Next Wavelength

Full Stack Digital Marketing Agency

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5 Tips To Manage Your PPC Campaigns During COVID-19

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COVID-19 has affected customers and businesses in various ways. Customers are buying more of their essentials online while some businesses are scrambling to break even. Altered buyer behavior and current market situations have caused some businesses to end their online PPC campaigns while others are contemplating it. It might turn out to be the wrong move that will cause more harm than good.

Scale Down, But Don’t Kill Your Campaign

Buying habits and priorities have changed for now. If your conversion rates have dipped, take a look at other businesses in your industry. If they are in a similar predicament, reduce your ad spend but do not kill your campaigns completely especially if they were working well. The data will get messed up and you will have to start from scratch to rebuild your targeted audience. 

When you come across logistics issues such as stuck deliveries or trouble restocking the goods, don’t remove your ads entirely. You can pause them for a while and mark them as “currently out of stock”.

Pounce If You Have To

Most people are staying home in isolation and their use of the internet has increased significantly. There is a lot of traffic and huge amounts of wasted potential because businesses are scared to market their offerings.

PPC rates have been fluctuating but right now the cost of ads is low. While the conversion rates are different based on industries, it is still an amazing opportunity for proactive businesses to build their brand. The usual oversaturated market is facing less competition as many marketers and companies have retreated.

After figuring out how the market is evolving, businesses that dare to act now have a potential to grow that should not be squandered. 

Due to uncertain business conditions, there is a window of opportunity now where your competitors are not spending on particular keywords. You can increase rankings for the more competitive and high traffic keywords by spending less and increasing your conversion rate.

Connect With Your Audience

Use emails and go live on your social media accounts and build relations. Being open and wishing good for your consumers health and livelihoods would improve brand image and conversions. 

Pivot slightly and increase your offerings by factoring in certain activities that have been on the rise like homeschooling, working virtually at home offices, social distancing, reconnecting with old friends and family. Mention them when in your ad campaigns too.

Get inspirations from some of the top businesses in the world and how they are conducting themselves during this pandemic.

Change Your Messaging

We are still living in uncertainty. Be considerate of people’s feelings and critically examine the context and tone of your messaging. Mention your services accurately in your ads such as “free home delivery” or “same day delivery”. Avoid showing large gatherings of people. 

You should experiment and run campaigns on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and other social platforms. Find out how people are searching for terms and topics related to the Coronavirus and adapt your marketing to help them in any way you can.

Take Advantage Of Cash Grants

Last but not least, eligible small businesses should take advantage of grants offered by the likes of Facebook and Google in their efforts to support and empower Small Business owners. Besides 

Facebook is offering $100 million in cash credits to support SMBs in 30 countries. To be eligible, you must:

  • Have between 2 and 50 employees
  • Have been in business for over a year
  • Have experienced challenges from COVID-19
  • Be in or near a location where Facebook operates

Similarly, Google will provide ad credits to “Small and medium-sized businesses globally, who have spent with a Google Ads account in ten out of twelve months of 2019, and in January and/or February of this year. Eligible customers are those who advertised directly with us or through a partner, and adhere to our advertising policies.”

Wrap Up

While there is a positive impact amongst local grocery retailers and education industries, some of the most negatively impacted verticals include travel, tourism, leisure, car rentals and alternative medicine. We would advise you to observe the landscape well, gain up to date knowledge before making any big decisions. It is easier to experiment with new pricing and messaging and scale upwards when your PPC campaigns go right – than to completely start from scratch hoping for a miracle.

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6 Advanced Techniques for Scaling Facebook Ads

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A/B test copy. A/B test landing page. A/B test creative. A/B test your campaigns. A/B test. A/B test. 

Aren’t you tired of listening to it?

Yes, A/B test has its place in Facebook advertising but it is not the answer for human existence!

Here are six powerful techniques to help you in scaling your Facebook ads profits.

1. Managing Your Daily Budgets

This is something a lot of Facebook Advertisers struggle with, how do you decide daily budgets?

