Digital Management

New Year, New You? 3 Easy Steps to Owning this Year

January 10, 2018 by Cassie Ciopryna Leave a Comment

(FREE downloadable team meeting slide deck!)

It’s the same ol’ January tune – here’s how to stay true to your resolutions to truly better your business.

The New Year is always a great time to reflect and refresh. The December holidays are over, where you filled up on goodies and spent time with those closest to you. Now there are no excuses to put your best foot forward towards any and all improvement – personal and business related.

Of course, here we are going to focus on your business-related New Year resolutions—because that’s why CallSource is here! Each of our clients has dedicated representatives to help them with their particular goals (and even help them find out what their goals should be depending on their data) – but you have obviously come here for the same kind of help, and I am going to deliver for you. Ready to make 2018 your standout year? Let’s go!

Step 1: Set Goals

As a business owner or manager, hopefully, you already set specific short and long-term goals for your company. You may even have specific goals per department, per quarter, per year, etc. If you don’t have any specific goal(s) to be working towards, it’s easy to get stuck in the day-to-day.

While being “busy” in these daily monotonous tasks may feel like you accomplished something by the end of the day, in reality, this is not helping you. Being busy doesn’t necessarily mean that you are accomplishing goals and growing your business.

To keep moving forward and be better, you have to make sure every aspect of your company is performing better.

And to perform better, you have to be reaching towards something other than the average, every day reactive processes.

Goal setting is a proactive process which requires preemptive thinking, managing, and performance.

It’s easy to get stuck in the reactive nature of the job—but instead of just answering the phone, putting out figurative fires, completing necessary paperwork or whatever your daily tasks may be, be sure to stop and get out of your comfort zone to work on improving your business.

CallSource’s Business Advisors always make sure to ask clients, especially new clients, what their goals are. What are they looking for insight into by working with us, and what are they working towards?

The most common answer anyone can say is: “We want to be better.”

OK—good start—but what does it take to actually get better?

Well, it takes an effort on your part as the business owner or manager, as well as the effort from your employees.

Don’t just set a goal to “be better.” See where you are at right now, and set up a timeline on processes to improve.

Be specific about your goals and communicate these goals to your team by having regular meetings, posting them in the break room or a bulletin board, on TVs, or whatever works for you.

You will need to create realistic goals.

You will need to create short-term and long-term goals.

An unrealistic goal is to say that you want your team to book 100% of appointments. A realistic goal is to say that your team is currently setting appointments at a conversion rate of 60%, and you’d like to see that improve to 75%.

Now, it is not realistic to say you want your employees to make this improvement in one month. But by setting smaller, short-term goals to reach this long-term goal, that is where you are creating successful goals.

Your team should be consistently reminded of their goals as well as their progress. Make sure to check in with regular updates. Take your goals a day, week, and month at a time.

Which leads me to step 2…

Step 2: Follow Through & Follow Up on Said Goals

It is true that slow and steady wins the race—it just takes consistent, daily, proactive effort.

via GIPHY

So what should you be doing consistently to stay true to your goals?

Daily

Ensure your employees are staying on track with their goals as well as that you are. Block off at least 30 minutes to an hour on your calendar for proactive tasks so that you aren’t getting stuck in those hypothetical fires every day.

Weekly

If you can’t swing a weekly meeting with your employees, at least make sure to get a weekly roundup from them on what they’re working on and how it aligns with the long-term goals that were set. If you are using CallSource or any call tracking and digital attribution platform, check your data at least on a weekly basis so you can see who is improving and where there may be any setbacks to address before they start declining even more.

Monthly

You need to be having meetings with your team a minimum of once a month – period. If you want to make sure you are achieving the goals you set out, it is imperative that you are proactive in staying on track and addressing any holdups. These meetings should be looking at data and updating the team on their progress – the good and the bad. Give kudos where deserved, and highlight areas that need to be improved as well.

If you need help deciding what kind of data you should be sharing with your team, download our free team meeting slide deck here.

Always

In between all of these days, just be sure to stay cognizant of the goals you set and staying on track with meeting those goals. Write them on sticky notes at your desk, post them in the breakroom, have a poster board in your office—find ways to keep them in the forefront of yours and your employees’ mind. Don’t worry about over communicating – you want everyone to be able to recite their goals back at a moment’s notice. The only way you are going to achieve above and beyond what you previously have is to be a bit obsessed with the outcome.

