position 1 for? Check the search engine results page (SERP) to see if competitors run ads there. You will want to run competing ads.
• Are there some keywords you want traffic for but are struggling to rank? Perhaps you’ve added a new service and want a traffic boost while your page steps up the ranking. PPC is a great fit for this.
• Use a tool like Semrush (which you can try for free for 14 days with our link), to identify new keywords that could be a good fit for your law firm’s PPC ads.

Competitor research

While researching your keywords, analyse competitor ads to find out what works.

• Pay attention to the language and CTAs competitors use.
• See if they use ad extensions
• Take inspiration from the ad imagery.

Ad creative

When creating a search ad, it’s essential to include the following:

• A strong headline that’s enticing and contains the keywords you are targeting. Think back to the titles of the blogs we discussed earlier.
• A compelling offering in the text. This should clarify your offering and why the viewer should choose you.
• Ad extensions, including other relevant pages on your site or a click-to-call button so viewers can get in touch right away. Consider the intent of the search. Ads run on a search where users are not quite ready to convert will have different CTAs to those that are for people ready to get in touch with your law firm.

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When creating a social media ad, it’s important to include:

• A scroll-stopping image that grabs the viewer’s attention
• A compelling offering in the text. This should clarify your offering and why the viewer should choose you.
• A compelling, relevant CTA.

If you decide to go the video ad route, you need to include:

• High-quality, scroll-stopping video that grabs the viewer’s attention
• A script that gets straight to the point, with a hook that keeps the viewer watching
• A strong, relevant CTA.

Landing pages

Landing pages are the pages visitors land on when they click on your ads and are key to a PPC campaign’s success.

If you have a great ad for your family law services, but the link in the ad takes users to your homepage, they’ll be unlikely to convert.

Your landing pages should be relevant, easy to navigate and have a strong CTA.

Measuring Your Law Firm’s PPC Campaigns

Monitor your PPC ad’s stats to ensure they get the desired result.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that lots of views mean your ad is good. If no one clicks or converts, it’s a waste of money.

You need to track:

• Click-through-rate (CTR)
• Cost-per-click (CPC)
• Return on investment (ROI)

If any of these stats drop, it’s likely you need to refresh your ads. You could change the imagery, test a new CTA or highlight a different USP.

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PPC Strategies for Lawyers and Law Firms

Now, you have everything you need to run a great PPC campaign for your law firm.

Remember:

• Start with keyword research
• Identify what’s working (and what isn’t working) for competitors
• Create strong ads using text, visuals and relevant CTAs
• Send visitors to well-designed landing pages
• Measure your campaign’s results
• Adjust your campaign if needed.
• Learn more about marketing your law firm in our downloadable guide.

What to Read Next

• How to Rank Your Law Firm at the Top of Google
• Earn 10x More Legal Clients
• 5 Powerful Lead Generation Strategies for 2024

What to Watch Next

What to Listen to Next

• The Complete Law Firm Digital Marketing Playbook
• How To Create Landing Pages That Convert at 43%
• The Best Lead Generation Strategies for 2024

The post Law Firm PPC Ads That Earn High-quality New Clients appeared first on Thinkplus.

Business-to-consumer marketing, more commonly known as B2C marketing, has been shaken up in the past year thanks to the AI boom we saw in the first half of 2023.

Because of this, you might be left wondering what marketing strategies are best for B2C businesses. In this guide, we’ll share ten ways to make your B2C marketing stand out in 2023 and beyond, including:

1. 1. Understanding your audience
   2. Repositioning your PPC campaigns
   3. Nailing your brand positioning
   4. Promoting social responsibility and good causes
   5. Making use of personalisation
   6. Using digital PR to your advantage with AI search in mind
   7. Mastering video marketing
   8. Taking your social media campaigns to the next level
   9. Incorporating influencer marketing
   10. Utilising an omnichannel marketing strategy

1. Understand Your Audience

The foundation of any B2C marketing campaign is a good understanding of your audience.

In today’s world, there’s more competition, more noise, more products…the list goes on.

Understanding your target audience is one of the best ways you can work towards standing out from the crowd.

You should think of your potential customers as more than just age, gender and location.

You need to consider what drives them, what they value and why they need your product or service.

This exercise is vital for anyone who also thinks they have a clearly defined target audience.

Reviewing this can help you find new opportunities you haven’t noticed before and help take your B2C marketing above competitors who haven’t put in this work.

How to Define Your Target Audience — Step-by-Step

Review your product or service

Start by looking at the benefits and features of your product or service and how buying from your business might appeal to potential customers. This includes ethical business practices, excellent customer service, fast shipping times, products made using a specific material or process or good product guarantees.

For example, earplug brand Loop makes the benefits of its product clear right away on its homepage — “innovative earplugs that look and feel good“.

Loop likely researched its target audience and found the common pain points — earplugs are uncomfortable and look unappealing — and realised it could highlight how Loop earplugs differ to appeal to its target customer.

Understanding what’s great about your product, service or business will help you understand who your business should target.

Conduct market research

Next, conduct market research by studying competitors and your industry. You can conduct surveys and interviews for a more hands-on approach, or you can take to social media and forums to see what your ideal customers are interested in and the comments they leave about your business or competitors.

You don’t just need to look at their comments concerning your business — pay attention to the type of things they post on their social media — this will give you a more rounded view of what your target customers are like as people, which will help you later when you create a buyer persona.

Analyse existing customers

Analysing your existing customers is one of the easiest ways to learn more about who you should be targeting. Not everyone who buys from you will be an “ideal customer”, but they will help you understand why they buy from you.

You can send out surveys to your existing customer base, look through reviews and conduct phone interviews with them.

Remember, customers need guidance through this process — if you ask them what their buying habits are, they will likely get confused.

Asking them questions like “Do you tend to buy on impulse or spend lots of time researching?” would be a better way to understand their buying habits.

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Segment your audience

Now that you’ve gathered this information, you likely have a few different customer types. Spend time sifting through all the information and segment customers into different groups.

You may find that one segment is unexpected, and it’s up to you whether you’d like to lean into this unexpected audience or change your positioning to focus more on a different segment.

For example, an earplug business could be aiming to target people who struggle to sleep but then realise that young concertgoers are making up a large part of its customer base.

It may decide to rebrand to get more concert-going customers or analyse its positioning to see why it’s attracting concertgoers over people who struggle to sleep.

You can see how choosing to target one of these two audiences would change the brand image, the way it’s presenting itself in paid advertising, the tone of its marketing campaigns, the marketing channels it’s using to promote itself…all of its digital marketing!

This is why understanding your target audience on a deeper level than age, gender and location is so important.

Create a buyer persona

Finally, you should take things a step further and design a buyer persona.

Buyer personas focus on individual consumers you’ve made up based on research — essentially, your ideal customer.

You give them a name, add a stock photo and describe their buying habits, family life, job, hobbies, values and more.

This process helps you visualise your ideal customer and will influence a lot of your marketing. When you create an ad, you’ll think, “Would this appeal to our buyer persona?”

You don’t have to do just one — if you have a couple of customer types, create more. Just don’t create so many that you lose track.

2. Reposition Your PPC Campaigns

In an AI-driven search landscape, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising will become an even more powerful tool to help businesses get the necessary visibility.

With the rise of AI search experiences, organic website traffic could drop by as much as 30-40% for some businesses. If you experience a drop in organic traffic, you’ll want to drive traffic through search PPC and non-search PPC platforms like social media or the Google Display Network.

An example of how shopping ads will look in Google’s SGE

However, you won’t be alone in this endeavour.

With the introduction of AI-generated ads, the number of businesses using PPC will increase, meaning costs will rise. Whatever quality AI can produce will become the new standard, so you must make something better.

Example of AI-generated backgrounds from Meta Ads

The quality of your ads will be crucial. Well-written and highly creative PPC ads will stand out from the crowd, as the quality of AI-generated ads can vary significantly.

Google has already provided previews of how PPC will look in the new search format, with ads appearing above AI-generated responses and sponsored shopping results within the response. Microsoft is testing ads within its Bing Chat AI, indicating an increase in PPC clicks compared to non-AI search.

Example of ads in Bing Chat

If your Google search ads are not converting as effectively in the new AI search experience, consider moving more of your ad spend to platforms where you’ve succeeded, such as a specific social media platform.

However, following best practices and leveraging AI tools available on platforms like Meta and Google, you can still get a strong start with search ads when the new generative search experience becomes the norm.

3. Nail Your Brand Positioning

Brand positioning is a crucial element that needs to be part of any B2C marketing strategy. It will help you stand out from the crowd and give potential customers reasons to buy from you.

What Is Brand Positioning?

Brand positioning is the core of your brand’s identity. It defines who you are and helps you stand out from your competition.
Let’s look at two vegan shoe brands on Instagram as an example.
Will’s Vegan Store targets wealthier customers and uses serene nature images, neutral colours and higher-priced boots.

Screenshot of Will’s Vegan Store Instagram

On the other hand, KOI Footwear appeals to a younger audience with vibrant colours, urban fashion and more affordable boots.

Screenshot of the KOI Footwear Instagram

Both brands sell vegan shoes, but their unique positioning attracts different types of customers.

To create a brand position that helps you stand out, consider your competition, where you fit in, customer needs and how you’ll put your positioning into action.

Analyse Competitor Positioning

To stand out, you first need to understand what your competitors are doing.

Look at their websites, social media presence and PPC ads. Identify their strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps they include excellent customer service as a benefit of shopping with them, but many customer complaints on social media go ignored.

Example of negative customer feedback on Facebook

This will help you improve your digital marketing, clarify your target audience and address any customer issues with your competitors.

Consider why customers might choose your competitors over you based on their positioning, but also think about why your competitors’ positioning might turn potential customers off.

Use this information to adjust your positioning. You shouldn’t copy your competitors by any means, but seeing what’s out there will help you find ways to stand out from others.

Understand Your Customers

Examine your current and ideal customers — focus on their problems, concerns, demographics and buying habits.

Use surveys, market research, social media insights, customer emails, reviews and live chat responses to gain a deep understanding of your target audience.

Pay attention to what customers do and don’t like about your brand and your competitors. This information will help you identify their pain points and tailor your brand’s positioning to address those issues.

It’s important to be authentic and highlight what sets you apart from your competitors while meeting your customers’ needs.

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Define and Implement Your Positioning

Based on your analysis of competitors and customers, it’s time to define your brand’s positioning.

Sum it up in a few words that capture your values, such as personalised service, trustworthiness or ease of purchase.

Let’s compare two life insurance brands to illustrate this point.

Dead Happy positions itself as a rebellious alternative, using catchy phrases like “make a death wish” and emphasising simplicity and affordability.

Polly life insurance positions itself as the go-to brand for mums, using emotional language and stressing affordability.

These are two brands with totally different positioning that essentially sell the same thing — life insurance.

Once you’ve defined your positioning, ensure it’s consistently reflected across your website and all your marketing efforts.

Putting Your Positioning in Action

Your brand’s positioning should be seamlessly integrated into your marketing and the entire business as a whole.

Consider the customer journey and how each aspect of your positioning connects with customers at different stages.

For example, if simplicity is part of your positioning, make information easily accessible at the beginning, provide detailed product descriptions in the middle and ensure a straightforward checkout process at the end.

Mastering brand positioning is crucial in a competitive market.

By understanding your competition, analysing customer pain points, defining your positioning and implementing it consistently, you can create a unique brand that resonates with your target audience.

Remember to be authentic and ensure your positioning aligns with the actual brand experience. Consistency across all touchpoints is essential.

4. Social Responsibility and Incorporating Ethical and Sustainable Practices into Your B2C Marketing

61% of consumers consider company ethics and values before making a purchase.

The type of things that consumers look for in ethical businesses are:

• They sell ethically sourced products
• They treat staff well
• They are transparent with customers
• They avoid false marketing claims
• They strive for constant improvement.

Ethical marketing promotes products or services produced or carried out ethically or promotes environmental or social causes as part of a broader marketing strategy.

Any causes the business promotes should be reflected in the business’s practices.

There’s no point in sharing mental health content on social media if you don’t care for employee health or sharing recycling tips if nothing is happening in the office to reduce waste.

Examples of ethical businesses include Simply Business, Candy Kittens, Betteridge & Milsom, Butternut Box and us at Thinkplus.

• Simply Business promotes mental health support for small business owners on social media.
• Candy Kittens offers discounted products through The Outlet to reduce food waste.
• B&M promotes people-first causes and collaborates with businesses that share similar values.
• Butternut Box highlights its ethical values in its marketing, including low-carbon recipes and donations to dogs in need.
• Thinkplus (that’s us!) emphasises transparency, diversity, employee benefits and community support.

You can learn more about marketing an ethical business in our guide.

5. Make Use of Personalisation

Brand personalisation is one of the most essential B2C marketing strategies you can use in 2023 and beyond.

Consumers want to feel a connection with brands, and a personalised experience can help build that connection. It also gives individual consumers a better experience by focusing on the products and services that are the most important to them.

Amazon is great at this, and so is Netflix. Both businesses suggest relevant “products” to users when they visit, based on their past searches and purchases on Amazon and watch history on Netflix.

There are a few different ways you can personalise your marketing campaigns. Here are some examples:

Tailored Recommendations and Dynamic Website Content

You can use customer data and algorithms to provide personalised product recommendations like Netflix and Amazon.

This can be based on the customer’s browsing history, previous purchases or preferences they might have set up when registering with your site or signing up for your mailing list.

Your website can also dynamically display content based on visitors’ browsing history, geographic location or past interactions. For example, a food delivery app will use the user’s location to show restaurants in their area.