There’s no doubt Facebook provides high-quality traffic to campaigns with higher daily spends. But if you haven’t tested your audience, creative and copy – the better option is to always start with something like $20 per day. 

Once you have done tests and seen results, you can start scaling your campaigns by setting up higher daily budgets like $100 or $200 per day.

It’s all about providing Facebook with more data, if you can spend more, that does not necessarily mean your ads will start performing better.

Optimize first, then scale.

2. Continuously Fed Lookalike Audience

To scale your campaigns and boost sales, it’s really important to keep your Audiences fresh.

One way to achieve that is by following a strategy we call ‘Continuously Fed Lookalike Audiences’.

Can you imagine the return on your Ad spend if you could only target people who are more likely to convert?

Assuming you’ve already implemented Facebook Pixel on your Landing Page or Website, you can create custom conversions and track everyone who is converting from your ads. You can then create a Lookalike audience of people who are converting and create new Ads from it.

The data will keep getting stronger, as your custom conversions feed your lookalike. This technique is guaranteed to scale your conversions and amplify your ROI.

3. Facebook Automated Rules

Facebook has an automation feature in Ads Manager called ‘Rules‘. Which has different parameters for automating actions like ‘turning on’ or ‘turning off’ a Campaign, an Ad Set or an individual Ad. 

For example, if Cost per Result goes above an amount which is not profitable for your business, Facebook will automatically shut off your ads. 

Automation rules help in minimizing the risks like over-spending on Ads that don’t deliver results without having to monitor your ads all day long. 

You can also set an automation rule to increase your campaign budget and scale if your ads are profitable.

4. Lookalike Audience from Video Engagement

It is a powerful technique where you can really leverage your video marketing.

Facebook allows you to create a custom audience based on video views. For example, people who watched more than 50% of your video.

If people watch your video (or at least 50% of it), there’s a decent chance that they are interested in your offer, or at the very least motivated by your marketing. 

When you build your campaigns based on lookalikes of an already engaged audience, it will have a higher probability of targeting more individuals who are interested in your offerings.

5. Avoid Audience Overlap Between Your Ad Sets

Audiences you create on Facebook can be checked for overlap.

The ‘Audience Overlap’ tool will show what percentage of people are common among the different audiences you have created. If you are not keeping this factor in check, you can count on Facebook doing it for you, as it’s a part of their algorithm. 

Ad Sets with more than 25% of Audience Overlap will have delivery issues. Ads can simply stop showing, or worse, they will end up competing against each other in Facebook auction. 

As if you don’t have enough competition already.

6. LTV (Lifetime Value) Lookalike Audience

Over the years Facebook has been gathering information from their pixels all across the web.

Pixels have gathered up the data for conversion values and revenue tracking for whoever has been using them. 

Facebook can tell how much an individual spends over their ‘lifetime’ with businesses, those who spend more are segmented as ‘high quality’ traffic.

When creating a custom audience from an email list, Facebook also provides an option to add value to each individual, how much they have profited your business. 

That’s why this technique of creating ‘LTV Lookalikes’ is really great for businesses who have a well segmented CRM database. 

By following this technique you will be able to closely align your Lookalike audiences with high value individuals across Facebook.

Wrap Up

These are some of the most powerful techniques that we use in our Facebook advertising. When you start layering these techniques in your campaigns, you will be able to tackle scaling and profitability issues with ease.

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Why Do Businesses Need Digital Marketing?

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Business owners have to make very important decisions like how much to invest in digital marketing, which social channels to pick, whether to assemble an in-house team or hire an agency. Understanding these issues well is extremely vital to identify your current situation and achieve your goals.

Here are the answers to some of the most common questions about digital marketing.

Why Should I Care About Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is an integral part of how a business operates and caters to its customers. Traditional marketing favored big companies while modern digital marketing allows smaller companies a chance to compete as well. The only catch is having an integrated marketing strategy which will be data-driven and optimized as the campaigns go on. 