Step 3: Repeat, Ad Nauseam

The above notes do not only apply to January – remember – they are for the whole year through! The more consistent you stay, the easier it will get. Sure, you will have slip-ups and setbacks, but such is life.

Just like when dieting they say one salad will not make you lose weight just as one unhealthy meal will make you gain weight, having a bad day here or there where you perhaps get off track of your goals is not going to ruin everything. As long as you get back on track the next day with you proactive measures, checking in with employees, etc., you are setting yourself up for success.

If you are ready to start not only setting realistic goals but ready to follow through on these as well and have regular progress updates, we here at CallSource are ready to help you. Download our free team meeting slide deck for better communication with your team. Also feel free to subscribe to our blog for more insights, or speak to a representative today on how you can get your personalized improvement plan for your business.

Bringing Clarity to Multi-Channel Attribution Tracking

December 29, 2017 by Kevin Dieny Leave a Comment

Businesses who understand their complete customer journey can capitalize on opportunities and unlock the full sets of experiences lead to sales.

There are two basic ways in which we can break down the complete customer journey, and we can use either of these to model how we want to attribute channels across the marketing spectrum. Measuring true ROI and the impact of our marketing efforts on the business depends on our attribution model.

But hold up…I am getting ahead of myself. What is the customer journey and what are channels, attribution, and the marketing spectrum, you ask? Let’s break out the chalk and chalkboard!

Before we get too deep, here are the basics

Channels are targeted sources that produce traffic for your brand, website, company, store, etc. You can think of channels as places where people find out about your products and services. Advertisements and social media are the most common channels right now. Because these types of channels are easily measurable, they are insightful. By understanding what channels your consumers are interested in, and adding your content to those targeted sources, you will be able to send specific traffic to your brand.

Attribution is being able to identify the source, or channel, of traffic coming to you. If a potential customer walks into your business because they read about it in the newspaper, then the newspaper is responsible for sending them to you—that is the channel that you can attribute to this new customer.

The age old problem that can occur with determining accurate attribution is figuring out which advertising source/channel deserves credit for sending a customer to your business when that person may have read about you in the newspaper and also saw a billboard advertisement. We will delve further into this issue a bit later.

The marketing spectrum is the full range of activities that you are performing to engage with customers in order to build value for your brand, sell products, and deepen relationships. Activities may include emailing, calling, texting, advertising, social posts, and sending direct mail. Since there are numerous ways of interacting with customers, it is important to consider all the different channels and activities in those channels that are contributing to building your business.

What is unclear about multi-channel attribution?

Bringing clarity to multi-channel attribution tracking is best illustrated by the models that attempt to describe the fluid dynamics of the process. Before we get into the models, let’s focus on the concept.

Consumers will digest or consume lots of content/information from the channels they prefer.

For example, when you launch an Instagram only campaign, you’ll miss your targeted audience who doesn’t have Instagram. Sounds obvious, right?

Small and medium sized businesses assume their customers are only in a few channels. However, without good data, you don’t know what you don’t know. You would need to hit as many channels as possible to correctly determine which channels your customers are actually consuming information from.

In order to clear up the attribution problem inherent in multi-channel marketing, you need to first understand the role of your channels as you scale. Once you do this, you can see why accurate attribution is a struggle. Unless you can attribute channels correctly, you will not know the true impact of that channel on ROI.

Your consumers are more than likely in all of the channels.

Just based alone on the above image, this seems like a lot of marketing channels—and it is. But truth be told, there are many more. Anywhere a consumer can interact with your business in a tangible or digital way – that’s a channel you need to be in.

(Tip!) If you’re feeling overwhelmed, a great place to start is by looking to your competitors to see what channels they are in.

Where to start with multi-channel marketing?

Until you know where your best customers are primarily found, you should focus on the largest and most universal channels first. Depending on your business and its goals – consider the following channels to start marketing into:

Website (CMS) – You need a digital location no matter what type of business you are; this is foremost the most important thing.
Search Engines (SEO) – You create a presence in search by creating quality and relevant content that corresponds with the products you sell and what your ideal consumers want to know.
Social Media/Listing (Distribution) – You need to get your content to people who need it. For people looking for your services or products that you offer, you must have a social presence in order for them to find you on listings or review sites.
Ads, Email, and Sales (The Funnel) – This is the final step that allows you to build your marketing “machine.” The machine will help you drive traffic to your content, convert consumers at the end of their journey into leads, and eventually move them down the funnel from a lead to a sale.

