LinkedIn – connecting people.
Call it whatever you want – Pay per Click, SEM, paid traffic, digital or online marketing – you will find a community for it on LinkedIn. And these communities share precious marketing tips that are worth keeping an eye on.
You can tell in an instant Matt Mroczek’s Two Minute Tuesday videos are one of the LinkedIn resources infused with savvy entrepreneurship and marketing goodness. I’ve stumbled upon his enthusiastic video on one of the must-use marketing tools – Zest.is. Already a Zest fan? That’s great! I had to connect with this guy. And I did.
A few marketing talks later, thanks to LinkedIn (and Zest!), here we go – Matt has accepted my invitation to share his wisdom and enthusiasm on Pay per Click with the Search Scientists readers. Find out when it’s the right time to start a PPC campaign, what paid channels should you explore, and much more from the video below.
P.S. You’ll get double Matt-knowledge – Matt Mroczek is joined by Matt Lo for this insightful PPC discussion.
Matt Mroczek
Matt Mroczek recently left the marketing agency world where he was overseeing national campaigns for some of your favorite household brands. Currently, as the VP of Marketing for Chipbot, his primary focus is finding new and unique ways to help small businesses grow.
Pay Per Click (PPC) is a common strategy for founders and marketers looking to grow their business. But how do you know if it’s right for you?
Driving more traffic to your website doesn’t always equate to more sales. It takes time and often goes beyond changing your headlines, website, and product offering; and more into changing your mindset.
In this video, Matt Lo and I discuss what to expect when starting a new campaign, how to incorporate storytelling and how to get the most out of your PPC campaign.
Transcript Below:
PPC Mindset
Matt Mroczek: I think a lot of people jump into ads because they hear somebody’s crushing it.
They’re spending five… ten thousand a month on Google and obviously, they wouldn’t be doing it if they weren’t seeing a return.
Do you think that adds pressure to business owners to either jump into that space or turn it off once they don’t see it working and then be like… oh well, it doesn’t work for my business?
Matt Lo: If you’re going in that mindset, that’s fear of missing out. You’re not going in the mindset of…
A.) Run this as an experiment. Is this channel good for me?
And then…
B.) Having a game plan on where are all the possible ways of failing and here are all the avenues I’m willing to take to make that fail into a success case.
So you really have to have, you know, a really good mindset… good plan… good strategy.
So you can develop your own personal framework on how you’re going to conquer Google Ads or Facebook Ads.
When’s the Right Time?
Matt Mroczek: Well, we’ve talked a lot about product market fit before.
I don’t think that’s as relevant as it is in terms of maturity of the company, maturity of the solution, as well as overall marketing budgets.
When’s the right time to start considering paid search?
Matt Lo: As early as you can.
I don’t think you need to commit to a super large budget. I’ve ran successful campaigns with $750.
Pretty good CTR, around 5%-6%, so slightly above average, and then making a really good profit off of it right on the first conversion.
So I think once you have a good sweet spot, that’s your money. That’s where you can grow and you keep investing it.
Ad Placement
Matt Lo: When a business wants to run ads, is it always a default answer to just go on Google? There’s always a default answer. Maybe just go only on Facebook? Or is it like a blended approach?
Matt Mroczek: I think oftentimes people think of it very singular, like – Ooo! We need traffic to our site. Google works for us because of whatever I’ve read, heard or, like you mentioned, a competitor or person I know is crushing it on Google Ads.
It really takes a lot of testing in terms of which channel and especially in terms of retargeting, where you can see a lot of the money as well.
If you think about the first time you hear about something and it’s gonna work for you, there’s a lot of levers that need to click instantly.
They know my pain, they have a great solution, and they have proof that shows that they’ve done it before; but that’s hard to convince on the first time.
So a lot of the times it’s in thinking and linking your other accounts albeit through social or through paid search. To then retarget people and then say ooh! remember this compelling message? You still got this pain, here’s where we can add value.
User Behavior
Matt Mroczek: For knowing what keywords to bid on, for creating a good headline and everything that goes into it for your paid search…
How do you combat the whole thought process that users today are just going to search for their term, they know the ads are there and they’re just going to scroll right past it. How do you counter that?
Matt Lo: Well, your SEO counters that, right?
Having great content, which means: you’re telling a great story, you have great value, and there’s action happening behind it.
That’s your organic listing.
In terms of ads, it’s okay if people are scrolling past it. You’re not trying to capture 100% of the market for that keyword. You’re trying to capture a certain part and you’re trying to measure against that.
It’s all about goal setting in that regard. So you look at the volume of keywords, you combine all those keywords to figure out your overall volume and you know this batch of keywords is going to this landing page.
Here’s the current competition. I want to beat the competition in terms of click-through-rates on that particular ad set.