Personalised Email Campaigns

You can segment your email subscriber list based on customer preferences, purchase history or demographic information.

By sending targeted emails with personalised product recommendations, exclusive offers or tailored content, you can increase open rates, click-through rates and conversions. You’ll also reduce the number of people who unsubscribe because they feel the content isn’t relevant to them.

Customised Landing Pages

You can create unique landing pages for specific customer segments or marketing campaigns.

These landing pages can be personalised to match the interests, needs or demographics of the target audience, resulting in higher engagement and conversion rates.

If you’ve looked for local services and landed on a page that says something like “Top Plumbers in Lincoln”, even though you can see it’s a national business, then you’ve experienced this type of customised landing page.

ERG Facilities has a landing page for Lincoln with a local number for potential customers to call.

This is a different number from the one on their main homepage, meaning the landing page offers a more personalised experience.

Personalised Ads

You can use customer behaviour, preferences or demographics data to deliver personalised PPC ads. These ads are more likely to convert as they’re more relevant to the person seeing them.

This is better than running the same set of ads for everyone if you have a few different customer types — the same with email.

6. A Solid Digital PR Strategy Is Key

Digital PR will be one of the top ways to compete with AI-generated search results.

It’s the ideal way to get your brand in front of prospective customers where they already spend their time, such as reading online publications, reading the news or browsing social media.

Here are some digital PR strategies that help B2C businesses thrive in this AI world.

Publishing Original Studies or Stats

Publishing stats or studies is an old-school but effective method of digital PR.

These don’t need to be brand-new studies either — you may already have customer data you can use to inform these studies as long as no identifying customer information is used.

Not only are great studies often linked to big publications, but they may also give you an advantage regarding SGE.

If someone is searching for specific data or stats in their industry, we hope the SGE will want to credit a source, even if they don’t link to you.

For example, a search for “digital marketing statistics” could return “according to Thinkplus, 55% of marketers struggle to understand why their target audience doesn’t convert”, which was pulled from our digital marketing ROI survey as part of the AI response.

The best studies share new information or creatively share existing knowledge — or even better if it’s new info shared in a cool way.

One of the best ways to do this is through infographics.

Here’s a fantastic infographic from Household Quotes about the most popular dog breeds worldwide. This infographic has a beautiful design and is cut down into smaller sections that can easily be shared if you want to share certain countries.

Image source

But how does this help a business that helps searchers find tradespeople to work on their homes?

Well, taking a closer look at the internal links, we can see readers are redirected to pages about how to make their homes pet safe, which may require a tradesperson to work on the house.

An infographic like this isn’t going to attract people at the bottom of the funnel, but it’s one of those where the business decided to cast a wide net with a study that will help get a lot of eyes on it.

This is the type of topic humans love — it’s focused on dogs — so people will want to share it on social media and show it to others.

It almost turns into word-of-mouth marketing, despite its roots being a digital campaign.

It’s likely that some of the people who see this will need a tradesperson at some point and may want to use Household Quotes to get quotes.

Or, they’re potentially choosing a new dog based on popular breeds and will move down the funnel after this infographic. They decide to get a dog → realise they need to dog-proof their home → then get a quote through Household Quotes.

Newsjacking

Newsjacking is another form of digital PR where brands jump on a trending topic to get eyes on the business by taking part in a meme or offering an expert opinion on recent news.

Let’s be real — we do it all the time on our YouTube channel with AI. But that’s because, as marketers, we can offer an expert opinion relating to AI news and communicate it in a way other marketers and business owners can understand.

Brands sometimes take part in newsjacking more casually, speaking about recent events or just sharing a couple of memes.

For example, local businesses in the USA recently spoke about how Taylor Swift concerts impact their business, with one hair salon in Houston, Drybar, describing how they saw an influx of bookings around the week of the concert. They took the time to learn different hairstyles that Taylor Swift is known for to appeal to customers.

If you realise your business is connected to an event or news story, you can reach out to publications with an expert or first-hand opinion, like this hair salon.

DryBar did miss a trick here — as far as we can see, there are no social media posts from around the time of the concert promoting that they were taking bookings for Taylor Swift styles that weekend. This would have been a quick and easy way to newsjack this story and get even more bookings for that weekend.

Coining a Term

If you created a new process in your industry or found a better way of doing an old process, which doesn’t have a name, you can use this as an opportunity to coin a term.

Create content around this term and reach out to publications whose readers could benefit from this knowledge.

Then, people will be more likely to search for “What is the X technique?” or “How to use the X technique”.

As you are the originator, your site will likely be used to corroborate the info — and put your brand at the top of SERPs.

Alongside that, if people are nice, they’ll credit you with the idea — “The X technique, coined by Y” — which is likely to be picked up by SGE and included in the generated results.

For example, Hubspot coined the phrase Surround Sound SEO.

Here is Semrush using the words “coined by Hubspot” while talking about the surround sound technique.

You’ll also get more backlinks if your term takes off. Remember that linked and unlinked mentions will fuel the knowledge graph, so even if sites aren’t linking to you, it will help your brand name appear alongside the term you’ve coined in the AI-generated search result.

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Link Insertion

Pay attention to the websites that appear the most often for searches around products like yours, and then see how you can get featured on those websites.

One of the simplest ways is to get featured in a top 10 list.

These lists will potentially become more prevalent in an AI search world, as consumers may want a more human opinion on the products they are considering.

It’s also likely that the more often other sites mention your product in a positive light, the more likely Google will choose it to feature in an AI-generated search response.

By doing this, you’re almost reversing the buyer journey by featuring on the websites that appear in the queries before the final transactional queries.

Image Source

Brand Blast

A Brand Blast refers to a digital PR campaign you plan to launch all on the same day.

It’s commonly called a “simultaneous launch” or “embargoed launch”. However, the gist is that you get everyone involved to wait to publish their content on the same day.

As a result, potential customers who read various publications related to your industry will see your story on all their most-read sites.

This will require some pre-planning on your part, as well as publishers agreeing to post about you on a particular day.

A brand blast will be most effective when you have a new product launch that gives publications a good reason to discuss it on a specific day.

But, if you have a story that’s big enough or interesting enough to share, you can often create a brand blast about it, too.

While these campaigns might not immediately help with Google’s SGE, your target audience becomes aware of your new product and brand’s existence while supplying new information to Google’s Knowledge Graph.

It then uses this for future SGE results, both informational and transactional.

Think of it this way; if there’s enough early positive press about your story, that positivity will fuel more mentions and comments that Google can pull into their answers as time goes on.

7. Master Video Marketing

Video marketing is an integral part of any solid content B2C marketing strategy.

We don’t mean big-budget productions, either.

One of the biggest entertainment YouTubers, Mr Beast, has said in interviews that although he could afford to make his videos into cinematic masterpieces, he opts for a homemade feel instead because his audience likes the more personal vibes.

The same goes for brands.

Look at Kylie Cosmetics.

Kylie Jenner’s YouTube channel is essentially the cosmetics brand’s YouTube channel. But because it feels like Kylie’s personal channel, the videos feel less like adverts.

And when she does share a professionally filmed ad on her channel, her audience feels like she’s sharing a cool achievement with them. It’s like, “Hey friends, look at this cool ad I made”.

So, how does Kylie make money from her more casual videos?

Well, this 11-minute makeup tutorial is just an ad for Kylie’s 24k Birthday Collection. But it has 12.2 million views.

It’s performed so well because the brand knows what its audience wants to see — Kylie and how they can look like her.

It just so happens they can look like her by buying her products.

If you’re selling a service, you can still create engaging video content.

One of our clients, Golf Course Lawn, shares regular videos about caring for your lawn.

The founder, Ron Henry, has created videos on tackling nearly every lawn problem and has gained over 50,000 followers.

Ron gives away lawn care secrets for free but suggests products he sells to help customers achieve the results he shows in the videos.

Because he’s sharing the results and his passion, it shows that his business is legitimate and that his products get results.

And most of his content is filmed with a handheld camera. It feels personal and doesn’t feel like a business has made it, which is one of the reasons why it’s so successful.

How to Start Video Marketing

Start by researching the type of video content that’s popular in your niche. Short-form video is a better fit for you than long-form, or vice-versa.

It’s also important to look at what’s popular outside your niche.

No one expected a language learning app to create content using current TikTok trends and internet memes. Still, Duolingo decided to take that leap and now has over six million followers on TikTok, with videos that regularly get hundreds of thousands of views.

Half the time, the videos aren’t about learning a language; they’re just silly videos that happen to include the Duolingo owl, which gets the brand in front of as many people as possible.

Video Screenshot Source

Duolingo is quite an extreme example, but it shows how you can do excellent video marketing by replicating current trends, even if others in your industry aren’t doing the same.

8. Make the Most of Social Media Marketing

Although 2023 has been a tumultuous year for social media marketing (we’re looking at you, Twitter), social media is still an essential asset in any B2C marketing campaign.

The key to great social media marketing, especially in the B2C world, is creating organic-looking content on the channels your ideal customers are spending their time.

If your demographic hangs out on TikTok, you need to create content there. If they spend a lot of time on Reddit, you need to find a way to incorporate Reddit into your marketing strategy.

Find out more about which demographics use which social media platforms.

Another way to find the best platforms is to check out competitors and see where they’re most successful. Check out the profiles of people commenting on their posts and see if they match your target customer or buyer personas.

If you have strong ethical values in your business, this may influence your choices. For example, the ice cream company Ben and Jerry’s recently stopped running paid ads on Twitter as they noticed a significant increase in hate speech on the platform.

Air travel company Ryanair noticed a gap in the market for airline content on TikTok. Many competitors weren’t using the platform, as in their eyes, the TikTok user base was too young to be able to book holidays or flights.

But Ryanair saw this as an opportunity to connect with their future customers. TikTok users would become familiar with Ryanair, and then when the time came to book their first holiday, they’d choose the low-cost airline they’d come to know and love on their favourite social media platform.

Ryanair also used TikTok to handle objections and clarify exactly what the Ryanair experience is. If you’re paying £20 for a flight, you won’t have a luxury experience. They don’t try to pretend to be something they’re not, and they even make light of it.

Video screenshot source

9. Incorporate Influencer Marketing

There have been rumours that influencer marketing is on the decline, but with Google releasing its Perspectives filter, we’re likely to see it have a resurgence at the end of 2023 and beyond.

The Perspectives filter lets you filter Google search results only to show perspectives from people around the internet. This could be short videos, long videos, Reddit threads, answers on Quora or more.

Because of this, brands will want to use online creators and influencers to appear in Google’s Perspectives.

With AI search on the horizon, businesses will likely see a drop in traffic, so influencer marketing is a great way to connect with customers outside of search.

Even without these upcoming changes, influencer marketing has been an important part of any B2C marketing strategy for the past few years.

To get started with influencer marketing, take a look at any influencers who are in your niche. You may want to work with a fitness influencer if you sell wellness products. If you sell tech products, you could work with a tech influencer.

But that doesn’t mean you’re limited to those niches. Family influencers will have an audience interested in tech, and gaming influencers might be a good fit for your wellness brand. Outside-of-the-box thinking can help you stand out.

For example, Loki the Wolfdog is an account dedicated to showing the life of some wolf dogs whose owners take them on many outdoor travel adventures. At first glance, you might think, “ok, dog influencer, I can’t work with them if I’m not a pet brand”.

But their biggest sponsor is car manufacturer Toyota.

Because of the owner’s travel lifestyle, their photos are often out in the wilderness — in deserts, forests and mountain ranges. In the background of many of these images is the rugged, off-road-ready car they use to get to these locations, and it just happens to be a Toyota.

Toyota identified that many of Loki’s followers aspire to live this lifestyle with their dogs. When the time comes, they’ll look to Toyota for a great adventure car that can handle pets and rugged terrain.

If you want to get an authentic look into the best influencers to work with and have a social media presence, look at who your followers follow. Check your follower’s accounts to see if they represent your ideal customer or buyer persona, and then see if any influencers pop up across a bunch of their accounts.

These are the people you want to be working with.

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10. Omnichannel B2C Marketing: Reaching Customers across Multiple Platforms and Touchpoints

The best marketing strategy includes multiple different channels with a combination of the strategies we included above.

This is known as an omnichannel marketing strategy. This approach uses multiple digital marketing channels and touchpoints to create a seamless and consistent customer experience across multiple platforms.

It also takes into consideration the experience customers have outside of the digital world, such as visiting a store or interacting with you at an event.

The goal of omnichannel marketing is to create a unified brand experience, no matter where customers interact with the company.

When running omnichannel campaigns, you must ensure consistent messaging across all channels so customers get the same info and experience every time they interact with your brand.

To do this well, you need to understand the customer journey and what they need at different touch points. If customers on social media are likely at the start of their journey, you want to avoid bombarding them with content about making a purchase then and there.

Business to Consumer Marketing Strategies for 2023 and Beyond

From these ten B2C marketing strategies, you should be able to find a way to boost your digital marketing and drive more traffic to your website.

Today we’ve looked at:

• Understanding your audience
• Repositioning your PPC campaigns
• Nailing your brand positioning
• Promoting social responsibility and good causes
• Making use of personalisation
• Using digital PR to your advantage with AI search in mind
• Mastering video marketing
• Taking your social media campaigns to the next level
• Incorporating influencer marketing
• Utilising an omnichannel marketing strategy

If you feel like you need to consume even more marketing info (good on you!), then here’s where you should go next:

• Learn how to create a NINJA content strategy in this guide
• Get more from Google Analytics 4 with our revenue-increasing data tips
• Add email automation to your strategy with our email automation guide.