Some small businesses have used digital and reached globally – making sales in 3 continents within 18 months and increasing revenue by over 200%. This would not be possible with traditional marketing.

The main benefits of digital marketing include:

  • Your customers are online. Reach out to them where they hang out at the time they can see you.
  • Making it a level playing field for smaller businesses who have the right approach towards digital marketing.
  • Advanced analytics ensure that you know what is working and what is not. An ad on TV costs a lot and you don’t really know what was the outcome of running it.
  • You can track every action immediately – measure the time, money and efforts you spend, cut the losses and double down on what works.
  • The more thorough and thought out your marketing strategy is, the better you can target your audience and personalize the marketing.
  • Can be highly automated saving you time so you can focus on your product and services.
  • When done right, gives extremely high ROI.
  • Flexibility – it can scale as you grow and expand.
  • You can talk to your customers and create brand loyalty and retention. Answer them when they have any queries. 
  • Reviews and testimonials add social proof which helps in persuading skeptical customers.
  • Reach a global marketplace and understand them better.
  • Your competitors are online. You can position yourself in a way to compete with them.

How Much Time Will It Take To See The Results? Can I Get Sales Immediately?

The short answer? It depends.

On what?

On the nature of product/business, market awareness and demand, competitors, and saturation. Digitally speaking, it depends on your website’s state, how long it has been around, how much content is on it.

Anyone guaranteeing super-quick results needs to take a lie detector test. 

There is no magic formula to determine the exact time it will take to see any sales.

We get it, you want to see immediate results. So do we, but that happens very rarely. Some results might come immediately and some a few months later.

The main reason why many companies don’t taste the fruits of digital marketing is that they stop too soon and pull out when they feel things are not working out. 

Digital agencies rely on experience and processes – not just mere tactics. This way the returns of SEO, content, PPC or any other service can be measured, monitored, and optimised. 

 A good website, branding, SEO, content marketing and social media strategy will work with each other and eventually increase traffic and generate sales.

Which Digital Channel Should I Use To Sell?

This doesn’t have a straight one-size-fits-all answer.

Yes, you want to get the most out of whichever channel you invest time or money into.

Every business should work on content, SEO, email marketing. 

This is because the price of Google, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn ads fluctuate and not everyone can afford to market on all platforms simultaneously. In 2019, 97% of marketers were investing in paid social. But you can’t just throw some money on paid channels and expect to acquire leads and customers.

The ultimate aim should be to create a multi-channel funnel which will generate leads and sales. This funnel strategy will develop gradually and depend on your budget, keeping in consideration your short-term and long-term goals.

At Next Wavelength we use a lean methodology that starts with the least amount of risk and is experimental in nature. We monitor the campaign, discarding what doesn’t work and improving what does.

How Much Money Should I Invest In Digital Marketing?

Today, most companies are not relying solely on billboards, television ads, flyers or pamphlets. Their prime focus is on digital marketing.

As per, Gartner’s Annual CMO Spend Survey, 61% of CMOs said that they were expecting budgets to increase for 2020.

There is no absolute number. Of course it is easier to justify the cost when someone already wants to scale a marketing funnel that is already generating sales. It becomes extremely uncomfortable for someone to shell out money when setting up digital assets for the first time.

The branding, logo, website, marketing funnel – all require detailed research before they can be executed. Keeping in mind a user-centric approach will make your life much easier. A user-centric approach is when you understand your customer’s needs and objections they may have and work towards providing a smooth experience.

Do your website and landing pages convert users or will they need to be revamped? Do you have access to necessary tools and are they integrated properly?

How much you should invest in digital marketing ultimately boils down to the state of what you already have such as a website, landing pages, tools etc. and where you need to go.