Once you have the primary channels out of the way, you can begin inserting your business and managing your presence across the entire spectrum. This exercise should help you see the role of each channel for your individual business.

A word of warning: scaling into more channels requires more content, which always requires more time. As you widen your breadth of channels and learn more and more about your ideal customers, stay mindful of the time constraints this presents to your business.

The attribution models of a multi-channel spectrum

There are numerous models that attempt to attribute the deserved value to the proper channel. While each model has its pros and cons, I first want to cover the most popular model, “Last Click.”

Last Click is the most popular because even if your cookies or tracking is unreliable, this will always deliver reliable results based on a consistent method. Google has their own write up comparing models present in Google Analytics you can utilize in reporting.

Last Click/Final Click Attribution Modeling

Last Click attribution is attributing the final channel’s click through to the source of lead generation. Assuming several channels (which could be near infinite) had touches to the consumer along their complete journey, Last Click will attribute the channel that they touched last to receive the credit in converting that lead.

Example #1 – A consumer sees an advertisement on television, and then sees that advertisement again later on YouTube. Later, they get an email promoting the advertisement, and finally they decide to Google the company before buying. In this example, Organic search gets the credit and the attribution for converting that person into a lead.

PROS	CONS
Most reliable for cookie based tracking.	Negates contribution of prior channels.
Simplest to use; usually the default model.	Doesn’t usually reflect marketing efforts.

First Click Attribution Modeling

First Click attribution is the reverse of Last Click. The first channel that brought someone into all of the other channels is given the credit in lead generation. Assuming again that there were several channels (this could be near infinite) that had touches to the consumer along their complete journey, First Click gives attribution value to the very first channel we had tracking information on.

As I mentioned, most attribution models prefer Last Click because of the unreliability in tracking. First Click attribution is the most susceptible to unreliable tracking. For example, if someone deletes their cookies from a cookie-based tracking system, then you get unreliable first clicks, as their first channel will be reassigned after their cookies were purged.

Example #2 – Imagine that a consumer sees an advertisement first on television, then watches the advertisement on YouTube. They then receive an email promotion for that advertisement, and finally they search and convert to a lead from organic search before buying. In this example, the very first click or channel, namely television, will get the credit for the attribution.

PROS	CONS
Emphasizes awareness strategies.	Most unreliable cookie based tracking model.
Used in brand awareness and political campaigns.	Entry channels over-weighted.

Linear Attribution Modeling

Linear Attribution modeling was statisticians’ go-to before exploring years and extended data. In statistics, it is a rule of thumb to first assign all weights a consistent value before attempting to individualize the weighting of every element. Based on this assumption, I would assume this is where linear became a popular marketing model.

The purpose of assigning equal value along the chain is that it may be too complex and we may not actually know enough to weigh any specific channel greater value than another. This model excels at awareness and recognition strategies, but does not help you do much else. Linear Attribution also has the flaw that if something did have a greater impact on the whole marketing spectrum, we would not be able to identify it correctly. But keep in mind—there are marketers that swear by each and every model, so do your research to determine which model best suits your business.

Example #3 – Assuming the same story as the examples prior, each click along the complete customer journey is assigned equal value as long as the consumer eventually converts.

PROS	CONS
Simplest (think statistician).	Nothing is given uneven weights.
Does not emphasize any particular strategy.	Cookie cutter marketing strategies.

Time Decay Attribution Modeling

Time Decay attribution is a confusing model as you need to know at which point the greater credit is assigned to a channel. In Time Decay modeling, the channels at the end of the consumer journey receive the most credit and the channels at the beginning receive the least. The channel at 50% of the consumer journey would therefore receive 50% of the weight.

Time Decay is helpful if you see a lot of your channel traffic from season and clustered events. You can weigh conversions nearest to the channels that led to a conversion more and give less credit to channels that contributed in a time period that may not have contributed to the consumer’s final decision to convert. Again, decide what model best reflects how your business does marketing and match the model to the type of improvements you want to focus on.

