Learn the best takeaways from Sahil Jain's SMX East presentation on how to reach your ideal customers using search and social, cross-network tactics.
#SMXEast Panel
Using Paid Search & Social Together To Deliver The Ultimate Knock-Out Punch
Speakers:
Sahil Jain, CEO, AdStage
Maggie Malek, Head of Social, MMI
Tara Siegel, Sr. Director of Social, Pepperjam
The Ultimate Guide to Financial Advertising Strategies.pdf
SMX East: How to Reach Ideal Customers Using Advanced Search & Social Tactics - #KnockoutPanel
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Marrying Search & Social Strengths to Drive More Sales
How to Reach
Ideal Customers
Using Advanced
Search & Social
Tactics
2. #SMXEast @Sahilio
Sahil Jain is the CEO of AdStage, the
leading cross-network online advertising
platform. Previously he dropped out of High
School to be an Engineer at Yahoo!, left UC
Berkeley to join Corp Dev at AOL and co-
founded YC backed Trigger.io.
A Bit About Me
14. #SMXEast @Sahilio
3. Consideration
Search Queries:
{keyword} prices,
{keyword} reviews,
{keyword] vs. {keyword},
competitor terms,
best category keywords
Unpublished Sponsored Tweet
Direct Sponsored Content
Dark Sponsored Post
Search Text Ads
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4. Decision
Search & RLSA Text Ads
Search Queries:
Brand keywords
High buying intent keywords
Specific product line, service, or
offering keywords
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Retargeting Can Be Used to Help Accelerate Each Stage
Example retargeting funnel stages, triggered by web custom/tailored audience buckets
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Campaign Targeting:
A) Company + Function + Geo
B) Company + Job Title + Geo
C) Company + Function + Skills + Geo
Step #1
Sponsored Content
Text Ads
Step #2
Form fill for a
demo or gated
content piece
Campaign Targeting:
Custom/Tailored/Customer Match
Audiences matched from your MA
exported leads based on Lead Status
/Campaign
Sponsored Post
Google Display
Sponsored Tweet
Blog content
Infographics
eBooks
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Unpublished Post
Direct Sponsored Content
Promoted Only Tweet
Search Advertising
Customer
1% Lookalike Customer
Custom Audiences
Tailored Audience
Expanded Targeting
Google Analytics
Smart Audiences
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Use Impact Visuals Above, Move Presentation Title As Needed
1. Use customer profiles to inform ad targeting.
2. Align campaigns & budgets to funnel stages.
3. Think about Search & Social in an eco-system.
TAKEAWAYS
LEARN MORE: WWW.ADSTAGE.IO/ACADEMY
Hinweis der Redaktion
Let’s examine why a search or social only marketing approach is missing key opportunities to reach future customers.
While this data point is from a B2B lens, it often rings similar for B2C as well. Your future customers are interconnected, conducting most of the buyer process online, and often skipping traditional sales approaches. It’s more important than ever to reach them at different places they frequent, during different stages of the buying cycle.
As conversion paths have revealed, it’s often more than just one channel driving a conversion or sale. Nothing revealed this more than when you kicked off your very first retargeting campaign and started to see the lift from search and remarketing display ads.
In the early days of PPC, we could only optimize to what could be tracked by the native networks and web analytics – conversions. As we analyzed conversion data alongside sales data, it was often revealed that not all conversions and customers are equal. Many conversions are a poor fit, or some of your higher CPL campaigns actually drive the highest sales revenue. Instead of spending all your time hoping a higher volume of conversions will translate into more sales – instead start by defining who exactly is your best fit customer, to increase lead-to-sale rates.
There are 3 crucial components to defining who your Ideal Customer Profile:
Connect with your Sales team. Often sales will have a list of wish-list top prospects, and top current opportunities. Get in lock step with your Sales team and provide cover fire with advertising – accelerating the sales process and increasing success.
Talk to current Customers. Marketers often have in their head what they *think* their audience likes, the best way to position the product or service, and the decision making process. Often, the reality may surprise you. I can tell you firsthand, that speaking to customers has led to messaging and even product changes revealing insights we had no idea about. Use actual customer language to better engage with top prospects, and refine your sales approach to their buying process.
Finally, use the wealth of data at your fingertips. I’ll dig into here a bit further….
Use your CRM data to examine aspects such as company type, job title, revenue, product line/service, and custom profile aspects (for us, we track which network and the configuration of our best customers, for example). Use historical data to refine the targeting and messaging of your ad campaigns. Creating lookalike profiles of your best fit customers.