The post The 10 Best B2C Marketing Strategies for 2024 appeared first on Thinkplus.

If you saw this headline and thought, “I’m having the same problem,” this guide is for you.

At the start of 2023, we surveyed 97 small to medium-sized businesses to find out how they’re feeling about digital marketing — what their priorities are, what’s been working for them, what hasn’t been so successful, what they think about AI marketing, shoppable video platforms and more.

But we don’t just want to share some graphs with you and be done with it. That’s not our style.

We’d rather provide actionable advice that you can do, rather than just reflect over.

If you just want the data, you can download the graphs here. Nice and square for your social media resharing pleasure. You’re welcome.

There are a few digital marketing stats that really stood out to us in 2023’s survey:

• 55% of marketers said they struggle to understand why their target audience doesn’t convert
• 72% of marketers struggle to get insights from the data they have or don’t understand the data
• 30% of marketers surveyed said they’re finding it hard to keep up with AI changes
• 77% of marketers say that SEO is the most important digital marketing channel for their business
• 70% of marketers say blogs are very important for earning search traffic
• 88% of marketers find PPC to be too expensive or ineffective
• 43% of marketers will be investing more in shoppable video platforms in 2023
• 71% of marketers aren’t cutting spending despite a looming recession

We saw a lot of trends in this year’s digital marketing ROI survey, but none stood out more than the challenges marketers face when it comes to their target customers.

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How to Find and Understand Your Target Customer

If you struggle with understanding your target customers, you’re not alone.
In fact, 55% of marketers we surveyed said their biggest marketing challenge is understanding why their target audience doesn’t convert, and 31% struggle to understand what their target audience wants.

Your audience influences every aspect of your marketing strategy — your tone of voice, your digital marketing channels, and even the colours and imagery on your website.

If you don’t have a well-defined target audience, you’re going to struggle to get an ROI from your digital marketing efforts.

If you’re unsure whether or not you’ve got a well-defined target audience, take the following things into consideration:

Are you looking at psychographics as well as demographics?

Identifying your customers’ demographics — things like their age, their gender and their geographic location is a good start, but the real gold is in the psychographics.

These are the things that make your customers tick — their hobbies, passions, beliefs — the list goes on.

Think about how you’d market a product to a female customer, aged between 25 and 35, who lives in the UK, has two children, a mortgage, goes abroad twice a year and is always keen to get the best deal.

Now think about how you’d market a product to someone with the same demographics (female, 25-35, UK) but in a different city every week, cares about the environmental impact of her purchases and has three cats.

These two people have the same demographics, but their psychographics are totally different. You wouldn’t market a product to them in the same way. You might not even sell the same product to both of them.

So if you’ve fallen into the demographics trap, take the time to define your audience further. It can seem scary to reduce the pool of people you’re marketing to, but by doing so, you can focus your efforts in the places that matter.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “Well actually, I have multiple customer types, so I don’t need to narrow things down”, make sure you’re creating different content for those audiences.

They’re likely to buy your product or service for different reasons, and they’ll have different journeys and questions on route to purchase.

If you’re getting a healthy amount of leads and sales but realise that you’ve achieved that with a basic demographics profile, you could get even more if you define your target audience further.

With something like this, it’s hard to know where to start. We always recommend that you begin by speaking to your existing customers.

Speak to existing customers

Speaking to your customers is a great place to start if you want to improve your digital marketing strategy. It helps you:

• See patterns in customer behaviour
• See patterns in demographics and psychographics
• Understand why they chose you over competitors
• Understand which of your USPs actually appealed to your audience
• What they love about your product and business
• What you could be doing better.

Speaking to customers is a window into where and how you should focus your marketing efforts.

We see this time and time again — businesses assume that their customers love a certain USP and put time and money into shouting about it, only to find out that, when speaking to customers, they were drawn to the brand by something completely different.

We worked with a custom shelving company that thought their customers liked them as they were a local business. Turns out customers didn’t really care about that aspect, but they loved that they could get custom shelves at a good price.

How to Prioritise Your Marketing Channels

Another trend in our digital marketing ROI survey is that marketers often struggle to prioritise their marketing channels.

For example, 44% of marketers plan to prioritise organic social in 2023, despite 74% claiming it has a low ROI.

Now, there are two ways of thinking here.

The first is that because these marketers have not prioritised social media marketing in the past they have not been able to get a good ROI.

Social media is just something they’ve done because they feel they should, but this is the year they will prioritise it and get an amazing return on their investment.

The second is that they aren’t getting a good ROI from social media because they aren’t using it in a way that resonates with their target customer. This could be the platforms they use or the content itself.

As a result, they’re getting a rubbish ROI, but because many people use social media, they feel like they need to have a presence there.

We saw this reflected in other data, too — 36% of marketers surveyed don’t know which traffic source earns them the most valuable leads.

There are so many marketing channels that it can be difficult to figure out which are the best for your business.

There are marketing “gurus” across the web touting the platforms they had success on as the be-all and end-all, when really it was just a good fit for their business in particular.

Other marketing “pros” tell you to put yourself across as many platforms as possible — more platforms, more eyes, more sales, right?

WRONG!

It’s far better to do high-quality marketing using the channels that your target audience are using rather than trying to master every platform.

Use what you learnt from understanding your target customers to choose your channels. You can also look at the data from your existing digital marketing efforts to see which platforms have resulted in the highest ROI.

According to our survey, 72% of marketers either struggle to get insights from the data they have or don’t understand the data. Let’s make things a little easier with a cheat sheet of the metrics you want to look at for each channel to get the data you need, and what they might mean.

Important content marketing metrics

These metrics can be found in Google Analytics 4, which you should migrate to now if you haven’t already.

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• Users — the number of unique individuals who have visited your website or app within a specific date range
• Page Views — the total number of times a page on your website or app has been viewed within a specific date range. Each time a user views a page, it counts as one page view.
  • If users or page views have dropped or plateaued, it could mean that your content is no longer ranking as high as it has previously, which could be due to more competitor content being published and ranking higher, taking your place, or changes to the Google algorithm.
  • If users or page views have increased, but conversions haven’t, it could mean that they couldn’t find what they needed to make a purchase. For example, clear information about your product or service, and shipping cost/time.
• Average Engagement Time — the average amount of time users spend on your website or app within a specific date range. Engagement time is the time a user spends actively engaging with your content, such as scrolling, clicking, or watching videos.
  • If your average engagement time has dropped or plateaued, it could be that your website is hard to navigate so users are leaving the site quickly. Or, it could be that they’re landing on a page via search, but it’s not answering their query as well as it could, so they’re heading back to search.
  • If your average engagement time has increased, but users aren’t converting, it could be that you’re providing great content but not including enough relevant CTAs.
• Conversion Rate — how many users converted on your site. What counts as a conversion depends on what you set up as conversion events in Google Analytics 4. A conversion could be a sale or a user completing a form or signing up for a mailing list.
  • If your conversion rate is down or has plateaued, review your CTAs and compare your offering against competitors. They could have a better value proposition or more enticing offers. This doesn’t mean you need to copy them, but it will help you position yourself as a more attractive option.
  • If your conversion rate is high but you’re not getting many return customers, consider ways to reconnect with them. Are you making the most of your mailing list? Could you offer a subscription with a discount as an incentive to keep them coming back?
  • If one page has a high conversion rate but another page doesn’t, compare the two and see if you can replicate the success of the high-performing page on the low-performing page.

Learn more about the most profitable metrics in Google Analytics 4.

Important email marketing metrics

These metrics are most commonly found in your email marketing platform, although you may also find conversion data in Google Analytics 4.

• Open Rate — how many people who received your email opened it.
  • If your open rate has dropped or plateaued, it could be that your subject lines and preview text aren’t enticing people enough. Subscribe to competitor emails to see the type of subject lines they use, and make sure it’s clear what your email is about and why they should read it. No more subject lines saying, “New blog live now”
• Click Through Rate — the percentage of people who opened your email and clicked a link in that email. If 100 people opened your email and 1 clicked through to your website, your CTR would be 1%.
  • If your click-through rate has dropped or plateaued, consider the CTAs you’re using and where they are placed. You don’t want to overwhelm readers with a giant “BUY NOW” button at the top of the email, but including relevant CTAs throughout the email will help increase your CTR.
• Conversion Rate — the percentage of people who open your email and then take a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or downloading an app. For example, if your email is opened by 100 people and 5 of those people convert, your conversion rate would be 5%.
  • If email readers aren’t converting once they click through to your site, consider the pages you are sending them to. Make sure they are relevant to the content of the email and not just a product page you want them to see in the hopes they’ll convert.

Important PPC metrics

You can find this data in the platform you use to run your ads. Learn more about PPC.

• Conversion Rate — the percentage of people who click on your ad and then take a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or downloading an app. For example, if your ad receives 100 clicks and 5 of those clicks result in a conversion, your conversion rate would be 5%.
  • If your conversion rate is low or has plateaued, you should review the pages your ad links to. If you promote a specific product or service but then link to your homepage, those who clicked on your ad are more likely to bounce.
• Click-Through Rate — the percentage of people who click on your ad after seeing it. It is calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions (the number of times your ad was shown). For example, if your ad was shown 1,000 times and received 100 clicks, your click-through rate would be 10%.
  • If your click-through rate is low or has plateaued, then you should review your ad creative and compare it against competitors. Make sure you’re grabbing the viewers’ attention and giving them a reason to click through to your site. Include USPs, high-quality images or video, and make it clear what you are offering.
• Cost Per Acquisition — the amount of money you spend to acquire a conversion. It is calculated by dividing the total cost of your PPC campaign by the number of conversions you received. For example, if you spent £100 on a PPC campaign and received 10 conversions, your cost per acquisition would be £10.
• Cost Per Click — the amount of money you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. It is determined by the competition for the keywords you are targeting and the maximum bid you set. For example, if you set a maximum bid of £1 and someone clicks on your ad, you will pay £1.
  • If your cost per acquisition or click is higher than you’d like it to be, then you should review your ad targeting to make sure you’re targeting the right audience, consider adjusting your bids and potentially review your ad creative and copy.

Important SEO metrics

These metrics can be found in Google Analytics 4, and tools such as Semrush*.

• Organic Traffic — the traffic that comes to your website from search engines, such as Google or Bing, without you having to pay for it through advertising. Organic traffic is driven by the content on your website and the keywords you have optimised for.
  • If your organic traffic has dropped or plateaued, look at your website’s content and make sure the keywords and phrases you are targeting are the best ones for your business. It could be that search trends have changed and consumers are making different searches to find what they want.
  • You should also pay attention to competitor content in search – if you search for a term and a lot of what appears is how-to guides, then you should create better how-to content than what’s already ranking.

• Keyword Rankings — how well your website ranks in search engines for specific keywords. The goal of SEO is to improve your keyword rankings for the keywords that are most relevant to your business. The higher your website ranks for a particular keyword, the more likely people will find and visit it.
• Search Visibility — the overall visibility of your website in search engines. It takes into account your keyword rankings for all the keywords you are targeting and calculates the percentage of searchers who are likely to find your website when they search for those keywords. The higher your search visibility, the more traffic you are likely to receive from search engines.
  • If you’ve seen a drop in rankings or search visibility, then you should review competitor content to see if a new style of content is taking over the search results, similar to organic traffic drops.
  • If you’ve seen an increase in rankings or search visibility, but new traffic isn’t converting, you need to review your CTAs and ensure they fit well into the content.
• Organic Conversions — the number of visitors who come to your website from search engines and then take a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or subscribing to a newsletter. Organic conversions are important because they represent the ultimate goal of your SEO efforts — to attract relevant traffic that converts into customers or leads.
• Referring Domains — the number of other websites that link to your website. Backlinks from other websites are an important ranking factor in search engine algorithms, so having a large number of high-quality backlinks can help improve your keyword rankings and search visibility.
  • Review your strategy if you don’t have as many backlinks as you’d like. Are you reaching out to the right websites to get your content featured? If you’re struggling with outreach, then you can download our tried and tested outreach templates below, or check out our link-building guide.

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Important social media metrics

These metrics are most commonly found within the social media apps themselves.

• Reach — the number of unique users who have seen your social media content. It can be measured by the number of accounts your content has reached, regardless of whether they interacted with it.
• Impressions — the total number of times your social media content has been displayed on a user’s screen. Impressions can be measured by the number of times your content has been seen, including multiple views by the same user. Essentially, impressions are the number of times your content was displayed.
  • If you’ve seen a drop or plateau in reach and impressions, review the type of content you are putting out on social media. Pay attention to current trends and see how to leverage them to promote your brand. That doesn’t have to mean jumping on every TikTok trend out there. You can also jump on design trends which have a longer lifespan.
• Engagement — the number of interactions that users have with your social media content. It can include actions such as likes, comments, shares, retweets, clicks, and direct messages.
  • If you’ve seen a drop or plateau in engagement, consider whether you’re creating engageable content. Do users have a reason to comment or share the post with their followers? The content should serve the users, not just be used to sell your products.

How to Integrate AI into Your Marketing Strategy

The impact of artificial intelligence on marketing is already the hottest topic of 2023.

Since the start of the year, AI tools have taken off, with giant leaps in technology every few weeks (and increasingly, every few days).

It can be a lot to take in, and 30% of marketers surveyed said they’re finding it hard to keep up with all the changes, and 60% have yet to use AI in their digital marketing.

The area we’re seeing AI used most is in content marketing — 33% of marketers are using AI to help write content. The team here at Thinkplus use AI tools like Surfer, Jasper and ChatGPT to help with content outlines and inspiration but not to write our content.