So you’re not comparing against everyone, you’re just comparing against competition because it’s the easiest way you can measure success.
Marketing Channels
Matt Lo: Should businesses start running ads against Instagram? And we’ll say… the situation should be maybe B2B?
Matt Mroczek: What do you mean by run ads against Instagram? Or just use that platform?
Matt Lo: How many times during a lunch meeting someone will ask “Hey, I don’t know if my Instagram ads are working” or maybe another kind of question would be “Should I run ads on Instagram, will it make me more money?”
Matt Mroczek: I think Instagram is a great channel, B2C brands definitely win more, just because it’s more lifestyle, more visually focused.
That doesn’t mean B2B brands can’t; but you really have to have great content, great resources and great stories to tell.
I think some of the best ones on it are Adobe and MailChimp. Those are massive companies that know what they’re doing and they have a great story that they’re telling. They know their solution and they know that’s where their audience is.
So it’s not easier for them, but they at least have a good recipe to follow when telling that story.
Storytelling in PPC
Matt Lo: That’s an interesting perspective. Instagram and maybe a little bit of Facebook, it’s all about telling a great story.
When you’re on Google Ads, it’s a little more straightforward. It’s: I have a problem, I need solving, I have a question.
Matt Mroczek: They’re searching for it.
Matt Lo: Right. So do you think that the story still matters for PPC? Or is it more or less – here’s the offering, here’s the value proposition, here’s the discount you’ll get. Here’s the social proof and then you need to buy.
Matt Mroczek: I think you’re gonna start seeing a big (and you already have been seeing) a big translation from people using paid search to boost their content marketing efforts.
Here’s a good example. My sister’s an attorney and one thing that i’m helping her with is: if you’re spending a ton of money on Google Ads and the first thing someone types in is “criminal defense lawyer” + whatever city that they live in. What’s going to be more captivating? Call us today, schedule a free consultation. That’s what everybody is saying. Or:
- Top 10 things to know after you get a DUI
- Top 10 things to know when you get your first arrest
- How to know the checkboxes when you’re going through a divorce ?
That’s much more captivating content and that’s where you start seeing the story interwoven into a page search strategy.
Winning at PPC
Matt Mroczek: In paid search – agree or disagree – that the number one goal is to get somebody to convert the first time, as soon as they hit your landing page?
Matt Lo: Agree.
Matt Mroczek: Now what’s the next best alternative? Or what are the other options? Because not everybody’s gonna convert.
What’s a good conversion percentage on your landing page and then what do you hope for after the fact?
Matt Lo: Having content around that landing page that can capture their email address.
So, oftentimes what I’ll do, usually for B2B, not for B2C: I’ll have blog articles related to the content of that landing page that they can go to to learn more. And then that blog article has calls-to-action to capture their email for the newsletter, to get more of that content.
PPC & AI
Matt Lo: Right now we use AdWords in a very input-output kind of process. We have to know the tool in and out and then we put all our input values in and we measure against it.
How do you think AI machine learning is gonna change that PPC process?
Matt Mroczek: It’s gonna pull in more data sources.
So then you could have a tool, say, that’s sharing data across, (as you mentioned) competition data, in terms of how that’s reporting.
But also more in terms of the user behavior, of not just how many people searched, how many people saw, how many people clicked or did not, and how far they went down the funnel.
The AI component of it could then start crafting unique headlines on-the-fly.
I think you mentioned this in a previous video – on-the-fly – that is super relevant to that person at that time based upon the last six hours of their day.
Matt Lo: Do you think the channel will eventually stop being effective?
If Google introduces AI – because messaging is already taken care of, it’s already changing dynamically – what’ going to happen?
Matt Mroczek: It’ gonna definitely shift the competitive landscape more towards the product.
I think the biggest thing that you saw with, not necessarily the dot-com boom, but just the internet and the evolution of it in general – Amazon being a good example – bad products get left behind. And I think that’s where you’re gonna start seeing more. More heavy investments into the product itself.
Because you can’t just count on a great headline, cool branding, and a funny video. It needs to be really great.
Matt Lo: You can’t smooth talk your way into buying my product.
Matt Mroczek: Yeah!
Matt Lo: You know, I’m definitely guilty of that in precious startups, where maybe I thought the value was high but it wasn’t really. But I was really great at selling it on a landing page or an ad.
Matt Mroczek: Mmm-hmm! And then now AI could be able to predict: okay, well, we know your persona pretty tight and because of that, we have a 90% confidence rating that this tool is gonna solve your problem.
And then, a secondary tool – 70%. And so on and so forth.
Matt Lo: AI could say your product is bad and you shouldn’t run ads.
Matt Mroczek: Yeah!