I Have Already Tried Digital Marketing Before And It Didn’t Work

For many companies, digital marketing doesn’t work out the first time. Here are some of the reasons that might happen:

  • Using a cookie cutter approach and merely copy-pasting templates. Instead of understanding the objectives and developing a custom solution.
  • Not having a consistent look and messaging across the various digital channels
  • Bad communication and not highlighting the benefits of your product.
  • Having little budget and not knowing how to create a process where you start targeting the low hanging fruit, get tangible results and move upwards.
  • Not taking the time to research prospects and customers. This results in poor understanding of the target audience due to flawed buyer persona.
  • Undefined goals, no tracking and measurement of success, unreasonable expectations.
  • Copycat marketers who can’t formulate strategies based on market conditions, but only follow tactics that worked for others (in a certain context).
  • Trying to find unethical means to sales like buying lists containing leads data, blackhat SEO and content tactics, buying fake likes and views etc.
  • Lack of education

Can I Do Digital Marketing By Myself?

Yes, and no.

If you have the resources, you can assemble an in-house team for design, development, SEO, content, performance marketing etc. But if you don’t already have a proper digital marketing specialist or experienced HR, you wouldn’t know the right person to hire.

Furthermore, can you afford to pay the costs of hiring and maintaining an entire team? You need to facilitate their training to make sure they are up to date with the latest developments and best practices.

If things go well, that’s awesome. But allow us to play the devil’s advocate here for a moment.

What if you spent all that money, months have passed and you’re not seeing any results? How will you find out the root cause of the problem or who needs to be held accountable?

Maybe you’re thinking of not hiring a team and just doing everything by yourself?

With competitors focusing on content marketing, visual storytelling, demand generation, data analytics – here’s our advice. No one can do it unaccompanied, that’s why you need to work with specialist agencies.

You see, with an agency you get what you pay for. Everything is taken care of and they can help you within a reasonable budget. They have the tools, experience and resources in-house with skilled specialists to use them to meet your target goals. But best of all, when your agreed-upon goals aren’t met, the agency will be held accountable.

Wrap Up

So there you go. As you can see, it is very important to choose experienced specialists to prepare your strategy and decide the tactics to meet your objectives. Digital marketing is extremely necessary to understand your customers’ pain points and how you can help them in their journey. A data-driven approach removes the guesswork out of your marketing.

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What is the Goal of Your Ad Copy? To Get it Clicked

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The goal of your ad copy is to pre-frame, pre-qualify and pre-sell your ideal customers to click on the ad itself. The goal shouldn’t be to sell – hopefully, you already have your marketing/sales funnel in place which can take care of the actual sales.

Eugene M Schwartz wrote in his book Breakthrough Advertising, “The greatest mistake marketers make is trying to create demand.”

“The power, the force, the overwhelming urge to own that makes advertising work, comes from the market itself, and not from the copy. A copy cannot create the desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people and focus those already existing desires onto a particular product. This is the copy writer’s task: not to create this mass desire – but to channel and direct it. Actually, it would be impossible for anyone advertiser to spend enough money to actually create this mass desire. He can only exploit it. And he dies when he tried to run against it.”

What you want to do is to identify who your ideal customer is and delve into the psychology of what motivates them to buy – tap into the demand!

Step 1: Identify one major problem/desire your customers want to resolve for in their lives

You should be spending as much time on researching the problem/desire as you do on solving it – and find the single, biggest and broadest demand in the market with an urgency behind it.

Step 2: What does your product do to resolve this problem/desire?

Think through what your product does and list out all the solutions your product can offer or how it can help fulfill the desires of your customers.

Step 3: Identify the market awareness

There are 5 different levels of market awareness, this will help determine what type of copy you need to use in your ads:

Most Aware:

This market already knows what products are out there to solve the problem or fulfill a desire – and they know what it will cost them to get it. A shampoo or a toothpaste can be a good example here. The best thing to do is to create an ‘offer copy’ for this market, discounts etc.

Product Aware:

People are aware of the problem/desire and they know there are products in the market that can solve the problem or fulfill the desire – they just don’t know about your product yet. The copy needs to be educational/informative, explaining the product in the best way possible.