Example #4 – Assuming the same story as the examples prior, each click along the complete customer journey is assigned increasing value as long as the consumer eventually converts. Another way to describe it is that each click’s value decays over time as more channels and clicks are added.

PROS	CONS
Gives credit to clusters of clicks.	Assumes that prior clicks are worth less.
Helpful if you have most of the market share already.	Favors a bottom of funnel centric strategy.

U-Shaped or Position Based Attribution Modeling

Position Based attribution modeling is one of the models that actually favors a certain type of marketing strategy. Position Based attribution favors straight lead generation as it gives credit to the beginning channel that brought someone in and the final channel that converted. This is why it has a U shape, as seen in the diagram below.

The position based tracking does suffer from cookie based tracking, as does any model that relies at all upon reliability. However, this model does have strengths in giving credit to marketing efforts at the ends, where the big impact actions happen. Giving credit to the end and beginning gives credit and therefore rewards the acquisition channels of marketing; which is why it lends itself to lead generation strategies.

Example #5 – Assuming the same story as the examples prior, each click along the complete customer journey is assigned a value, but when the conversion happens, the first click and the last click are given much more credit.

PROS	CONS
Focuses on two important clicks.	Doesn’t help you build complex strategies.
Leans towards lead generation strategies.	Ignores values of relationship building.

Special Mentions of Attribution Modeling

I could go on with the other 7 or so advanced attribution models and another dozen or more of the super advanced or specialized attribution models, graph them, and weigh their pros and cons, but I’d rather touch on how all of these are implemented and tracked, as that is the intent of this article.

I will instead list the others and attempt to cover the deeper look into all models at a later date. Here are some of the more advanced iterations of attribution models that exist alongside the fundamental attribution types mentioned already:

Middle of Funnel or W-Shaped Attribution Modeling – This model brings the valuation of channels that extend into channel actions at the middle of the funnel but not up to the point of a completed sale.
First or Last Touch/Email/Conversion Based Attribution Modeling – Here, a specific type of action with a channel identifies as the first or last attribution; giving it full credit for the role in creating that touch.
First or Last AdWords Attribution Modeling – Google points out this type of attribution model in its description of analytics models you have to choose and report on. The benefit here is that you give credit to search marketing efforts solely – in order to calibrate paid search and make it more efficient but it somewhat ignores the other channels. To me, this modeling is more ad-hoc.
Full Funnel or Z-Shaped Attribution – Full Funnel is similar to linear modeling, but the model extends beyond a conversion or initial sale to the final sale and weighs all of the channels that have an impact along the way with equal credit. This is the most widespread channel attributor but it does not specifically weigh any one place in the funnel as more important than the rest – a concept that bottom or top of funnel marketers scoff at.
Attribution Modeling in R – Analyzecore has a great article discussing the practical concepts of modeling in R code or algorithmic systems based modeling, the point of which is to conceptualize the flow and customize it to any model that is desired on the fly. This and other models that rely upon more complex algorithms are expandable if you have the desire and need to dig into your data on a highly granular level.

The problem with attribution modeling is unreliable tracking

Hinted at throughout this article is that the problem with attribution modeling comes down to reliable tracking systems. As a consumer progresses along their multi-channel journey they should be tracked so that every touch with a channel is measured to see, at minimum, that it happened. But there are some struggles with even getting that much information because of the way we track that kind of interaction.

Measuring: The Silo of Marketing Stacks

As marketing teams add new tools and measurement analytics to their stack, they end up adding a silo of information that is separate from all of their other tools. In order to merge and connect that information, it requires setting up integration or API connections so that the technologies in your stack share and consolidate information. This is great when all of your stack tools cooperate or a nightmare if you are stuck exporting into CSV or XLS files and swapping that information around.

Assigning: The Unique Identifiers that Link Consumers to their Data

All marketing tools assign a unique identifier to every single point of data that is connected back to the source of that connection, typically a consumer. Consumers are often listed in marketing tools with all the data that corresponds to them (tools vary), but there is always a way for their systems to deal with duplicates. This is usually done with unique identifiers, or sometimes it is done with emails as these are the most basic unique identifier in the industry. Other systems provide long hex codes with near impossibility of duplication in order to ensure that every single person is accounted for (and it actually works).

