How do you develop interesting campaigns?
For our company (All Points Digital), everything starts with understanding our client’s business. We do a discovery process of our client’s business, by going through their entire business process from A-Z (not just the marketing component). By understanding the process, budgets, profit margins and pain points we are able to make educated campaigns based on real business goals (not just traffic). Additionally, we operate an omni-channel approach to all of our digital marketing efforts, especially when we are looking at SEM and SEO. All Points Digital evaluates search efficiency by optimizing the channels together whereas most agencies view these services as different silos. We feel that approach provides a disservice to clients because growth in one of these channels can skew or cannibalize the growth in another. We view success when the combined channels revenues are growing collectively. By taking this tactic you can create a much more efficient overall campaign strategy.
What is one recent interesting campaign based on this approach?
We work with a well known retail/e-commerce company that has a lot of brand recognition. After analyzing their analytics, we realized they were spending a majority (over 80%) of their paid search budget on branded keywords. For some companies, this is required, but when we analyzed the organic and paid search traffic together, we realized they were cannibalizing their own sales! This is because we discovered the organic channel would capture over 93% of the branded search terms for their products without spending a nickel on their own brand name. We recommended they stop branded search entirely and shift their budget to more non-branded (top of funnel) yet still high intent keywords and key phrases. Our hypothesis that this would increase their top of funnel consumer, and familiarize more hand raisers for their products to the brand. This was a tough sell to our client because other companies’ previously recommended allocating most of the paid search budget into buying branded terms (which delivered inflated results), but ultimately they trusted our team and the analytics we provided. The results spoke for themselves as they reduced spend over 25% and increased sales by 100% when looking at both paid search and organic search together. The omni-channel approach to paid and organic search allows for innovative strategies that many agencies do not take advantage of.
Additionally, any retailer plays in a very competitive space and frequently, one competitor simply outspends the rest. In this example, one main competitor spent roughly 10x our client, so with this approach, the client can leverage spend in a more efficient manner and outcompete someone with a larger budget. We find not wasting budget very interesting and regardless of the client, most companies are inefficient with their paid search because they evaluate the results within a silo.
Why take this approach to creating campaign strategies?
First and foremost, looking at all of your marketing activities together makes the most sense to us as a company. In order to achieve your sales and revenue goals, you need everything working together. In particular, in digital marketing there is so much of SEM that relies on SEO. From improving content on landing pages to improve quality scores to leveraging organic results to develop new paid search campaigns, both channels need each other to be successful. At times, this approach means less spend, which means less percentage of spend for our agency, but we view our clients as partners. In the long run, we establish much more trust from our clients with these innovative strategies that we have more bandwidth to try more in the future. For example, for local companies, we run traditional paid search campaigns, but the most effective strategy to generate new leads is likely Google Local Service Ads (if the service is available to the industry). While we could run these, they are most effective from a budgetary perspective being monitored by the client itself. This also means our agency doesn’t receive compensation, but it does generate more trust in our recommendations that make clients more profitable over time.
Every marketing agency makes a claim that they are partners with their clients, but through these types of recommendations, we back up that claim with our work and recommendations. In the end, clients want their business to succeed and know if their agency helps them achieve their goals, then they will view them as partners. And once you unlock that trust and partner status with a client, they are more willing to share additional information, which helps drive more opportunities to create interesting campaigns.