Solution Aware:

Here the market is aware of the problem/desire and they know there is a solution to that, but they don’t know of any products yet. This copy will be focusing on ‘future pacing the solution’ – what will their life be like after having that solution and how they can achieve it with your product.

Problem Aware:

Problem aware as the title suggests, are aware about the problem but they don’t know if there’s even a solution necessarily to solving it yet or solution that can fulfill their desire. Here the copy will lead to the problem itself, outline the solution and conclude with your product.

Unaware:

Unless you’re trying to open a new market, this scenario will probably not apply to you. But the formula applies the same. You need to lead with the message to explain why you think there’s a problem, why the market should care, what the solution is and how your product helps. This is generating demand, and taking Eugene’s advice into account, you will need some serious budget to generate this mass desire.

Step 4: What is the appeal you want to use?

Fear of losing money, greed to earn more money, passion to learn more, skepticism towards a solution they have used before etc. There are several ways you can appeal to the market, once you’ve figured out the pain points you will know the right appeal to make.

Final Thoughts

Here’s the framework to build the best message/copy for your ad.

  • Identify the problem/desire
  • Figure out how your product can provide the solution
  • Find out the market awareness level
  • Make the right appeal

Now create the story that will sell your product!

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Don’t Kill Your Marketing: Learn Market Sophistication

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Market sophistication is sort of a barometer for figuring out how many marketing messages, tactics and strategies a market has already been exposed to.

Every single market has a different level of market sophistication.

As the market becomes more mature, tactics and strategies will stop working or not deliver the expected results.

Does that mean the market is dead? No, but your marketing tactics are.

To better demonstrate the concept, I’ll be focusing mostly on the fitness industry – it has been pounded to dirt and is one of the most difficult markets to break into.

Welcome to the Jungle

1st to market is the stage one sophistication level which is a pretty rare situation, but if you are lucky enough to be in such a market, best approach with your claim is to be direct.

The market is fresh, you don’t need to elaborate your messaging here.

Next is 2nd to market (Stage two).

If your business is in this market, then it’s probably best to look at what ‘1st to market’ are already doing, how they are advertising, what claims they are making, and then enlarging on their claims.

In fitness, the 1st to market must have been claiming “reduce 5 kilos”, the competition came along and said “reduce 5 kilos in 10 days”.

By the way, another thing that happens with market sophistication is the change in marketing terminology – from “fat reducing” to “weight loss diet” to “paleo” – when all of them are the same thing.

Alright, you got the point.

When a market reaches 3rd stage of sophistication, this is where the problem arises – businesses have already copied the competitors 10 times and claim-enlarging cycles have been repeated all over again.

The market repeatedly hears it to the point that they stop believing. Your best claims are like firing bullets on a Kevlar armor!

Even if your ad said that “this will float fat right out of your body” – it wouldn’t sell your product.

This is one of the drawbacks of the so called “competitor analysis”. Most marketers get stuck there and are unable to move or breakthrough.

So, what do you do when the market is in its 3rd stage of sophistication? Which is probably the market situation of your business.

You need to shift the tactics from simple competitor analysis (doubling down) and start showing how the product works. Specially how it will work in your customer’s life.

Something from “floats fat right out of your body” to maybe “blocks the absorption of fat in your intestine.”

Not Out of the Woods Yet

Here’s the bad news though.

Your competitor will see what you’re doing, copy it, double down on it, until rest of the market falls in line and educational content becomes the norm, leaving the best of your customers with skepticism.

Unless you were the 1st to adopt this tactic, simply educating your customers will not cut it.

This is when the market reaches stage 4, it is just a continuation of elaboration and doubling down. And at stage 5 it’s safe to say your market is completely saturated or nearly dead. Nearly dead because it’s very rare for a market to completely die off.

Start bringing in some uniqueness to your content, instead of simply educating your customers about the product like everyone else in your market.

A content-tilt maybe.