Tracking: Building Consumer Databases with Input

Databases in tech silos are assigned unique identifiers after they are inputted into those systems. The technology that adds them to these systems are processes that often rely upon tracking (at least in the analytics world they do). In order to track consumers, we need something robust enough to follow them on properties that we control. The most common analytics tracking code in the world is Google Analytics, installed with a simple few lines of Javascript code into the header of webpages. In my opinion, 90% of all tracking processes are based upon cookies.

Since they have been referred to multiple times in this article, let me simply clarify what cookies are. Cookies are miniature databases stored in the web browser of users which allow us to literally “follow the user.” Non-cookie based tracking does an end around the storage of information in the user’s browser and skips all the pitfalls of cookie based tracking, but requires elaborate privacy controls. For more information on cookie vs. non-cookie based tracking, check out my previous article here.

There are always pros and cons, but the point I want to make is that (for analytics) consumer information is tracked into marketing stack tools and linked to identifiers based on the robustness of tracking.

Clarity: Putting it all together

Gathering the information is the first step, and because of that, makes all future steps dependent upon the quality and robustness that comes from tracking and inputting that data.

This is why it is crucial to have reliable tracking as your ability to assign correctly is based on having enough information to make the consumers in the database distinct from each other. Further, it is vital that we measure; otherwise we cannot improve – hands down. Measuring is dependent upon having properly assigned consumers in our database, and upon robust tracking inputs.

Having any data is great. Even 50% accuracy of data gets us 50% of the way to 50% right and wrong decisions. Having no data and making decisions is called “Empirical Decision Making” and it’s best summarized as shooting from the hip.

(Tip!) Avoid it at all costs; do not shoot from the hip when it comes to making marketing decisions!

So the big question looms:

How do you attribute all of your marketing (which relies upon measurement) from the consumers (which rely on assignment) back to the channels that triggered those interactions (which relies on tracking)?

ANSWER:

You do your best. If you are trying to clear this issue up because you already are familiar with this issue, then you need to find a better solution that includes:

Tracking
Assignment
Measurement

You cannot even being to model your attribution and give credit to channels unless you understand the reliability of your entire spectrum.

Recommendations

Identify holes that you have, so that you can see where there is drop off in channels and assess whether that is a content failure or simply a tracking issue. Utilization of UTM standards and standardized naming conventions to go along with them is key. Cross-train marketing members on your team to help them understand the value in tracking as it applies to measurement and goal attainment.

If you are interested in learning more about CallSource’s Digital AI tool, a non-cookie, highly robust tracking system, pull out your checklist and check the box next to awesome tracking software because this tool does it all.

How to Generate Hot Sales Calls from PPC Campaigns While Staying ROI Positive

December 1, 2017 by Kevin Dieny 1 Comment

You have multiple priorities to keep in mind in marketing and sales – here’s some tips to keep both in the forefront of your mind.

You are tasked with what seems impossible: “Generate hot sales calls from a PPC campaign while staying ROI positive.” If you worked at a marketing agency, then this would probably be in your everyday tasks while working with clients. But unless “Advertising,” “PPC,” “Traffic,” or “Affiliate” is in your job title, then I’m sure you have other things to focus on besides trying to generate calls from digital advertising.

Let’s jump into an extensive “how-to” for generating hot sales calls for those who have other things to focus on, as well as for experienced PPC managers looking to shore up what they know.

A task like “Generate hot sales calls” implies a current condition or state where this does not exist. “Scale hot sales calls” refers to a state where this is already occurring. I am going to assume that you are currently not generating hot sales calls from your PPC campaigns, so I’ll focus on the former. Since this is your task to work in an environment where something successful is desired but does not yet exist…welcome to marketing!

Step 1 – Make a list of marketing assets before you start the project

In marketing, you first have to start with an inventory of what you have to work with and go from there. Start with answering the following questions:

What is the budget for this task?
Who will be in charge of running the campaign and acquiring the creative assets?
What methods of digital advertising are we going to use? (Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc).
What marketing tools do we have access to assist us in this task? (Advertising tools, email marketing tools, landing page or thank you page creators, etc).
What is our sales process for handling the “hot sales calls” that we generate? What about the follow-up or missed opportunity sales calls?