Another great use for AI is taking something you’ve written and getting the AI to “translate” it into a different tone of voice or for a different audience.

For example, you can ask ChatGPT to generate a paragraph explaining how Wi-Fi works:

“Wi-Fi is a technology that uses radio waves to provide wireless high–speed internet and network connections. A Wi-Fi network consists of a wireless router, which transmits the data signals, and one or more wireless devices, such as laptops, smartphones, or tablets, which receive the signals and connect to the network. When a device connects to a Wi-Fi network, it sends and receives data via radio waves in the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz frequency bands, which are unlicensed and free to use.”

And then ask ChatGPT to rewrite this in a way a 5 year old would understand:

“Wi-Fi is like a special kind of magic that helps us use the internet without using any wires. It’s like having a superpower that lets us connect our phones, tablets, and computers to the internet without needing to plug anything in. It works by using special radio waves that travel through the air and help our devices talk to each other and share information.”

That’s a fairly extreme example, but it shows the capabilities of AI and how it can be used to take complex information and explain it in a new way.

In fact, 49% of marketers surveyed believed that there would be stricter parameters from Google when it comes to AI content. In August 2022, it seemed like Google was planning to penalise AI- generated content, but they’ve since done a u-turn (conveniently after announcing their own AI tools) and said that they will be “rewarding high-quality content, however it is produced“.

Of those using AI in their day-to-day marketing activities, 30% believe AI makes them more effective, resulting in more pieces written in a limited time, and 52% believe AI will help with time efficiency.

It’s no surprise that 23% of marketers believe that AI will replace the role or take on a large part of writing tasks — often AI written content is indistinguishable from human-written content.

The challenges lie with getting the AI to produce content in your business’ tone of voice, and risks with the AI “confidently lying” — it’s been known to include incorrect facts in content and occasionally even make up sources.

Because of this, AI still needs a lot of human intervention, but this isn’t the only place humans are needed. Unless you input a high-quality prompt, AI won’t just produce content on its own.

How to Improve Your SEO Strategy

Marketers still see SEO as one of the most important digital marketing channels. In fact, 77% of businesses say that SEO is the most important digital marketing channel to their business and 57% plan to spend most of their marketing budget on SEO in 2023.

SEO is a great investment for any business — here’s how to ensure you don’t waste your budget.

Keyword Research

Start with solid keyword research, keeping your target customer and goals in mind.

Next, decide what type of content will best fit your keywords and phrases. Shorter keywords are best for your homepage, category and product or service pages.

People searching for these simple keywords are often further down the sales funnel and are best served by clear pages that show off your USPs and make it easy for the visitor to convert.

Longer keywords and phrases, often in the form of questions, are better served by blog content. Searchers using Google to ask questions are often higher up the sales funnel, unsure if they want to make a purchase. Your content is what will help them make a decision, but only if it’s genuinely helpful.

Don’t waste your time creating content for keywords that are too competitive or that aren’t being used by your target customers.

Instead of loads of traffic and sales, you’ll get disappointment and sadness. Boo.

On-page optimisation

You don’t have to create brand-new content for every keyword — you can optimise your existing content.

• Check your meta titles and descriptions are relevant to your chosen keywords (so don’t call your homepage “home”)
• Update copy to include your target keywords and variations of them.
• Look at the search results for your target keyword and see what type of content is ranking. You might find that changing the format and making it more user friendly will make a big difference.
  • We saw the opportunity to improve a fairly well-performing blog about starting an Etsy store for a client. By updating the content format to be a step-by-step guide, adding an FAQ and expanding on the original points, we saw a near 300% traffic increase.
• This might not seem like an SEO problem, but making your website more user-friendly can have a big impact on SEO. One of the signals Google uses to rank your website is the average engagement time of your users — and if they’re not finding what they need easily on your site, they’ll be leaving faster.

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Local SEO strategies

If you’re a local business, you’ll want to use local SEO strategies in your digital marketing. Check out this video from our founder Tim all about creating a fantastic local SEO campaign.

How to Improve Blog Content to Get More Leads

In fact, 80% of businesses get no leads from their blogs, yet nearly 70% say blogs are very important for earning search traffic. Also, 42% say they’re very important for impressing customers.

It is possible to turn that traffic into leads — you just have to be smart about the content you’re creating and the CTAs you include.

First, consider who your content is for and which stage of the buyer journey those people are at. A CTA asking someone to book a consultation makes sense on a service page – these visitors are nearly ready to convert.

That same CTA wouldn’t work in a beginner’s guide blog as those visitors are likely to be at the start of their buyer’s journey.

Next, look at the content that appears in the search results for your target keyword. The content ranking highly on Google has already done something right, so this will help you see which types of content Google deems the best for searchers using these terms.

If the results are full of rich blog content that includes downloadable resources, calculators and infographics then you will want to replicate this in your own blogs.

If you’re not sold on how blog content can help your business, then consider this — 49% of marketers surveyed believe their blog enhances their brand, and 37% believe their blog helps them develop relationships with new and existing customers.

It’s too valuable to skip. If you haven’t seen much traffic coming to your blog, make sure you review the type of content you’re putting out. If you’re just sharing company “news” you’re unlikely to have much success.

How to Get More From Your PPC

A whopping 88% of marketers find PPC too expensive or ineffective — a story we hear all too often (before our PPC Ninjas get involved, of course).

Businesses know they should be running some paid ads but they don’t know where they should be running them.

This all comes down to your target audience.

Are you tired of hearing us say this yet? Sorry (we’re not really sorry — it’s crucial advice)

Where and how you run PPC ads also comes down to the stage of the sales funnel you’re targeting.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of running ads on the platforms you know rather than the ones best for your audience. Maybe you’ve made purchases in the past due to seeing Facebook ads, but the same might not be true for your audience.

For example, 45% of marketers surveyed saw great results from LinkedIn ads. They could have tried running ads on Instagram and Facebook, but they might not reach their ideal B2B audience.

The same goes for the reverse — you’d be surprised to see an eCommerce brand advertising on LinkedIn, even if their customers use the platform occasionally.

It’s also important to remember to test your PPC campaigns. If you know you’re running ads in a space your audience is spending their time, whether that’s on a social media platform or on a search engine, but aren’t getting the ROI you want, then it could be that your ad content isn’t resonating with your audience.

Take a look at the ads that your competitors are running. You can do this by typing the keyword you are targeting into search and looking at the ads that appear or by searching for your competitors in the Meta Ad Library, depending on where you are running your ads.

This will give you an idea of the type of things you should include. If competitors make their USPs loud and clear, you should do the same. If they’re putting their product front and centre, you should be too.

We’re not saying you should copy what competitors are doing — your ads should be uniquely you — but it helps to see what others are doing and take inspiration from what they are doing well.

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How to Ride the Shoppable Video Platform Wave

A recent trend we’ve seen taking off is shoppable video platforms. Actually, 43% of marketers will invest more in shoppable video platforms in 2023.

So what do we mean by a shoppable video? And which platforms are leading the way?

Shoppable video is video content that allows viewers to buy products instantly, sometimes without needing to leave the video.

It’s becoming popular with eCommerce brands as it allows them to show off their products more engagingly and connect with their target customers on the platforms they’re already using.

In fact, 53% of marketers surveyed said they expect video ads as a whole, not just shoppable ads, will be the most successful form of social media advertising for their business in 2023.

This has led to a rise in “shoppertainment” — videos which offer tutorials, product demos, live Q&As and more. Not only does this help brands make more sales as a direct result of this content, it also helps to build brand awareness and loyalty. If consumers feel like they have a genuine connection with your brand and the people behind it, they’ll be more likely to purchase.

Platforms that use shoppable videos include Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

How to Plan Your Marketing Budget in 2023

If you’re worried about cutting costs due to economic uncertainty, let us put your mind at ease — 71% of marketers aren’t cutting spending despite a looming recession.

If you’re facing budget cuts in your department, ensure you put this stat forward to your leadership team. They might think that most businesses are cutting down on marketing when in reality it’s quite the opposite.

Check out this blog about how to plan your marketing budget for 2023. It’s full of pointers to help you create the most solid budget you can.

Download all the graphs as a handy zip. file here.

What to Read Next

• Learn how to read the data in Google Analytics 4 that will help you get an ROI
• Get to grips with the basics of email automation.
• Find out how to get more organic traffic in 10 steps.

The post Why 65% Of Businesses Aren’t Getting an ROI from Digital Marketing (Here’s How to Improve Your Marketing) appeared first on Thinkplus.

Jess Percival
Hello, welcome back to the Thinkplus YouTube channel and our Friday live stream.

I’m super, super excited for this one.

Today Jana is going to be talking to us all about why your PPC campaigns aren’t converting, and of course, how you can fix them.

It’s going to be an absolute blast.

Wow. The music played really loud there. Let me turn that down.

Jess Percival
Same as always, if you leave a message in the chat, you’ll be in with a chance of winning a hard copy of our book, How To Get To The Top Of Google. And as you may know or you may not realise, if you click through from our social media, this is our brand new YouTube channel just for live videos. So if you are not subscribed, well, please double check to see if you are subscribed, because you might not be, and in the meantime, if you could drop a message in the chat let me know where you’re watching from today.

Jess Percival
See? Dale’s a lot quicker at this. He always knows where all the buttons are and what we need, whereas it takes me quite a long time to find them. But yeah, if you can let me know in the chat where you’re watching from today, and that will also give you a chance to be entered to win a copy of the book. I’m in a very, very, very sunny Grantham today, although about five minutes ago it was snowing because apparently, it doesn’t really know what it wants to do today.

Jess Percival
But anyway, let me go into the chats. Hey Tortoise Property, glad you managed to find us on the new channel. Slightly sunny and snowy Peterborough. I think you’ve got very similar to what we’ve got in Grantham now. I’m going to check in with Jana now. She looks like she’s in a pretty sunny place. Hey Jana. How are you doing?

Jana Maljic
Hi, Jess. Yeah, I’m doing good. I’m super excited to be joining another live stream and just can’t wait to get started.

Jess Percival
Yes, I’m so pleased because you were part of our Dominate live stream last Friday. Seems like it is so much longer ago than just last Friday.

Jana Maljic
Just last Friday. Yeah. It seems like ages ago, right?

Jess Percival
Yeah, exactly. It feels like so, so long. You’re completely right. Oh, we’ve got Ahammed who’s watching on LinkedIn, and of course we have Tortoise Property as well. But yeah, you look like you’ve got good weather where you are Jana, or have you got snow as well?

Jana Maljic
No, it’s actually a bit rainy, but it’s just everything is bright, like grey and bright.

Jess Percival
Yes. Yeah, yeah, I get that completely. The weather doesn’t know what it wants to do today. Shall we crack on with your marvellous presentation? I’m super excited to hear what you have to say today, absolutely buzzing. So yeah, let me pop that on the screen for you, and like I said, what I’ll do is I’m kind of going to leave Jana to just talk through everything and give some insight into her amazing knowledge, but if you do have any questions, you can drop them while we’re chatting, but we will… Oh my gosh. My brain just left. We will be answering questions at the end, so you feel free to leave them at the end as well. But yeah, I’ll bring up your presentation now Jana, and I will let you take it away. Enjoy.

Jana Maljic
Thank you. Hi everybody. It’s nice to be joining another live stream for [Thinkplus]. I hope you watched the previous ones. If not, find your way on YouTube to watch those as well. So like Jess said today, we will be talking about why your PPC campaigns are not converting and obviously how to fix it.

Jana Maljic
So a reason number one why your campaigns might not be converting is very, very simple, actually. It’s because you may be sending traffic to the wrong landing page. And what do I mean when I say wrong landing page?

Well, if you’re advertising a certain product, for example here we have organic baby blankets, then you want to lead your audience to exactly that product, to a product category page, or if it’s a product that’s on discount.

So wherever you’re advertising from, whether that’s Google search, Google Display, Google YouTube campaign, or Facebook Ads, Pinterest Ads, LinkedIn Ads, wherever you’re advertising, whichever platform you chose, just make sure you’re sending people to the right product category page.

Jana Maljic
It happens quite often when I see an ad, for example, I see cute dress being advertised and it’s on a discount and I click on the ad. It’s one of those Facebook carousel ads, and I click on it, and then I land to like a category page or a homepage where I need to search for that particular product for some extra time, and you don’t want that.

You want to make the journey as easier as possible for the customer. So don’t make it harder for them make, make the journey as easiest as possible for them to be able to get that purchase in like a few clicks, and yeah.

Jana Maljic
We have another example here. This is one ad on Facebook from ASOS store. So they have been advertising the Nike… Oh, sorry. I cannot see this. The Nike Blazer Jumbo Trainers, and as you can see, the ad for the trainers is leading to the ASOS page where it’s filtered out to show you only the Nike Blazer Jumbo Trainers. So it’s not filtered to show… It’s not leading you to the homepage. It’s not even leading you to the product category page of like the trainers. It’s leading you to the exact product that they’re advertising. So if anyone is interested in that product and they click on the ad, they’re sent to exactly that product. So just make it as easier as possible for the customers to purchase from you.

Jana Maljic
Okay. Reason number two, your landing page simply sucks.

Sorry to break it to you, but it could be the reason that your landing pages are not that good. So here we have a checklist that you can use. You can take a screenshot of this or write it down. It’s a really, really good one. This is something that we use for all of our clients.

Jana Maljic
So we’re going to start with the audience.