In fitness industry one of these content tilts can be “self-image identification”.

It means, you’re not just telling people about the process of becoming what they want to become, but you’re taking them on the journey with you.

Perception is reality after all!

I really like the example of Kino Body’s, Greg O’Gallagher.

Greg is selling lifestyle not fitness products – his mission statement is “transforming civilians into movie star shape in the simplest way possible”.

He not only delivers on the promise, but makes you self-identify with himself and rest of his clients, who found success with his products and training methods.

Wrap Up

So summing it up:

  • Figure out where your market is in terms of the sophistication level.
  • Don’t get stuck in the doubling-down “competitor analysis strategy.”
  • If your market is saturated, i.e. “nearly dead”, find your content tilt.

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How to Test Your Ecommerce Idea Before Investing in it?

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Do you have dozens of ecommerce ideas, but you’re not sure which one will be profitable?

You have done a lot of research on these ideas, maybe even launched a few stores – all in vain? Well, majority of ecommerce businesses end up like this.

They create a bunch of products, they build massive funnels for it, then they try and figure out a way to sell just to find out that it doesn’t – after they’ve spent a ton of money.

Key to making sales is to give a product that people are willing to buy!

These steps will help you to find out whether there’s an actual demand for your idea before you invest in it. Allowing you to put together a product that people will buy.

Although, you do have to invest a little bit of money and a little bit of time to figure it out, but it’s going to be substantially less than the other route that most people end up in.

So how does this work?

Build a Landing Page and Write Your Sales Copy

Assuming you already have your idea of what you’re going to sell.

The first thing you need to do is to create a landing page. There are couple of options here, Leadpages is my favorite.

Next is to create a basic text-based sales copy for your landing page. If you don’t know how to write one, you will need to hire a copywriter to do it for you – I highly recommend that that you hire one.

The right copywriter will create a sales copy which will help you in increasing your conversions (we will get to the conversion part in a bit.)

And if you end up deciding to go with a different ecommerce idea, the copywriter can help you edit the sales copy, so you don’t have to keep repaying to create a new copy all over again.

Create an Opt-in Form

From the landing page you will have an ‘Add to cart’ button which you can either link to a new page or a pop-up window. A pop-up is what I recommend unless you have a good reason to send them to another page.

Once you have this set up, the opt-in form copy will be something around “Please enter your name and email address.”

After filling out the form, they will be re-directed to a page where it will say “Sorry we’re currently out of stock on this product, we’ll let you know once it becomes available.”

Opt-ins vs Ad Spend

So this way you’re not actually selling anything – you’re driving the traffic from the ads to the landing page and then you’re measuring the opt-ins.

Basically, you’re considering every opt-in registration as sales in this scenario – hence the conversions. Let’s say your product was worth $100 and you spent $500 on your ads to get 20 opt-ins.

We know in a 2-step process not everyone is going to buy. Since there’s no way to figure out how many will drop-off, we need to assume every opt-in is a buyer.

If you did 20 sales for $100 a piece you essentially earned $2000 in sales with $4 return on your $1 ad spend ($2000/$500.)

This means you have a profit potential with your ecommerce idea, which is a strong indicator that it makes sense for you to build or invest in the product.

If you didn’t get enough opt-ins to cover your ad spend then you know there’s not enough profit potential and you will need to test a new idea.

Create an Email List

If you decide that you’re going to build a product, once your e-store is setup properly, send out an email to this list saying, ‘we got the product back in stock, visit the store to order’.

Majority of this list will buy – so you didn’t completely waste the initial ad spend.

If you end up going with a different ecommerce idea, you can promote that new product out to the email list, driving them through the top end of your funnel.

If you did 20 sales for $100 a piece you essentially earned $2000 in sales with $4 return on your $1 ad spend.

Either way, you can leverage the email list that you build.

Wrap Up

Majority of your effort is to get the sales copy and landing page built right, and someone to run the ads properly.

Click here to download the funnel model for testing your ecommerce idea.

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