After making this list, you might see some first steps that need to happen before you start generating hot phone call leads. You start with a list to identify the constraints you will be facing. The shorter your list in general, the more constraints you will find that crop up and delay or throw off your task. Have an answer for each bullet point above, and you will have enough to jump ahead.

Step 2 – Defining a “Hot Sale” and their buyer intensity in the marketing funnel

The more precise you define a “Hot Sale,” the better your PPC campaign will perform. We’ve previously talked about how to create better marketing qualified leads, but how do you ensure those MQLs become a “Hot Sale”? The quality of your leads is dependent on not only how well you can define what makes someone a qualified lead, but how well you can speak to these specific consumers with a relevant message.

We will use hot, warm, and cold to signify the buying intensity of sales prospects going forward.

Cold leads/prospects are at the top of the funnel and may not know your company, or there is a problem to fix.
Warm prospects need convincing and are most likely in the middle of the funnel.
Hot prospects are sales prospect further down the marketing funnel and ready to buy.

Let’s picture this funnel…

Each section of the funnel has a specific goal, and you might be surprised to find out that it is not always, “Call Me!”

The goal at the top of the funnel, where your cold prospects are located, is to make people AWARE. Awareness is defined as: informing people of a problem, of their current state, of a better state, and finally of who your company is and what you’re passionate about doing that nobody else does.

The goal of the middle of the funnel is only to segment people into WARM or HOT groups. This is done by tracking the engagement types who you identify as someone who may be interested in buying. Deciding what to track is ultimately up to your company and what interactions consumers are having with your properties online. Draw a line in the sand and decide what is warm, or someone who needs more information, and hot, meaning someone who you confidently feel is ready to buy. Usually you won’t get this right the first time, but with trial and error and testing, you will get better…

The bottom of the funnel is where HOT audiences are sent. The goal at the bottom of the funnel is to send your prospect to a persuasive page to call you, set an appointment, or to engage with you in some fashion. The highly subjective part is being persuasive, but if you’ve done the work before this point and segmented them correctly, you should have sifted the leads with the highest buyer intensity.

Step 3 – “Hot Leads” Consumer Messaging

“One Man’s Loss is Another Man’s Gain.” – Proverb

There are two categories you need to figure out to be successful in defining and speaking to your hottest consumers:

Relevance	Value
Identify your target audience, discover their pain points, and speak to them in a way that solves for their needs quickly.	Provide a quality offer to your target audience that will seem irresistible to them right now.

As referenced in the proverb above, your target audience should not be similar to anyone else’s. Even amongst your competition, your target audience should be distinct and aligned to what you sell.

Using the analogy of Subway and McDonalds, both are targeting more market share of the healthy fast food market—especially amongst the 18 to 30-year-old segment. Even still, one should be specifically going after the sandwich crowd and the other the burger and fries crowd. You see examples of this in commercials where advertising hones in on a specific segment of a targeted audience and tries to speak directly to them—such as the new “McVegan” burger that McDonald’s is testing or Subway’s “Fresh Fit” sandwich menu.

Although it is important to make your business stand out, don’t get too hung up on this step of really individualizing your messaging yet or blame this step later if your campaign doesn’t work out as intended. But I can’t give you this brief without also sharing a tool to help you make your marketing both relevant and valuable. I like to use DigitalMarketer’s Avatar Worksheet to stay on message and identify my hottest target audience.

Step 4 – Why phone calls as a sales generation method?

Limiting your sales generation to phone calls is a heavy constraint. However, there are some reasons you should consider generating phone calls as your main sales means from PPC campaigns:

You are an appointment based business.
You have a team that is trained to handle sales calls.
You have a team that is trained to handle sales calls.
You track your marketing phone calls and already have a budget dedicated to scale this.

Let’s talk about the last point, tracking your marketing phone calls because it’s something you can easily add-on to your business. Shameless plug aside, you can only improve your marketing by tracking it and having a plan in place ahead of time to utilize the findings.

(TIP! Do you want to know what marketing source you are getting the best appointments from? Check out CallSource’s solution, LeadMetrix)

There are a few other types of lead generation that can occur before you start making sales on the phone with them. Although we are assuming you have been tasked with generating hot leads for sales calls through PPC, you should also consider gathering leads through other means and then closing them on the phone.