Have a really long think about who your audience is, and then is it clearly defined and represented in the pictures on your website? So if you are selling something for, I don’t know, let’s say women clothing, I’m sorry. This is obviously the only example my brain can think of today. Women clothing. Okay. You want to show women wearing that clothing in certain situations. So for example, if you’re selling, I don’t know, business clothes, you want to showcase this lifestyle you’re selling, the woman with the business outfit, I don’t know, walking down the street, carrying the laptops. So you want your audience, when they come to your website, you want them to see themselves and imagine themselves in your product if it’s clothing. [inaudible 00:08:08] product. So yeah, this is a very, very important thing.

Jana Maljic
Then we have the lead capture offer. This is obviously for lead gen businesses. Is your offer for the first thing that the user’s eyes are attracted to? Is it enticing? Does it define what the user can expect? So let’s say you are offering, I don’t know, plumbing service. No, that’s a bad example. Let me take something else. Okay. Let’s say you’re offering digital marketing services, so for example, I don’t know, PPC services let’s say.

Jana Maljic
When someone lands on your page, you need to make sure that whatever it is that you’re offering, it’s well explained and like, for example, for us, for PPC, it would be Google ads campaign management, and then underneath, what is included inside, whether that’s the keyword research, the strategy, the writing of the ads, the ad creatives, anything else that is included in your offer. So make it as easier as possible for your people, for your customers to know what you’re actually offering.

Jana Maljic
One thing I see a lot is that, for example, if you’re a SaaS, software as a service business, and you have the, for example, the free trial or call to action button, so this is your offer. Your offering a free trial. But what happens if your customer clicks on the free trial? So explain this to them. Maybe they have some fears, some uncertainties about how long is the free trial. Do I need to include my credit card details? So just add like one extra sentence to your offer, so what’s included in the free trial, or if you have a contact ask button, what is going to happen if I click there. Is the sales team going to attack me with 10,000 emails? Is it going to be a quick chat with the sales team just like to get to know each to other?

Jana Maljic
You cannot believe how much adding one extra sentence beneath your offer can increase your conversion rate. So think about that. Think about answering any uncertainties, objections and fears that your customers might have before they give you your contact details, because nowadays in like 21st century, not everyone will just give you your email for like the thing you’re offering. It’s just, it’s too common and you want to make sure that you’re sort of answering their objections and fears before they give you their contact information.

Jana Maljic
Okay. I’m just going to take a sip of water, talking a lot. Okay. Next we have the call to action. So whether that’s learn more, shop now, contact us, get a free trial, you need to make sure that it’s visible, that it’s in a colour that tastefully contrasts with the colours used on your page. Don’t use something that is off brand, but just make sure it’s visible, it’s easy to see it, easy to click it on desktop and mobile, and that it has that explanation that I just mentioned, like what happens next.

Jana Maljic
User journey. So that’s obviously very important. Like I said, make it as easiest as possible for your customer to find the next step. Make sure it’s easy or desktop and on mobile, and make sure that the customer doesn’t need to scroll like half an hour to get to whatever it is you want them to get to, and make sure that in two or three clicks, they can either get the information they need or they can contact you. So, yeah, that’s a really, really important thing that you need to pay attention to.

Jana Maljic
Page layout just sort of connects with the user journey, but also not only like how much they need to scroll, what they need to pick, but does the page seem like orderly, calm? Do you have enough white space? Is it readable? You don’t want to have like super, super small fonts, but also, you don’t want to have super, super huge fonts, so just make it as clean, as enjoyable as possible. This is something, if you’re not sure about all this stuff I’m talking about, user journey, page layout, obviously you can talk to experts such as us, but you can also search about the recent trends in website page layout, or you can find some brands that you enjoy, so some website that you are purchasing from, and just take a look at what they’re doing and try to see what is it that website, what’s appealing on that website to you? So have a think about that as well.

Jana Maljic
And then we have the headlines and the copy. Does the copy look inviting rather than intimidating? Are you using a simple language? So this is often the case with lead gen businesses, that they are just over complicating things. So I know you know what your business is about, and I know you want to sound professional, but in some cases, you need to just simplify it. Make it as easiest as possible for a customer who is seeing your website for the first time and they have no idea what you’re selling and what are you talking about, just make it as easiest as possible for them to understand.

Jana Maljic
And if you’re not sure you’re doing a good job, it’s always a great idea to ask someone like your friend, someone from your family, a neighbour, and just show them your website, show them your headlines, show them your copy and ask them if understand what is being said here.

Jana Maljic
Another thing copy is important for is, especially for PPC campaigns if you’re running, for example, search campaigns, you need to make sure your copy on the website includes the keywords and it just makes sense with the ad you are showing. That’s important not only for the customer and their journey, but also for, for example, for Google search ads especially. It’s because your keywords need to be shown on the landing page because Google is ranking your search ad based in the keyword relevancy, so this is another thing you to make sure that your keywords are included in your landing page. So yeah, just another really, really important thing.

Jana Maljic
Then we have branding and colour scheme. Obviously, you want to make sure, especially for ads, that whatever ads you’re serving, you didn’t just make up the design, it falls within your branding and your scheme and that your entire page is really on brand and consistent. So for example, if you’re advertising on a visual platform, such as Facebook or Pinterest or LinkedIn, you want to make sure that however your ad looks like, that the same look and feel is found on the website so the user is not really surprised when they land on your website and like, hey, where am I now? It needs to be a cohesive experience.

Jana Maljic
Use of images and videos. This is something I already mentioned with the target audience, so make sure your target audience, if you’re a eCommerce store, they see themselves, they see the product usage. One interesting thing to mention is that for example, for eCommerce stores, make sure whatever product you’re selling, whether that’s a clothing item or any other item, that you have multiple pictures from multiple angles, that you have maybe a video. If it’s some product that people need to use, showcase all the elements, create a little video, show how it’s used, show that in action, make it…

Jana Maljic
You are skipping the part. So people, when they’re purchasing online, you’re skipping the part where, for example, for clothing, you’re skipping the part where they can try it on. So how would they know how this looks on them if they don’t see it? And same goes for any other like tool or anything else you would sell. So they need to know how does it look like. Give as many images as possible, give infographics if it’s a really complicated product, create videos.

Jana Maljic
So this goes for B2B as well. Just imagine that your website is like, let’s say in person, you would be on a trade show and you would have your stand and you would have your product, whether that’s a software or anything else, and people will get to touch it, to use it, to see it in action, and just imagine your website being your stand and you, your salesperson. Just imagine your website as a salesperson and everything else you would say to your potential target audience in person live, just imagine that your website needs to show and tell everything about your product or services if that’s a service.

Jana Maljic
Then we have credibility devices, which is also really, really, really super important element because you know how people are. I am like that. I’m sure yourself, you are also like that. Your friend, your family member recommends a product service, obviously you’re going to choose that one over some other which no one recommended. Same goes for websites. So your landing page needs to have credibility devices. You need to have testimonials. You need to have some qualifications or credentials, so any, if you’re a B2B business, any previous customers that you served, you can put their logos on your website or their testimonials, and if you have any other reviews like Google reviews or Trustpilot reviews, you need to put that on the website. So you need to say to people, okay, I’ve sold this already. People love me. Buy from me. This is what they think. Just make your new audience trust you and your product and service.

Jana Maljic
And the last thing that we have here is urgency devices, which is something you might see around, maybe not so often, but yeah, some websites do use it. I think you’re also familiar with booking.com. So when you’re checking for apartments or hotels at booking.com, you will always notice that you have this thing saying X number of people are looking at this apartment right now, and this is one of those urgency devices. So this is something that gives you the idea of like, oh my God, I need to book this soon. Otherwise, it’s going to be booked and I’ll be left out of the apartment. So this is one of those things that just like psychologically impact your audience and they want to purchase from you straight away.

Jana Maljic
I think I have a few examples here, so let me just show you. Okay. So the example on the left is the Casper mattress. And as you can see all the way down, they have the testimonial, they have the image, and then on the right, we see the urgency device, which is a countdown. This is great if you have a special offer, a discount that lasts for only like 24, 48 hours or something like that, and then when the user comes on your website, they see this countdown and it really creates that urgency, and if they’re thinking about purchasing it, they’re going to purchase it really, really soon, so have a think about that.

Jana Maljic
The next reason we have… [inaudible 00:20:26]. Apologies. Okay. Reason number three is that your website is not mobile-friendly. And I don’t just mean here that your website needs to have responsive design and be mobile optimised and all that. It needs to be easy to navigate it on the mobile, so your fonts need to be readable, your buttons need to be clickable. It needs to be fast. It just needs to be easy because not every responsive design is really easy to navigate on mobile. It can maybe look good, but I need to, even though it looks good, maybe I need to scroll for like 10 hours to get to the bottom of the page or something like that, so make sure that it’s really mobile optimised. You have also a mobile-friendly test from Google. Just Google that and find it. I will not spend too much time talking about this because it’s honestly not my, it’s mostly devs work. That’s something worth mentioning.

Jana Maljic
Another reason is that your website is maybe too slow. So according to a Google study, 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than three seconds to load. So we all know 21st century, we are all super, super, we’re living really, really fast and we don’t have the time or the patience to wait for one website to be loaded for like five minutes. It’s just not the way today’s world works, and you need to make sure that your website is fast. There’s also a website speed test from Google you can take. Just Google that, and you can just put the link from your website and it will give you a short list of like things you can improve.

Jana Maljic
And then we have reason number five, your budget or bidding is too low. So whether you are doing your ads on Google or Facebook or LinkedIn or anything, any other platform, it could be the case that your campaigns are not working just because your bidding or budget is too low. So sometimes we see the case that for example, on Google ads, you didn’t actually do your keyword research, but you rather sort of came up with the keywords from your head, even though you do have some tools that you can use such as Keyword Planner from Google, and you set the budget just from the top of your head, like I’m going to do five pounds for this keyword. And it could be the reason that it’s just too low and that your ads are not serving because of that.

Jana Maljic
And this is something you can always correct by manually adjusting the budget, but like I said, there is this tool called Keyword Planner in your Google ads. Use it. It’s very, very simple. You’re just typing out the keywords you want to bid for and it’s going to give you a search volume and forecast of the average cost per click, and then you can make sure that you are building high enough.

Jana Maljic
And then for example, on Facebook, maybe if you started running Facebook ads and you see this information and warning that says learning limited, it’s probably because your ad set has a very low amount of budget and then it cannot optimise for the objective that you set out to optimise, and then it just, the algorithm is like not getting enough information, and then the algorithms learning is not capable of performance. So try increasing your budget. Try testing that for at least like two or three weeks and see what happens. I know it’s a scary thing to increase the budget, especially if you’re like on a limited budget or something, but try and increasing it for at least like two or three weeks a month if you can and just see what happens there, and then you can, once you have your data and once you have like the first initial performance, you can see if it makes sense to invest in Facebook, Google, Pinterest, any other platform.

Jana Maljic
But if you are too scared to increase that budget, if you’re just doing the ads with like 10 pounds per day and not willing to increase, you will just keep spending like budget for no reason. So it’s best to maybe increase it for a while and then see what happens and then make a decision if it’s something that is worth your investment and time or not.

Jana Maljic
Moving on to reason number six. Your audience is too broad or narrow. This is mostly for Facebook ads because you have the options to choose like the targeting based on your interest and demographics, and sometimes people go too narrow. I see this many times when I’m auditing Facebook accounts. They’re thinking to themselves, okay, I’m selling, I don’t know, I’m selling a certain type of product, like for vegans. I’m just going to go for interest in veganism, et cetera, et cetera.

Jana Maljic
But try and giving Facebook’s algorithm a space to breathe and a space to find the audience by itself. They do give these options of like the interest-based targeting, which is fine and it’s worth testing, but it’s also worth testing having your audience a bit broader and just giving, because those algorithms, Facebook and Google, they’re spending thousands of dollars into those algorithms, so they’re really, really, really smart. They’re smarter than us and they will know by themselves to reach people they need to serve the ads without us just limiting their hands with this. So just try it, test it, give it a bit of, go broader.

Jana Maljic
If you’re a local business, I would definitely suggest keep your targeting within your location and go broader, but if you’re like a product that could be of interest of like a lot of people, if you’re a clothing brand, you don’t need to select, for example, fashion or clothing as an interest because we all wear clothes, so it doesn’t maybe have to be something like that of an interest. Maybe just try and keep it broad and see what happens.

Jana Maljic
Okay. I think I talked about this. Reason number seven is that your account is poorly structured. This is mostly the thing we see happening on Google, but it can happen on Facebook as well, that your account is poorly structured, but I will cover that with another reason. So this is like, for one example, here you have the best way to set up your campaigns is that have a look at your website, and if your website is structured well, which it should be, so please don’t waste your money on advertising if your website is not structured well, and then group campaigns by your website layout.

Jana Maljic
So for example, on your website, you would obviously have some product categories and then product and then landing pages for certain product categories and products, et cetera, and you want to do that on Google ads as well. So if you structuring, let’s say search campaigns, and let’s say you’re selling office furniture, one campaign would be office chairs. And then in ad group one, and then in ad group two, you would have different segmentation of those office chairs. Ad group one can be leather chairs. Ad group two can be, for example, ergonomic chairs, or white chairs, or I don’t know, wooden chairs, any other chairs. So make sure that you’re just structuring your campaigns and ad groups really nicely so that each of your keyword is connected to the ad group.

