Paid Search and Visitor Insight

Paid search programs can provide a certain amount of basic insight into your campaign success, allowing you to see which paid ads brought in visitors. With this information, you can figure out what sorts of things people are searching for when your website catches their eye, and you can tweak your marketing efforts based on this. However, systems fall short of automating continued, targeted messaging to your paid search visitors and often can’t link ads viewed through the sales cycle to closed opportunities.

Marketing Automation Enhances Visitor Insight

From the start, marketing automation makes paid search easier. You can quickly and easily create a number of branded landing pages that are very specific to each of your paid search ads. Having landing pages that are closely related to your paid search terms improves your Google quality score and helps you gain better positioning at a lower cost.

Once you’ve converted some prospects with your killer offer, they are entered in your marketing automation system and you can begin nurturing them until they are sales ready. Segmenting prospects based on which ad they responded to will result in tailored communication that helps move prospects forward in the sales cycle. Segmentation may be based on their product of interest or perhaps a pain point that was addressed in your ad.

Once a qualified prospect has begins working with a sales rep, connecting your paid search data and your CRM data in the marketing automation system give you the ability to keep track of a prospect through all stages of the sales cycle. Ultimately this results in you being able to see your cost-per-opportunity rather than just your cost-per-click, leading to more effective future spending.

Each type of content has a different set of titling guidelines that reflects the formality and flexibility of the content.

White papers are versatile content because they can be pushed out through various marketing channels or  made available on the website to pull leads in. But they can also be very time-consuming and require an investment from the reader. Therefore, their titles should get straight to the point and give the user an idea early on of what to expect. For example, a white paper on The Four T’s of Effective Email clearly informs the reader of the benefit to be gained from a read.

Case studies help companies demonstrate the value of their product through the real-world success of a client. Ideally, a prospect will read a case study that most aligns with their situation to gain an understanding of how they can benefit from the product. The right title can help match a prospect with the appropriate case study. Give your case studies titles that reflect the client’s previous situation and then the bottom-line improvements that resulted.

Blog posts allow for the most freedom and flexibility of  the content available. The typical blog post requires less time and resources to produce, but suffers from minimal investment from the reader. For this reason, developing the right title for a blog post means creating a great hook to catch the attention of the reader. Your title should reflect the content of the post while stirring up interest and curiosity.

An important factor that exists across the board is to keep SEO in mind. A strong, keyword-rich title can add more value to your content as search engines discover it and users share it. This can result in more back-links and an improved online presence for your company.

Find the pefect formula for landing page success

The new MarketingSherpa report on landing page optimization concluded that two factors are the most important when it comes to building the perfect landing page:

Headline and Call to Action

The good news is that these are two of the simplest factors to test. Using a marketing automation system that offers multivariate testing, you can set up a custom link that will alternate incoming traffic between different landing pages. Because the traffic is coming from the same source, you don’t have to worry about outside factors like where you are advertising, you just get to see which page is leading to more conversions.

A smart testing tip is to test only one item at a time. So you may want to start with one factor – like determining your top performing headline – and then take that headline and use it on the pages where you will test your call to action. Keeping things separate allows you to attribute your success or failure to one particular factor, at least as much as it is possible to attribute it to any element that you control.

Other areas suggested as important for testing include images, body copy and form layout.

Don't dive in too deep when you're just learning to swim.

Marketing automation covers a lot of territory, and the possibilities for improving your bottom line can be overwhelming. As a growing field of business technology, it seems like a new methodology or technique is being created every day. If you’re just starting out with including automation techniques in your online marketing campaigns, it doesn’t make sense to utilize every aspect right away. Start small, dipping your toe in the shallow end, and work your way up from there as you get comfortable with the techniques. Remember that poorly executed advanced marketing automation is much less effective than correctly executed simple marketing automation.

Lead Nurturing

The most complicated area of marketing automation is probably the practice of lead nurturing. Lead nurturing is how you convince potential customers to become paying customers, and automation programs allow you to do this on a large scale. If you’re just starting out, consider using simple drip programs for lead nurturing. A basic drip program will follow a straight path and consist of emails with pauses in between. As you get familiar with the system and start segmenting and understanding click actions, you can branch off a little more, but try to rein in your excitement and keep things straight, or you could find yourself in the deep end of the pool, unable to swim.

Scoring

Most MA programs have a default scoring system which should be adequate for anyone starting out. The urge might be to try and customize your scoring system, but remember that making changes will effect your entire database and can be difficult to reverse if you make a mistake. Certain changes are more and less valuable, so the best way to go about adjusting your own scoring system would be to change point values gradually and see what happens to your inbound leads. This way you can get a feel for what actions are more valuable.