Some of these basic methods employed include but are not limited to:

Form-fills to capture leads from landing pages
“Contact Us” phone calls or emails
Online chat platforms
SMS text messaging capturing

You don’t need to use all of these tactics, but consider how they would work for your company.

Step 5 – The Medium, Platforms, and Local of PPC Campaigns

We have now identified and explained all of the major constraints that a typical marketer would face in the task, “Generate hot sales calls from a PPC campaign.”

On to implementation…

My advice—plain and simple—is start with a local search segment of your targeted audience if possible. I recommend this from my experience in PPC. Don’t just take my word for it, here is a great article from ReviewTrackers on how local search is best for bottom of funnel.

Start with the easiest method to capture sales from PPC campaigns before getting more complex. Local advertisements are the easiest because you are overcoming a lot of the issues people have with PPC ads and their reluctance to trust them by saying you are a real company just around the corner from them.

Other platforms could work just as well for you and each of them has its pros and cons. Research by emarketer this last September details the growth of digital advertisement platforms and highlights a trend that digital ad spend is only increasing.

Taking it up a notch is the question of which platform would work best for generating hot sales calls?

I would recommend the following, depending on your target audiences:

Adwords for local search
Facebook for most everyone
LinkedIn for longer sales cycles or specific age groups
Bing for devices and age groups or even as a cheaper alternative to Adwords (not always cheaper)
Yelp for testing against Adwords
Instagram if you are a very visual company
SnapChat if you are gunning for millennials

…The point is go where your targeted audience is hiding, because your competitors probably are.

Finally, consider the medium you are utilizing for these PPC campaigns. I look at the content that is being linked to on multiple levels in order to test what works best for the structure of a keyword based search campaign:

The Brand Level
The Categorical Level
The Keyword Level

Brand Level
The brand is your company name and offers you the chance to target search marketing with a message to accurately portray your brand in a way that positions it for sales calls. Brand targeting should not be overlooked. When it comes to performance, they typically have the best Click Through Rates (CTR) and high-quality scores, which directly reduces your costs in running advertisements on those platforms. Someone who types in your company name into a search engine might be looking for the phone number… why not give them that opportunity and test this hypothesis?

Categorical Level
The category level should be made up of your products or topics that align with what your company does. If you do not have products that are clearly defined, consider looking at your mission statement for ideas. Assuming you have products, break them up into exclusive categories and make content and messaging to target an audience for each of those products.
Categories often coincide with price as lower priced products or services are easier entry points to a sale then a higher priced one. Targeting people for categories should take people to the product they searched for, and that corresponding landing page has to do a few things to be successful:

Make them aware of a problem they have.
Talk about the pain of that problem in the current state.
Refer to the ideal state (or the potential after).
Clearly make it your passion to help them solve this.
THEN… and only then… talk about your product as the solution you want to provide for a specific set of problems.

Keyword Level
The keyword level takes this even further, and so I do not recommend this for marketers just getting started. The reason that keyword level is more difficult is that you are isolating specific problems people are having through search terms and matches a highly relevant and valuable solution page for them.
People will type in hundreds of queries, so building quality content for all of even the most popular searches will take considerable time and effort. Every grouping of search queries has to be paired with a highly relevant piece of content which you have to build. For example:

Search Term: “personalized 833 vanity numbers”

Relevant Hypothetical Article: “Personalize your own 833 vanity number for your business [Article on Blog]”

Valuable Hypothetical Offer: “The Best 833 Vanity Numbers for Small Businesses [Downloadable List]”

In this example, the search term matched, a highly relevant article was displayed as an advertisement, the article makes mention of a downloadable offer for lead capture during and after the article’s content that sends people to a form to get their name, email, and phone number.

You would have to repeat this process for every valuable keyword in order to maximize the keyword level. These steps are simplified for categorical and brand as your need for content is much smaller since matched keywords are grouped into anything relevant to the category.

Before I move on from search marketing I do want to point out the click2call, call-only ads, and “call me now” buttons that are found in these platforms. My advice is to use these for remarketing lists for people lower down your funnel, but consider giving them the option to call you straight from the advertisement as well. Do not neglect the call extension, but also don’t jump straight to “call me!” unless you had a segment that was already hot.

Specificity is King

The more specific you get (Keyword > Category > Brand), the more personal you can make content and offers. You should be trying to speak to a specific, targeted group of people so that you get higher relevance and value.