Jana Maljic
We see often that some people, some businesses choose to just put like 10 keywords in one ad group and have lots of different products in it, which just it’s impossible for your campaigns to work well, because what will happen is that you will have ad copy promoting, let’s say those chairs, but it’s not something…

Jana Maljic
If I’m searching for leather chairs, then I want to have the ad shown to me that is promoting leather chairs, and then when I click on it, I want to go to a landing page that is a product category of the leather chairs. So don’t mix everything up in one ad group. This is a common mistake. And one other thing, because I’m talking about segmentation, is that don’t segment it too much. So don’t go too narrow because what you need to have is that you need to have a search volume.

Jana Maljic
So yeah, my example with the leather chair, that could be the case if you’re a office furniture who sells, I don’t know, in the entire US, and then it makes sense because probably the search volume for leather office chairs is quite big there, but if you’re a local business and you’re just promoting in one certain city or something, then you don’t want to go so segmented. This is where you will use the keyword planner and you will see the search volumes and you will see the trends, and then based on that, you will make a decision whether or not you do have enough search volume to have the keyword segmented all the way down to the leather office chair.

Jana Maljic
Okay, moving on we have the reason number eight. Your campaign settings have mistakes. I know this sounds like, okay, I probably set it up correctly. These are just settings, basic settings, but you cannot believe how many times the settings can be set up just like wrongly, and it’s such a basic step that we all think it’s super, super easy and intuitive, but it actually happens many times, so double, triple check your campaign settings. Make sure everything is correctly before you start your campaign. Make sure location is the one you want it to be. Make sure you included the location you want to serve ads for, not exclude it. This can also happen, and it happened too many times. Make sure your bidding strategy you’re using is correct. Don’t use some smart bidding strategies just because you think, okay, Google is smart and I’m going to beat my competition, because smart bidding strategies work but they work after you get a certain amount of data to your account. They work when you have great conversion tracking set up data.

Jana Maljic
They don’t work from start, like okay, you’re a brand new account and you turn on the smart bidding and it works. It doesn’t. So make sure all your settings is correct and it’s aligned with your business goals.

Jana Maljic
Reason number nine. Your ad copy is too blend. So it can happen that you did your campaign structure, you set it up nicely, your clickthrough rate, you wrote your ads and it’s… This is not where I wanted to go. Oh, it’s too bland. Okay. Sorry.

Jana Maljic
So take a look at your clickthrough rate. Often people ask us, what is a good clickthrough rate? It’s not a fixed answer. It’s not something I can tell you, like 2% is a good clickthrough rate or 5%. It really, really, really depends on your industry, on your business. Which location are you targeting? What is the competition? There’s so many factors that affect your clickthrough rate. But what you can do as a benchmark is that you can find your industry benchmark, and then you can see if it’s really, really, really, really below your industry benchmark. And then what you need to do is you need to revisit your ad copy. You need to make sure that your keyword are included in the headlines and descriptions. You need to make sure that your unique selling points are in the ad copy.

Jana Maljic
And you also just need to make sure that you’re saying all the right things to sort of attract your customer, but also to disqualify your customer. So people are often focused on like writing the ad copy to make it like super attractive, but then just remember that you’re paying for the clicks. So for example, if you’re selling something that is a bit more expensive and someone is looking for like a cheaper version of your product, I’m going to go back to the example with the office chairs just because my head is not capable of coming up with something else at the moment.

Jana Maljic
Okay. Let’s say you’re selling the office chairs, but you have a really high quality office chair, and they’re a bit pricier, high quality, but pricier, and you might want to include the price in the ad copy. So chairs from 500 pounds or something like that, because if I’m searching for a cheap office chair, you don’t want to pay for the click for someone who’s searching for the cheap office shares. You want to eliminate them before they click on your ad, because you’re just spending money to get people on your website who are not interested in the thing you’re offering. So make sure you’re also disqualifying audience that is not for you.

Jana Maljic
Okay. Reason number 10. I need some water. Your ad creative is bad. Okay. So what to say here. In this ever changing fast-pacing world, we are constantly scrolling and being bombarded with like 10 thousands of ads per day, and yeah, it’s just too much of everything and I think our attention is really starting to decline.

Jana Maljic
And how would you even… Like people spend so much time, for example, thinking about this cool ad copy for their Facebook ad and what will be included inside and everything, but then it comes to the situation where user is not even stopping to read the super cool ad copy you’ve created, so you want to make sure that your ad will stand out. You want to make sure that you’re just stopping the scrolling and grabbing that attention, and how do you do that? Obviously it’s super, super hard and I can imagine right now you’re thinking, well, where do I start? And it can be quite hard to think of something that is eye-catching in this super, super crowded world, but where you can start.

Jana Maljic
You can start by looking at, obviously if you decided to advertise on Facebook ads for example, you obviously have your Facebook profile. Have a look at your posts and which type of post got the most engagement, the most comments, the most likes or shares, and maybe try creating an ad around something like that. You can also use Facebook ads library as an inspiration. You can check what your competitors are doing at the moment, what type of ads are they they using.

Jana Maljic
And one other thing that I love doing is that whenever you see an ad, that caught your attention, so you’re scrolling in your free time and you see an image or video ad, any type of ad that made you stop scrolling, take a screenshot, take a screen recording and think about what is it that made you stop scrolling and try to replicate, steal those tactics in creating your own ad. And yeah, that’s a great way to get inspired.

Jana Maljic
I have an example here of one ad that I screen recorded this, but you can also I think find in the Facebook ads library when searching for Nuud Care. This is a vegan-free deodorant. So basically this woman just starts dancing and then you see all these cool, unique selling points, which is very, very interesting for the user to see. It’s vegan. It’s cruelty-free. It’s no aluminium, no parabens, et cetera, et cetera. And those USPs just fly inside and she continues dancing. And then she takes the product and it’s a deodorant, so she puts it in her arm pit and then have fresh outfits worldwide, this is their tagline, at the end. It’s very short. It’s very snappy. It’s very fast, and it has this cool orange background, which just made me stop and stare.

Jana Maljic
And you will notice. Yeah, obviously they’re not just showing an arm pit and they’re not just showing the deodorant, they’re showing the person as well, which is another good thing to think about is that when you’re advertising on social media, try and use people as much as possible in your ads, just because people go to social media to interact with other people, and this is something they expect to see. They don’t want to see some polished sponsored ad or something like that. So yeah, I think this is a great ad and there are so many ways to get inspired.

Jana Maljic
Reason number 11 is that you have the wrong campaign objective. What do I mean by that? This is especially, on Facebook, it can happen often. So if you have advertised on Facebook before, you’re probably familiar with the campaign objectives. You have the brand awareness objectives, the reach, traffic, engagement, page likes, video views, messages, and then you have conversion objectives, which is conversions, scale of sales, et cetera, et cetera. So Facebook is great with offering these objectives, but you need to make sure what your goal is with your campaign.

Jana Maljic
So we see this too many times when auditing Facebook ads campaign is that businesses are using traffic objective because they want to get as many people to the website, obviously, but they’re using this objective when they want people to purchase, but this is not something Facebook will optimise for. If you want to get people to your website and you use the traffic objective, this is what a Facebook will do. It’s very simple. They will bring traffic to your website, but it doesn’t mean they will bring traffic and people that are willing to convert. It just means they will bring traffic and people that are willing to come to your website.

Jana Maljic
You need to use conversion objective and set your event for purchase, for example. And then you need to use that campaign objective if you want people to purchase. So obviously in many cases, you cannot just use conversion objective because obviously you want purchases and you’re just going to use purchases as objective, and you’re going to get tonnes of sales, et cetera, et cetera. It doesn’t work like that.

Jana Maljic
You need to segment your campaigns and you need to segment your audience and just funnel everything out. The first time you’re advertising to someone, to a very, very cold audience, you might want to use the awareness objective or the traffic objective, where you will just showcase your brand, showcase your product or service or anything your offering, and then that audience will visit your website who maybe interacted with your ad, like liked and commented or anything else, you want to retarget that audience, because they’ve seen your website. They’ve seen your product. They’re a little bit more familiar with your brand. You want to retarget those with the conversion objective campaign and get them back to purchase. Not many people will purchase on the first time they interact with you. So have a think about that and make sure you’re using the right campaign objective.

Jana Maljic
Reason number 12. Are you considering external factors? This is interesting one because we saw it recently with the COVID-19 pandemic is that a lot of businesses actually increased their sales. Why? People were home. They were bored. They started purchasing, I don’t know, things like whatever they wanted to purchase, whether that’s a clothing item or something else. If you’re offering like courses, they were bored at home, they were close. They were purchasing courses for many different things, I don’t know, language courses, these type of courses, do it yourself, whatever.

Jana Maljic
If you are a restaurant, maybe you saw an increase in your takeaways. So don’t just, when you’re evaluating your business and your performance, don’t just think about, okay, last month was really great and this month I want to do better, or last year was really, really great with sales and next year I want to do better, because maybe it’s not applicative in every situation.

Jana Maljic
If you were doing really, really great during the COVID pandemic, I’m happy for you. It’s good that you took advantage of the situation and you increased your sales during that year, but it’s a very, very specific year. It’s not going to happen again. And when you’re comparing your performance month to month, week to week, year to year, just make sure you’re taking all those external factors into consideration, and don’t compare apples to oranges. Just make sure you’re comparing reasonably and you need to make sure if you have, take a look at your analytics and your data, if you have some sort of seasonality changes, people are buying more during summer or during winter or et cetera, et cetera, and just adjust your effort and your budget and your goals accordingly.

Jana Maljic
So if you see that during springtime, your sales is off the roof, okay, invest a little bit more budget during springtime. Take advantage of that seasonality, and then save up some budget during summertime, if it’s a slow period for you know, et cetera.

Jana Maljic
And not only that, but like consumer buying habits, this is something that is changing from year to year. People are not buying today in the same way they were buying five years ago. So make sure you’re like on the top of the trends of how people buy, what do they want to see in your website, what you can offer to them that is like in the 2020 year that we’re in. So have a really large thought about that. It’s something that I see often, but in some cases, it’s not being considered, it’s not being discussed about.

Jana Maljic
Okay. Reason number 13. Is your offer actually good? I saved the best reason for last. Make sure that whatever your offer is, it’s aligned with your customer expectations. So don’t expect, let’s say… I’m taking clothing brands today a lot, but okay.

Jana Maljic
You created your own little clothing brand and it’s great. It’s something that, I don’t know, it’s sustainable. It’s something your customers don’t have, et cetera, et cetera, your competitors don’t have, or maybe they do, but you have so many brands out there. You cannot just come to the market and just like offer, I don’t know, something for 100 pounds, whereas your competitors are offering the same product for like 50 pounds. How do you compete? If I’m going to purchase something that you’re offering for 100 pounds and your competitor is offering for 50 pounds, why would I do that? What makes you different? What makes you stand out?

Jana Maljic
Find that thing that makes you different, whether you’re selling a product or a service is just, you need to make sure that whatever it is that you’re offering, the price is something that the customers expect or the service is something that customers expect.

Jana Maljic
So maybe you cannot lower down the price, or maybe you cannot provide that 10% discount offer for the first time purchase or something, but what you can do is maybe provide a really, really fast delivery. If you are a software as a service, maybe you can provide a really, really amazing 24/7 support. So anything that you can offer to your customers that will make you stand out, that will make you different, you need to do that. You need to give them something. Make sure that your offer is aligned with 21st century customer expectation, whether that is a B2B or a B2C product or service. I think we are done. Here’s the questions and answer side, and I can take some of your questions now, but I think I will need help from Jess too.

Jess Percival
Yes, that is absolutely fine. Yeah. Feel free to leave your questions in the chat. And as I said before, if you leave a question, you’ll be entered in with a chance to win a copy, a physical copy of How To Get To The Top Of Google, which is our best-selling book. This is a 2022 edition, but if you can’t wait that long and you don’t want to worry about losing the giveaway let’s say, you can actually download the e-book version for free in the description. And also don’t forget to hit like on this video if you’ve learnt something new from the wonderful Janna today, and also double check your subscribe, because this is a whole new channel, and I think we’re at 98 subscribers so it’d be nice to hit a 100 today.

Jess Percival
So yeah, thank you so much, Jana. I’ll give you a couple of moments to give your voice a break.

Jana Maljic
Yes.

Jess Percival
Because you worked super hard there. So this first question, I wasn’t quite sure of the wording, but what I think it means is if you’re already doing pretty well with SEO, why should you run a PPC campaign as well? What’s the point, I guess is the question?

Jana Maljic
Okay, this really depends. So PPC might not be needed for your business if you’re ranking really, really well in SEO. This can be potentially good for local businesses because there’s not maybe so much competition. So if you’re ranking well on SEO for the keywords you want to rank well, I would say just don’t spend that money on PPC. It’s not a mandatory thing.

Jana Maljic
Businesses are using PPC because they’re probably not ranking well for their products or services organically, and this is the reason why they’re using PPC for a certain time period, because SEO, it’s a more of a long-term investment and you need so much time to see the results, so PPC is sort of like a faster way.

Jana Maljic
Another thing I would say, why you can use PPC is that even if you’re ranking well organically, maybe you have a special offer, like a Black Friday offer or anything else, you want to showcase that discount, whether that’s on Google search ads or Facebook ads, any type of ads, not just maybe a special offer. Maybe you have a new product, maybe you have a new service and you want to advertise that to people because how will they know? So think about all the other ways that PPC is important for you. And yes, results are faster with PPC. That’s also correct, Paul

Jess Percival
Yes, that was a really good answer. And something else that I’ve noticed as well, sorry if you answered this when I was looking at the comments and I just wasn’t quite listening, but sometimes you can be ranking number one for a search term and your competitors maybe bid on that search term so they can beat your number one spot using that ad spot. So you might, even if you’re on like, let’s say your company name is Thinkplus for instance, and somebody else is running ads on that keyword, you could also run ads on that keyword to like make sure that you’re absolutely in the top spot. So that’s another thing that could be quite important.