Landing Pages

Smart forms and multivariate testing can be great tools for capturing lead information on your website, but inexperience can lead to landing pages that drive leads away. The key is to start with simple forms on your landing pages that ask just the minimal required amount of information to be useful and avoid being intrusive. Over time you can begin A/B testing to determine the right copy for your landing pages and fields for your forms.

Here are some areas to apply WIIWTP:

• Email Frequency – How many emails do you receive per day? Chances are that it’s more than you can handle / would like to receive. With this in mind, think about how often you are reaching out to a prospect by email. Like you, most prospects don’t want to have their inbox flooded with messages from the same company. Consider, as a prospect, how often you are willing to receive emails from another company to determine the appropriate frequency. WIIWTP? – I would want the company to keep in touch with relevant information twice a month, but not overload me with emails.
• Email Content – In general, most emails come off as marketing messages or personal emails. Although both types of emails can be successful, they have their own unique goals to accomplish and shouldn’t be used interchangeably. For instance, a full HTML email is great for announcing new features, whereas a personalized, text email helps the salesperson better engage the prospect. Do you prefer to be contacted by your sales rep at the company or by the general account? By using dynamic content, the emails used in a nurturing program can be general text emails that come off as personalized. WIIWTP? – I would want the receive the correct kind of email based on my stage in the buying process.
• Contact Forms – These days, forms are the gatekeepers of information.  Companies use them as a means to gather information about a prospect and leads fill them out to unlock content. It’s a win-win situation as long as there’s balance. When companies get greedy for details, then prospects get deterred and don’t fill out the form. To keep this from happening, the marketer should approach the form from the perspective of the prospect to determine the amount of information needed by the company that the prospect would provide. As a visitor of the website, would you be willing to give your job title to download a white paper? Maybe not at first, but the company can use progressive profiling to slowly build a complete profile as new content is accessed. WIIWTP? – I would want to fill out a simple, non-invasive form for content.

WIIWTP? – This may not be the next big craze in rubber bracelets, but you may want to write it on a sticky note to put at your desk. You’ll always have that reminder of “What if I were the prospect?”

Here are a few ideas on landing page elements that you can test with a just a simple switch:

• Field Type: Do your prospects prefer drop-down menus or free text fields?
• Images: Would adding a product image help your conversions? How about a lifestyle shot? Maybe a data-oriented chart or graph?
• Button Messaging: An interesting piece of research by HubSpot showed a huge different in clicks based on one simple factor – what you button says!
• Thank You Messages: Try out different post-conversion offers to keep prospects engaged. Maybe after showing some interest in your product demo, they’d like to view a more in-depth case study. On the other hand, if they are still in the research phase perhaps a white paper would be more appealing.

Trying something new for a short time will help you determine if your design strategy needs an update or if you were on the right track all along.

Clickthrough Rate refers to the number of clickthroughs–when a customer clicks through pages on your site–expressed as a fraction of the total impressions. Clickthrough rate measures the effectiveness of an online ad by counting the number of viewers that are interested enough to click on that ad. Because clickthroughs only represent the first step in the conversion process, this is a metric best suited to measuring medium-term marketing goals rather than the end result of a campaign.

# of Clickthroughs / Total Impressions = Clickthrough Rate

Things to keep in mind when creating a form are:

• Keep it simple - Just require the basic information. You want enough to be able to contact them, but you don’t want them to get frustrated with the length of your form or number of questions and have them skip over it. It is OK to ask some questions that will give you more information about them, but don’t require it. This way, when someone is willing they will take the extra time to fill out the extra questions, and if not they will simply fill out what is required, its a win-win situation.

• Make it easy to fill out – Nobody is going to spend 30 minutes filling out a form on your landing page, you are lucky if they even take 5. You need to make it clear and straightforward, no high tech special effects are needed. Impress people in other areas of your website, this is not the place, if they can’t just type there information up quickly there is a big chance they won’t do it at all.

• Balance friction and incentive – Friction is the consumer’s resistance to a given element in the sales process. It can be caused by many things, including filling out a form. The friction the consumer feels needs to be outweighed by the incentive they will receive after completing the desired action. Put simply, if you want a prospect to fill out a form, you’d better make it worth their while. It is not possible to have zero friction, that would lead to no information on the sales side, and no incentive would create no leads or extremely poor leads, so it is imperative that a balance is achieved that will generate interest and happy prospects.

Marketing automation enables you to create a landing page in just a few quick steps.  The process is laid out in simple terms with many benefits and features:

• No IT or webmaster required
• Reusable templates that can even be imported from an existing website
• Ability to copy previous landing pages and simply update content
• Easy drag and drop builder to build templates
• Use existing forms or create new forms with a drag and drop builder
• File hosting for images and logos

With such a simple process and easy-to-use features, you can knock out a few landing pages before you even finish your morning coffee.