What about the other platforms that are not search?

Image based advertisements
Image based advertisements require a landing page, and you should always do that! A landing page can be an article or a product detail page, but your consumers should be sent somewhere that they are likely to convert.

Retargeting
Retargeting is huge, and if you are not doing this, you are ignoring the ability to segment your visitors. I recommend implementing image ads as retargeting PPC campaigns because they really have to work hard. In comparison, search advertisements allow personalization by matching keywords that a consumer is looking for to a potential solution you provide.

In retargeting you can only segment that audience based on what the platform allows. Most platforms allow you to pixel an audience or upload a list that is matched to their database. By uploading or targeting specific pixeled visitors you can find people that are warm or hot based on their engagement.

I’ve seen clients go after their cancellations with some positive results because they have new pricing, a new product, or unique service addition that sets them apart. This means that as you conduct your business online, especially with advertisements, remember that marketing is a long term strategy and it often takes many touches to finally make a sale.

(TIP! Have you considered a reputation management strategy for your business?)

Adding touches does not always guarantee a Hot lead or a sale but it does improve the chances that marketing will be successful. Your purpose for this whole PPC campaign task is to build a marketing strategy that will inform you enough to know how many touches on average it takes for someone to become your next client. You can only know this if you track your marketing activities.

(TIP! Do you want to track consumers from multiple sources without lifting a finger? Check out Digital AI)

Step 6 – What does ROI positive mean for marketing?

Marketing is a long-term strategy.

Okay, I get it, but I need results tomorrow, so what should I do?

A key element I have purposely left out of all these steps is the time frame. I have left it out because technically you could be ROI positive if you take a long time, with highly calculated steps, and spent just enough at each stage to get what you want. That oversimplified explanation can last months or years as marketing teams make incremental changes until they achieve return on investments (ROI) that are double, quadruple, or even 100x their spend.

That’s impossible… 100x?

The truth is products that take double or triple-digit returns are usually able to sell themselves. I wouldn’t always credit a marketing team for that kind of return unless they started out with utterly abysmal marketing and did a 180.

Achieving ROI is based primarily on the LTV (lifetime value of a customer). Once you know how much value an average sale is bringing you, you have your breakeven point for ad spend. You need to break-up your budget accordingly for testing.

The continuum that marketing lives on is that as time is shortened costs usually go up. If you want to be ROI positive tomorrow, your chances are very slim.

My advice is to consider time in your equation.

In order to become ROI positive and start multiplying your return, you need a well-oiled marketing machine. I have laid out the steps that you need to master, and I mean it when I say you must master them. You have to assume that you will fail along the way – the key is failing quick. Learn from your mistakes, take calculated risks, and plan on increasing your budgets only after you have made wins.

Marketing optimization is a job all its own.

Most people think marketing ends when an advertisement is first turned on and calls start coming in (or maybe they don’t); this is when optimization starts. You will only improve what you bother to track. Here are recommendations for constant improvement and to get ROI positive going forward:

A/B Testing (avoid multivariate until you have a large team or lots of content assets)
Content Testing
Time of Day Testing
Day of the Week Testing
Format Testing (videos, infographics, television ads, etc.)
Cannon Ball Testing

Cannon ball testing is when you make a dramatic shift (as opposed to iterative testing) and change a ton of things all at once. Analysts scream and optimization specialists jump out of the window when they hear you are doing this… but sometimes you have to. You need to experiment with changes and sometimes you have to make big shifts until you find some semblance of success.

Summarize everything for me for watercooler conversation

In summary, put on your lucky thinking cap and go down this step by step list to learn how to generate hot sales calls from PPC campaigns while staying ROI positive:

Make a list of marketing assets before you start the project
Defining a “Hot Sale” and their buyer intensity in the funnel
“Hot Leads” Consumer Messaging
Why phone calls as a sales generation method?
The Medium, Platforms, and Local of PPC Campaigns (The MVP)
What does ROI positive mean for marketers?

By the end of this when someone says, “What is your return on ad spend (ROAS)?” or “What is your return on investment (ROI)?” you can confidently answer and have the insight to explain how you are actively improving. Even if it’s not rainbows or pots of gold today, you can celebrate the fact that you are making attempts and failing fast because marketing is a long-term strategy and you will get there!