Jana Maljic
Yes. I agree. That’s another thing, especially because if you’re really, really strong as a brand, competitors might be bidding even in your brand name, and obviously organically, your brand name will be ranking among the top, but maybe you want to beat your competition. So there’s many, many cases and scenarios when you would still want to use PPC.

Jess Percival
Absolutely. Absolutely. And like you said, if you’ve got an offer or like a new product or something that you want to let people know about that they might not know about yet, then that’s a fantastic way to use PPC. So I’ve got quite a long question from Tortoise Property, but I think it’s a very, very good one. So Tortoise Property, is a property, a state… What is it that you do Tortoise Property? It’s to do with housing, and there’s like, it’s a special category now that Facebook has changed, so Tortoise Property can no longer target postcodes despite being based in a specific area. So would you have any recommendations considering they can’t target their audiences now due to the limitations on things like postcodes, even though they’re very much a business who just has restrictions?

Jana Maljic
Okay. So you might not have the option to target based on postal, but can you target based on your city? It might be the case that they’re located in London and not serving in the entire London I can imagine, because London is just very, very big, but I think even in London, there are some areas you can select, you can pinpoint. On Google or on Facebook, there’s option to pinpoint your location, so even if you can’t use a postcode, you can pinpoint your location and select the radius. So yeah, that’s also one option you can try.

Jess Percival
Very good. Yeah. I know there was, it impacted quite a lot of businesses when they made those changes, but I suppose they were trying to keep the consumer in minds and stuff, but I can understand why that’s frustrating. So I had a question from Kelvin who asked, regarding audiences being too narrow, how narrow is too narrow and how broad is too broad? Is there really a benchmark or is it nearly impossible to tell from business to business?

Jana Maljic
Yeah, that’s a great question. So I would say, yeah, there’s no like specific benchmark, but according to my experience, like I would say anything, it obviously depends on your location and your type of business and all that, but I would say anything below 20,000 people, because on Facebook, when you select your audience, you have on the right side, you have like the prediction of how many people you will reach, and I think you have the same thing for Google.

Jana Maljic
So I would say anything less than 20,000 people or 30, 50,000 people is too narrow. And then broad, well, you cannot go too broad just because you can always have multiple ad sets and multiple audiences tested, so there are some cases when we select the audience, as it says, the audience reaches 2 million, and I don’t care that the audience reaches potentially 2 million because the algorithm, when it starts getting data, it’s not going to serve the ads to the entire 2 million. It’s going to serve the ads to the people that are the most relevant. So don’t think about audience being too broad. That’s fine. In any case, you will test the narrow version of the audience and the broad version and you will see the results, so go ahead, go broad.

Jess Percival
Yeah. That’s a really good answer. That definitely makes a lot of sense. Phil has asked, what should you do if your PPC is generating leads, but not quite the right kind of leads?

Jana Maljic
Well, this is a great question as well. This happens many times. Well, it depends. So whether it’s something you can do to improve in your landing page, because where are you generating those leads? Obviously someone came to your website and they read some stuff there and they decided to convert.

Jana Maljic
So make sure the information you have on your landing page is something that only your qualified and right kind of leads would convert. And if you are using a lead gen type of a campaign on Facebook, when you are getting those leads on Facebook itself for example, also make sure that in the ad you are mentioning all the things you want to qualify or disqualify your audience. This comes back to the thing I was mentioning before. So when it comes to pricing, if your pricing is a bit too high, make sure that they know the pricing is high because you don’t want to pay for leads that will just end up not converting later on.

Jana Maljic
Same goes for any other thing you’re offering. If you like a location-based service, make sure they know, because I see this many times in search ads, for example, you are a local business and then you’re advertising for, let’s say Invisalign. You’re a dental studio, and you’re only, you’re located in a certain, I don’t know, city like London any other area, and you’re paying for the keyword Invisalign, but you might want to pay for the keyword Invisalign near me or Invisalign London or something like that that makes you… And you want to have this in your ad as well, your location, because we see it many times that local services, they’re going to advertise in certain keywords and their ads will appear, but it’s like, the location is totally wrong. It’s not something the customer was searching for. So have a think about everything you’re communicating out to your audience and make sure that it’s something that either qualifies them or disqualifies them.

Jess Percival
Fantastic. Yeah. There’s so many different things that can lead to the leads, lead to the leads not quite being right. This is quite a nice question from Vladimir. Starts off by saying great lecture. And also just asked, how would you go about looking for a junior position, for instance, for PPC, if you were trying to get a job in PPC? What would your advice be, Jana?

Jana Maljic
Thank you Vladimir first, and I’m not sure if he’s asking where he will find, where he will search for the positions or how can he learn about Google ads?

Jess Percival
I think maybe how you can learn and the kind of skills that employers are looking for when it comes to PPC.

Jana Maljic
Okay. So how you can learn, obviously by watching YouTube videos, such as this one, but there are also many other PPC experts. I even watch them myself. So people that are experts in their field. You have lots of courses as well, but I tend to watch YouTube videos and read articles just because courses can be a bit outdated. By the time you start selling the course, the information has changed because it’s a fast-changing world. So follow some experts, read the articles, the newest articles about the newest trends. And in the beginning, if you’re looking for a job, don’t be afraid to volunteer somewhere and just work for free. I started advertising for my friends at first, and then I moved on from there because I needed the experience, so yeah.

Jess Percival
Yeah. That’s a really great answer. I think some of the other things I would say as well is even though Google and Facebook both offer their own courses for their own ad platforms, it’s so different when you actually get hands-on with it. It just feels totally, totally different. And so, as Vladimir said, they are managing a small account for a business, so that really helps that you’ve got started with that.

Jess Percival
But yeah, I’d say, think about both those things and don’t be afraid to join like Facebook communities or Reddit communities of people who work in the industry, because people are always happy to offer you advice and help you out if you need it. So, yeah. Lovely.

Jess Percival
Thank you so much, Jana. This has been an absolutely fantastic talk.

The post Why Your PPC Isn’t Converting (and How To Fix It) appeared first on Thinkplus.

Join our PPC Specialist, Veronika Bonovska, as they discuss how you can increase your B2B leads using social media advertising, including:

• How you should optimise your website
• How to do competitor research
• How to optimise your social accounts
• and more

The post How To Increase Your B2B Leads Using Social Media appeared first on Thinkplus.

Pay-per-click advertising is a fast and effective way of getting your business or website shown at the top spot in search engines like Google by paying each time a user clicks on your ad.

An example of Google’s ads in their search results

Google’s results are ordered based on secret algorithms that are constantly updated. Some of the factors usually considered to determine a website’s position in the search results are traffic and engagement. This means that well-known websites naturally rank higher, while websites with low traffic and engagement end up at the bottom of the pile. These are called organic results, and the ranking in these results can be improved over time with search engine optimisation (SEO) work.

SEO requires constant optimisation of your website content and can take a couple of months to show significant improvements. With PPC, however, your website can appear at the top of Google’s search results immediately after setting a campaign live.

How Does PPC Work?

As part of your campaign setup, you will need to select the keywords your target audience might be using to look for your products or services on Google. These keywords will be verified by Google each time a user performs a search query, and if they match with the keywords in your list, your ad will be shown.

To determine the positioning of the ads among advertisers, Google will consider the cost per click (CPC) advertisers are bidding for on that keyword. However, your CPC will also be determined by the quality of your ads and website for that keyword.

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This is why it is important to look at the big picture and review your current digital marketing strategy — including your website — before starting any digital marketing campaign.

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What Can PPC Do for My SME?

At this point, you might be asking yourself, “Why is this all relevant to me?” Although some of the benefits of PPC may seem obvious, you may be uncertain of how it can work for your business. Worry not! We will next explain why PPC is especially suited for SMEs in 2021.

1. Quick Launch

Sometimes SMEs need fast launching of their advertising campaigns. Maybe you don’t have an internal marketing team that can foresee the campaign needed for your newest product or service, or perhaps one of your competitors suddenly disclosed a big promotion, and you need to act fast unexpectedly.

Whatever the reason behind your need to launch a PPC campaign, we know that acting fast makes all the difference for SMEs and can determine the success or failure of a marketing campaign.

Does this mean that we can launch your campaign the same day you sign up with us?

Unfortunately, it’s not THAT fast, but there is a good reason for that. We still need to research your business, industry, competitors and target audience and put together a plan tailored to your business.

Once the strategy is approved, we will produce the campaign structure, and specialised advertising copywriters and designers will create the ads. Once you approve your ads, we will proceed with the campaign setup and set the ads live.

The good news? This is all done within the first month of your campaign, so by the end of your first month, you can have highly targeted new ads up and running.

2. Low Initial Investment

You might have heard that “there is no minimum budget to start a Google Ads campaign”. While this is true, there is a minimum budget required for your ads to get the exposure they need, be competitive for your target audience and stand a chance of succeeding in your goals — whether that’s brand recognition or achieving leads or sales.

Advertising is becoming more complex and competitive as you read this post, so the recommended budget for your business needs to be calculated manually by a PPC expert who can analyse your audience, competitors and possible keywords for your campaigns.

Want to know an estimated budget for your campaign? Our highly skilled PPC Ninjas can put together a FREE, no-obligation review of your current PPC Ads and recommend a budget for your campaigns.

The initial budget for PPC campaigns is less expensive and much more cost-effective than launching a traditional advertising campaign (radio, TV, billboards, etc.).

In most cases, PPC also outperforms other digital marketing channels such as organic search, email marketing and social media in terms of cost-effectiveness and time needed to obtain results.

However, your digital marketing strategy will always perform better if you combine PPC with other channels, as customers usually interact with more than one channel before completing a conversion on the website.

3. Selective Targeting

With PPC advertising, you can be very specific about the keywords and audiences you want to target. As part of our initial PPC plan, we will research your target audience and identify the keywords they might be using to look for your offering on search engines.

You might be wondering, “What’s new in 2021 about targeting?” And the answer is that a lot has changed recently. We have seen an increase in restrictions about tracking users’ online behaviour.

There are now more options for users to easily state if they are willing to share their data, to which most users — unsurprisingly — opt out. This significantly affects audience targeting since we can’t collect that data to cluster users by behaviour when they opt out of tracking. This way, highly relevant audiences like “Shoppers: People who enjoy shopping and view it as a pastime” will likely decrease in size, and we will need to rely more than ever on keyword targeting. This is why a complete initial analysis and an on-point campaign structure will make all the difference to your campaign’s performance.

One of the most common opportunities we find when we review Google Ads accounts as part of our free website and marketing review is the need for new keyword research, keyword refining and account restructure.

Screenshot of a conversion path within Google Analytics.

4. Data-Driven Decision Making

Test, measure and repeat. This is the base of digital campaign optimisation and can be applied to PPC in many aspects too. So make data-driven decisions to make sure you are getting the most out of your ad spend.

Some options to A/B test are:

• Automated bidding strategies
  • It might sound like you can just click on “maximise conversions” in your campaign, sit back and watch conversions multiply, but it’s more complicated than that. Automated bidding strategies only perform well if Google has gathered enough quality conversion data, so in most cases, there is a need to do a deeper analysis and answer questions such as:
    • Is there enough data?
    • Is the quality of the data good enough, or could it be misleading?
    • Is the current cost per acquisition (CPA) at a good point, or should you change the strategy to “target CPA”?
  • It’s also highly recommended to set a campaign experiment to test your current strategy against the new one.
  • Testing automated bidding strategies is recommended now more than ever, especially since conversion data is even more limited than before now that users can opt out of conversion tracking.
• Location targeting
  • Optimise your biddings based on your location performance to maximise your results. This means you can decrease or increase your biddings and exclude or include locations. You will need to gather enough data to make this kind of decision.
• Ad copy and landing pages:
  • In most cases, the user goes through at least three steps before completing a conversion — entering a search query, clicking on an ad and visiting a landing page. (Please note that with lead form extensions or call extensions, the conversion action can be completed within the ad.)
  • The ad and the landing page play a vital role in the final conversion achievement, so it is essential to test variations to make sure you are encouraging users to complete the conversion and providing an easy way to do it on the landing page.

5. Remarketing

Remarketing or retargeting happens when you show ads to audiences who have previously interacted with your business’s website or mobile app somehow. There are many uses for remarketing campaigns, including:

• Upselling to previous buyers.
• Targeting users with abandoned shopping carts in an eCommerce website to encourage them to finish the purchase.
• Remarketing to your top of the funnel audience who is at the “research phase” and visited your blog to encourage them to request a demo of your product or service.

As mentioned before, tracking has recently become more difficult. However, we need to track users’ activity on your website or app to identify them in a remarketing list. So, can we still include remarketing in your campaign strategy? The answer is yes, although we will need to pay attention to the size of the remarketing audience to make sure it is suitable to run ads. Keep in mind the following recommendations:

• The remarketing list must have at least 100 users for display ads and 1 thousand for search remarketing ads during the last 30 days.
• Consider uploading a customer list manually to ensure you reach the necessary minimum and have a large enough audience.
• If your audience is still too small, create a combined audience using a remarketing audience and a custom audience based on interests or previous search queries.

PPC advertising as we know it is surely changing in 2021. If you need expert help to make sure your ads are compelling and up to date with the latest best practices, request your free digital marketing review now.

The post What Does PPC Look Like for SMEs in 2021? appeared first on Thinkplus.

You can set them up on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other popular sites, as well as Pinterest, Amazon, LinkedIn and many others.