Finally, take your sales, customer, and CRM inputs and humanize it. Create a spreadsheet that helps to form your customers into similar groups, known as personas. Personas will help provide guidance into channel selection, ad copy focus, service/product being promoted.
Now you have detailed Ideal Customer Profiles defined, it’s time to strategize on the best cross-channel approach and messaging to reach, engage, and convert potential new customers.
Instead of approaching different network campaigns separately, take more of a holistic approach. Start thinking about and assigning your ad campaigns, aligned with certain stages in the buying process – from simple awareness, to the engagement, consideration, and decision making stage. Now, it’s unrealistic to expect a buyer to perfectly go through the buyer’s journey in this progression. Prospects will skip, pass through, and go back steps – that’s digital for you. However, aligning your campaigns to the buying process will provide a succint
Let’s start from the very first step – Brand Awareness. This is all about reaching great fit prospects who likely has never heard of your brand before. This step is about providing an initial impression of your brand. Social video, display banner ads, and fan/follower growth campaigns work well here.
Once your brand is somewhat known to the prospect, the next step is to engage with them in a light and helpful way. Altruistic, sharable packaged content works well here. Take advantage of native sponsored ads that show in the main feeds of the major social networks. Your goals are to increase views, and shares on the web content, and increase engagement on the actual post itself (interactions, comments, shares). Some of the content will be open, such as blog posts, while others will have light lead capture (email, name) for gated assets such as Whitepapers.
You’ve produced and promoted some great content that helps to solve/speak to pain points in the industry. Next, is more of a direct approach, using Dark Sponsored Posts/Tweets/Content in order to drive a form fill conversion – capturing the prospect’s information. While also targeting comparative, pricing, review, and competitive queries on the search engines (google, bing).
Finally, we’re at the decision making step. Using a mix of tightly themed ad groups targeting brand, high buying intent, and specific product line/service keywords and driving a hard conversions such as a demo request or sale. Take advantage of consideration and drop off decision themed keywords by layering in Remarketing Lists for Search Ads ad groups to drive more conversions.
As I mentioned before, it can take 7 – 13+ touches between sales and marketing to drive a sale. Retargeting can be layered across each stage of the buying funnel, accelerating the cycles, increasing engagement and conversions with visitors who would of normally bounced and not returned. Retargeting can be built into funnels to keep from having too high of frequency and align ad content to what the prospect actually cares about. Prospects just introduced to the brand by social display may not yet be ready to purchase. A hard driving retargeting ad might be too aggressive. Start spending more time thinking about your retargeting strategy and how it fits within your overall lead nurturing eco-system.
I wanted to show you some tangible examples of how using several different search and social campaigns can complement each other, in what we’re dubbing “Cross-Network Plays”/.
For the B2B Demand Gen folks in the house, here’s an example of how to drive new contacts into your database and qualify them using display lead nurtuing.
LinkedIn offers some of the most accurate and expansive B2B targeting out of all the social networks. Breaking out campaigns by targeting parameters such as:
Company + Function
Company + Title
Company + Function + Skills
You can reach your ideal customer profile with pinpointed campaigns. Once the prospect enters their email and other information it get captured in your CRM or Marketing Automation system. Export prospects based on campaign, lead status, industry, company size, job title, etc. and load them as custom/tailored/customer match audiences across Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Use display to nurture and warm up these prospects with compelling content.
For search-heavy web acquisition campaigns, capture bounced, unconverted traffic with Social Retargeting
Create web custom/tailored audiences by landing page url, and exclude folks who converted. Using unpublished/promoted only posts & tweets to bring the bounced visitors back to your website, to a dedicated landing page focused on capturing retargeting visitors.
Take you best customers and use Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s lookalike modeling to find similar customers who you haven’t yet reached.
Your search and social acquisition campaigns will shake out a set of great customers. Use this group to create a lookalike model using Facebook’s Lookalike Custom Audiences, Twitter’s Expanded Targeting Tailored Audiences, and Google Analytics Smart Audiences based on a conversion goal. Ensure to layer in additional refinement targeting such as interests, geo, and keywords on top to get to the core best-fit prospects.
This brings us to the 3 top takeaways from today:
Use customer profiles to inform your ad targeting. The spray and pray days of the past are simply to inefficient. Focus your budgets and efforts on attracting the right type of leads and opportunities that provide the highest ROAS returns.
Align your campaigns and budgets to specific stages of the funnel. Find the right mix for your business model. For example, 10% budget on audience, 60% on engagement, 30% conversions. Keep optimizing until you find the right mix.
Think about your Search & Social ads in a greater eco-system. Run cross-network plays that provide smart marketing touches and accelerate sales cycles. We need to take a step back from only acquisition themed mindsets and start to look at the greater picture.