The benefits of PPC ads for businesses are clear: you only pay when someone clicks on your ads, not when they just see them, and you can spend as little or as much as you want. Plus, there’s none of the wastage of traditional mass media advertising where you cast as wide an ad net as possible and hope to reach some people in your target audience.

And, unlike print and broadcast advertising, with PPC, you get reams of data about your ads and how they’re performing, allowing you to tweak them so that they’re more effective.

PPC analysis tools let you know with ease if you’re getting a return on your spend by comparing the cost of conversions with your budget.

It’s little wonder that businesses of all sizes have PPC ads running because they might struggle to get web traffic and online sales without them.

You can set up your own PPC ad campaigns and run them or have a digital marketing agency and their PPC department do it for you.

This is a preferable option for many companies who don’t have the time, knowledge or skilled personnel to run their PPC campaigns.

If you are doing it yourself, you first need to know how to create a PPC strategy that’s effective and works. We have some pointers for you.

How to Create a PPC Strategy That Gets Solid Results

Create Your Goals

A strategy is a plan of action, and you need a tangible, or measurable, end-point. There’s no point in devising a PPC strategy if you don’t really know what you want because how would you know your campaign is a success? So start by working out what you want from your PPC ads. It might be:

Getting more sales via your website.

Attracting more leads that turn into new customers.

Driving more people to a physical store.

Convincing higher numbers of visitors to take a desired action on your site, such as signing up for a newsletter (email capture for marketing purposes) or getting in touch.

Increasing corporate awareness or boosting the image of various brands.

PPC example: The first two results on this Google page are PPC text ads and marked as such so that visitors are aware they’re paid search results:

Define Your Audience

The next step in creating a PPC strategy that gets great results is to work out who, exactly, your audience is. You might have a general or vague idea, but you need to know all the details.

As a useful exercise, spend some time creating a buyer persona — the people who typically are your customers.

You’ll need to know the gender, age-range, and usual professions these people work in, and possibly their interests and spending ability patterns.

For guidance on how to define your target audience, read this blog post: How To Define Your Target Audience in 6 Quick Questions

You can use some online tools to help you figure out your buyer persona, and then you have a solid idea of who those people are. This allows you to effectively target your PPC ads to them and attract the right people to your website.

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Create Landing Pages

The most successful PPC strategies are based around landing pages, which are created to showcase specific products or services and are part of an overall website. There’s not much point in advertising a particular product but linking to your homepage in the ad — visitors might wonder why they ended up there as the product might not be visible, and they have to search for it.

So creating landing pages for your site with purchase, more information, or contact options on it will ensure you have as low a bounce rate as possible once you start your PPC campaign.

You’ll have higher levels of conversion because it’s clear that the page is linked to your ad copy. Ultimately, you’ll generate more sales from your PPC campaign and get a higher return on your investment.

Driving Conversions and Sales: This landing page from Lyft is simple yet effective.

Set Up Your Ads

Now that you’ve done the groundwork, it’s time to create your ads.

Which network you use might depend on your audience demographics: Facebook Ads might be better if your buyer persona is older, for instance, while Instagram Ads could be a better fit for younger people.

If you’ve never run PPC ads before, an excellent place to start is Google Ads, which like all the online advertising solutions, promises to help build your business:

You can set up an account with ease and experiment with different ad formats and copy, and set what budget you feel comfortable with.

Your ads can appear in Google search results as well as on YouTube, which Google owns, and across millions of websites that are part of the Google Display Network, which is mostly visual ads rather than the basic text ones that you see in search results.

Plus, you’re not tied into any contract and can stop any time you like, and you get lots of data about how your ads are performing.

Analyse Your Ads

Once your PPC ads are running, it’s definitely not a case of leaving them and forgetting about how they’re doing. You need to continually monitor and analyse your PPC ads for optimal performance because the platforms’ audiences can shift, more effective keyword targeting by your rivals might take some or all of your traffic away, and a myriad of other factors could see your ROI quickly diminish.

Using the reports generated by the ad networks you’re using, pay keen attention to the following metrics:

• The click-through rate: how many people are clicking on your ads, and is it going up or down?
• The cost per click: is there more competition for your target keywords and the cost of each click is going up? To get the best possible return on your spend, you want as low a CPC as possible.
• The conversion rate: how many people are clicking on your ads, arriving on your landing page and converting into leads or sales? If it’s low and falling, there may be something off about the page, and you may need to optimise it for higher conversions — a more compelling email capture form, for instance, or a time-limited offer or discount.

Ads Report: Google Ads clearly displays all the key PPC metrics you need.

Continually tweaking your PPC ads and optimising them and your landing page are the keys to a successful campaign that will get you results.

Expert PPC Advice from Thinkplus PPC Chief Lizzie Cross

“The main things to consider when putting together a PPC strategy for any business are how much you can afford to invest in initial ad spend and how much can you afford to pay per lead?

This will depend on your product/service profit margins. It’s important to calculate how much you can afford to pay per lead, so you can work out what sort of conversion rate you’d need to make the campaigns profitable for your business based on your available budget.”

Flexibility Is Key

Ideally, it’s best to be as flexible as possible with the budget, but it’s worth considering that you’re likely not to make a ROI from any small PPC campaigns for the first two or three months.

So it’s important to set an affordable budget that isn’t so low that the campaigns don’t have the necessary spend to create any traction.

Once you have an initial budget in mind, it’s crucial to assess the most suitable campaigns for your business — for example, a shopping campaign for eCommerce sales, display campaigns for building brand awareness.

Ideally, with any PPC strategy, you should be prepared to extend a good level of flexibility. Every business is different, and while some strategies will work well for certain businesses, you may find a very different result can be achieved with another, very similar business.

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Give It Time

There’s likely to be lots of testing needed in the first six to eight weeks of setting up the live campaigns. It’s also important to ensure that you give any optimisations or set-ups ample time to collect the necessary data and kick in properly before making any significant changes.

There will be other hurdles you may need to prepare for as part of your strategy. For example, you may notice that the traffic seems valid, but the campaigns struggle to gain leads or convert.

This could be due to multiple issues, the main ones being: conversion tracking, problems with the overall purchase/lead funnel, and this can also be the actual CRO on the site/landing page.

Beginnings of ROI

All of these things will need to be addressed as part of your strategy so that you can give your PPC campaigns the best start possible.

We advise setting your initial PPC strategy out over three months, to begin with. This should give you enough time to test and find the most appropriate campaigns and make continual optimisations, which will allow you to gradually see a ROI from your PPC campaigns.

Want help with creating, running, monitoring and optimising a PPC ads campaign? Let the PPC experts at Thinkplus give you a big helping hand.

The post How To Create a PPC Strategy appeared first on Thinkplus.

These are Pay Per Click advertisements that appear on websites and social media and are highly targeted to individual users, as the ads they see are mostly based on their browsing history and interests.

This means the people coming to your Shopify store may be interested in what you’re selling and might become a customer, thereby drastically increasing your sales.

General media advertising of the past and still around today relies on a scattergun approach to getting the word out and generating interest, with ads running on mass media such as TV, radio, newspapers, magazines and billboards. The aim is to advertise to as big an audience as possible in the hope that some small segment will be interested in your offering and buy.

Then the internet arrived and advertising was reborn into a much more efficient practice, cutting out all the wastage by targeting specific audiences instead of those who may have no interest in various products or services.

Plus, with PPC, you only pay when someone clicks on your ads, and you can spend as little or as much as you like on your campaigns.

This makes PPC extremely affordable for smaller companies who may not have the large budgets required for mass media advertising. And, equally importantly, you can choose what audiences you want to target, based on such demographics as gender, age, location and language, and you get detailed reports showing you all your traffic and conversions.

Once people arrive on your site, and perhaps for the first time, it’s then up to you and what you have in your store and how it looks and functions to make sure they complete the buyer journey by choosing some items and checking out and paying for them.

How to Set Up a PPC Ads Campaign

PPC, also known as paid search, is one of the most popular elements of any digital marketing campaign, because of its immediate results — there’s practically no waiting around before the traffic starts to come in and sales hopefully start to rise. But you need to know what you’re doing. Even though the most popular PPC networks and platforms, such as Google, Facebook, Instagram and others, have automated systems that allow you to set up ads, you still need a degree of planning and exercise to get you going.

Key to Good Results: These Google PPC ads (marked at the top of page) appeared for people searching for “camping equipment”, some of the advertisers’ keywords.

So creating a solid PPC campaign means:

• Doing extensive keyword research to find keywords that are most relevant to your niche and products; you can use a variety of online tools, such as Moz and BuzzSumo.
• These tools will also let you see the demand, or competition, for specific keywords — and like anything in business, the more popular something is, the more expensive it’s likely to be.
• In our example above, “camping equipment” is most likely expensive, requiring a budget of thousands to get a campaign going and sustain it, because they’re fairly general keywords. To get a lower price, try variations, long-tail keywords and consider adding location to them — or a combination of all three, such as “best camping equipment London”.
• Add negative keywords that exclude various terms people are searching for can help to boost your return on your ad spend.
• Work out your budget and how much you want to spend per day of your campaign.
• Create compelling copy for your ads. Keep it highly descriptive and brief. Add a call to action that encourages people to do something, like click, browse or buy.
• Add a landing page, or pages, to your website and link your ads to them. There’s little point advertising a product or service and then directing traffic to your homepage, where there may just be general information about your company and visitors might leave. Get straight to the point with a specific webpage about the product or service you’re advertising and want to sell.

If all this seems a bit overwhelming — and time-consuming — and you think you should get a degree in PPC before proceeding, don’t worry, as you can always outsource the task to a specialist PPC agency like ours.

Our PPC Ninjas set up and run wildly successful PPC ad campaigns across a range of networks and platforms, and continually test them to make sure they’re running optimally and the costs are as low as possible. A PPC campaign that’s not managed correctly can end up being expensive, as you’re not getting the traffic and returns you want.

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How to Increase Shopify PPC Conversions

One of the first things you should do when you’re figuring out how to increase Shopify PPC conversions, (so that people do something you want when they arrive at your store from ads and not immediately leave), is look at your site and see if it’s responsive.

What that means is: Does it work on the range of devices in use today?

Not just PCs and laptops; mobile devices, whether smartphones or tablets, is where a growing number of visits and sales are taking place, you need to be sure your site is optimised for these devices.

Going Mobile: Two of every three dollars spent online is via mobile devices, says a report, and the rate is increasing as more people use mobile devices to access the internet and buy at Shopify and other stores.

Clicking through to a site via PPC ads and finding that it’s PC only and doesn’t display or work on mobile devices will lead to an enormous bounce rate as a hefty portion of your PPC-generated traffic flees the minute they arrive at your store.

Shopify has an extensive range of responsive themes, but some may not be, or they may not be responsive on certain devices, such as those that run the Android operating system, for instance.

A quick check to see if your store is responsive will put you in the picture.

Next, you need to make sure your product pages are clear, clean and compelling.

Some companies put a lot of effort into their landing pages but neglect their all-important product pages, which is a real shame, as it’s here that the browsing and buying happens.

Photography must be high-quality and professional. Otherwise, even the best products won’t fly off the virtual shelves, because poor-quality images may give the impression that they’re poor-quality products.

And the copy, or text, on the page, must be simple, in plain-speaking language and quickly tell you what the product is and the benefits of buying it — right now. More product copy does not equal more sales, as online, attention spans are short and there is a lot of competition. So keep it brief and to the point.

Give people a better look at your products, as it may be their first time buying them and photos, after all, are one-dimensional and therefore flat.

You may be able to install a display plugin from the Shopify app store or add another kind, such as Smart Product Viewer, which offers a 360-degree view of products, or WooCommerce 360º Image, an app that does the same thing:

Axing Blockers to Increase Shopify PPC Conversions

A major conversion blocker on eCommerce stores is a lack of trust signals.

If it’s people’s first visit to your store and they don’t know much about you, how can they trust you to deliver once you’ve paid — and what’s your customer service like, if there are problems?

A great way to get around this block is to let your other customers do the talking, by way of reviews that are hopefully brilliant.

You can integrate review sites like Trustpilot into your Shopify store and give new customers the reassurance and trust they require.

Another way to increase Shopify PPC conversions is to add a live chat feature to your store so that people can get in touch in an instant and get an answer to their queries straight away. Email is too slow. Many people now prefer not to use the phone, as you could be tied up waiting for ages, and they may not be in the same country, so will not want to incur hefty charges.

The Shopify app store has lots of live chat choices, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Shopify Chat, letting your customers get in touch with ease.

And what to do about customers who procrastinate and just can’t decide whether to buy now or much later? Give them a prod with time-limited discounts or offers. If they like something and its price and see that there may only be a few left or an offer will expire in several hours, they’re more likely to snap it up now.

It’s called scarcity marketing, and it’s hugely effective at getting people to make up their minds and buy, but you don’t want to overdo it or dupe people into thinking only a limited amount of stock remains when you have a warehouse full of it.

Still wondering how to increase Shopify PPC conversions so that your sales really take off?

It’s time to call in the PPC pros at Thinkplus and let them set up and run killer PPC campaigns that will give you tons of traffic.

And you can get a FREE website and marketing review so that your PPC landing pages are in great shape and help to boost conversions — get yours now!

What to Read Next

• How to Create a Winning Shopify Marketing Strategy
• Everything You Need to Know About Shopify 2.0 (and What to Do)
• 6 Ways to Increase Your eCommerce Store’s Sales

The post PPC Guide for Shopify eCommerce Stores appeared first on Thinkplus.