Ad Secrets From Big Brands That You Can Copy to Sell More

[Music] my name is neil patel and i help companies generate more revenue through digital marketing entrepreneur magazine said i was the number one marketer in the world and they also said i created 100 most brilliant companies i started my first website at the age of 16. i took all the money that i earned from working at amusement park and i paid a marketing firm the marketing firm provided no results and i quickly learned that i wasn't alone out of my frustration and from being broke i had no choice but to learn marketing my first client was a power supply manufacturer i helped him generate another 25 million dollars in sales and from that point i realized the power of marketing i helped everyone that i could and i built my reputation by being honest and over delivering i've helped companies like google nbc viacom general motors ebay but nothing's more satisfying than helping small business owners succeed i founded four multi-million dollar companies and i've learned all the mistakes that you should avoid i've written about them on forbes entrepreneur inc fast company and even on my own blogs it's so awesome to know that colleges from all around the world are teaching my material in their classroom over the years i've received awards from the president of the united states the house of representatives and the united nations people believe marketing is expensive and difficult fortunately that's not true there is a formula even if you don't have a technical bone in your body you can get results and my mission is to share this formula with you [Music] hello everyone uh we're gonna get started now thank you guys all for being here uh we really do appreciate it because we all know you guys have busy schedules and have other things to do throughout your day so let me share my screen all right brooke screen looks good you can see it chris looks good perfect so today we have a webinar on the ad secrets from big brands that you can copy to sell more this webinar is great for you it doesn't matter if you're a big brand or a small brand you're going to learn stuff that's going to help you grow especially when it comes to the future paid media both on things like facebook and google pretty much just buying any ads online a little bit about me uh you know i'm the co-founder of ad agency called np digital what's great about np digital is actually not me it's some of the other people on the screen like brooke and chris and we have an amazing team that helps us work on big accounts and even smbs and helps them provide amazing results and as i mentioned we have brooke she's a vp of paid media for smb division and she personally has managed more than 100 million dollars a year in ad spend then we have chris he's our vp of paid media for enterprise division that works with larger companies and he's helped manage more than 500 million dollars a year in ad spend and beneath both of them we have tons and tons of other people within our paid media departments uh they've both worked at very large corporations before brooke herself worked i prospect where i think they manage something like five billion dollars a year in ad spend uh chris at one point also used to work at facebook as well so do you feel like when you're doing your paid ads that you're fighting against the giants and it may not just be big companies a lot of times there's a lot of incumbents who have been around for a long time they've been spending money and you know that if they've been spending money for years you know not just months but literally years it must be working from because no one just burns money for no reason and for some odd reason when you're spending money you may not be able to scale as much you may not get the economics work and you're just finding it hard and if that's the case no matter what size of company you are don't worry we're going to show you how to solve some of those problems scale up your paid ads and become more successful what's really interesting when you look at you know big brands versus small brands there is a little test that was run was actually quite a big test and it was really funny in which there was real brands ex procter and gamble or bmw or visa or mastercard against fictional you know fake brands literally made up brands or unknown brands and as you can see in every single category fictional brands have a chance there's a lot of traffic that goes to fictional brands sure maybe not in the serial category i know some of these words are hard to read but in most the categories more than half the clicks can go to fictional brands so you don't actually need a big brand to do well in paid advertising and we'll show you how to do well whether you're a big brand or your brand new brand here's the thing that's super interesting you know before covid some of the most valuable places in the world were you know in cities and people would always say oh location location location nowadays the most valuable location is literally the first page of google if you have a business there's no better place than the first page of google because whether there's kobit or not kovid google's still up and running people are still searching everyone has these mobile devices like i'm holding in my hand and um you can generating clicks and more importantly you can end up getting revenue and sales so you're probably wondering how do we know the secrets from the big brands well first off we get a lot of traffic to our own website and that's really taught us a lot over the years and figured out how to scale and grow but on top of that we've worked with a lot of the big brands and we still do from all around the world and we don't just work with them in the us some of these big brands ask us to help them expand into india or australia or the uk or brazil or latin america and we literally are in you know uh seven countries we're about to be in a few more uh within the next i would say like three to five months and we work with over 492 companies that's a lot of companies and we work with companies of all sizes from startups and small medium businesses like someone being a local business selling strollers or you know having a few coffee shops all the way to large corporations like you see on the screen like the airbnbs and the ebays and the googles and the salesforce what's really interesting years and years ago steve jobs you know back in 1995's had billions and billions and up to tens of billions of dollars worth of goods and services are going to be sold on the internet he was right that it's going to be a large number and he really was one of the most brilliant people of our time and he could see things before most people but what was crazy is the numbers actually surpassed what he even projected and if you go moving forward you know over the upcoming years over six trillion dollars a year is going to be spent online that's a lot of money literally it's tons of money and e-commerce just isn't uh product-based stuff when you're looking at online commerce they include things like service space uh goods within that number whether it's b to b or b to c so you're probably wondering what are you going to expect by this webinar we're really going to go into a lot of strategies tactics uh we're going to go into quite a few and don't worry if you implement all of them or you can't or you're not going to implement them perfectly just doing a little bit is better than doing nothing and of course if you need help you can always check out our ad agency np digital where we help companies of all sizes scale sweet before jumping right in before we're showing in these secrets we want you to think of a couple of things first before we get into the key takeaways number one is as a brand you need to identify when your consumer is going to be in the mindset and shop and spend money online so you need to ask yourself when do people have a reason to spend money in the next slide what and it typically aligns as far as a consumer spending behavior around a holiday calendar so you have to plan accordingly based and be cognizant of those holidays and knowing that brains are going to be active within those holidays but that's when the consumer is most likely to purchase and have the need to purchase with that you have to be cognizant there's going to be an increase in cost increase in cpms the competition during those times is going to be high but brands also typically have different fiscal calendars than you might have but for the most part they do align with standard quarterly segments conversion conversations typically happen with our clients towards the end of a quarter towards the end of a month is we have budget we need to saturate we need to spend it or we lose it or they have quarterly goals and numbers that they need to hit uh so they could come to us and say our numbers are down we need to have a stronger push towards the end of this quarter to make up and this is a good indicator that we might need to lower your flights um use a smaller brand because those are going to be high competitive times right but going into the next quarter the start of the beginning of the quarter might be a wall time for some of these bigger bigger brands and that could be a good time for you to answer yourself into the auction with less competition and lower cpms and lower cpcs but also brands are not necessarily just thinking about investments on digital they're they're thinking about their investments that happen across all traditional media channels they're activating tv commercials radio print digital out of home and what they're trying to do is build awareness and ultimately that awareness is going to drive an action in the digital space once you're influenced by a tv you're going to go search on google once you've listened to a radio ad you're going to go search on google so you need to also be thinking about those brand activations leading to being present and digitally present in search but it's never just ads today we're going to talk about ads and the functions and the needs to be prepared with your ads but in reality the strategy and planning components of activating media is more than just advertising it's understanding who your audiences are or your landing pages effective for the purpose of the conversion or the checkout are you looking through and understanding the call to actions with the ad copy align to your landing pages for google importance of quality score there's going to be different components to what you need to activate but it's never just the ads themselves all right jumping into the actual key takeaway is a key secret secret number one big brands big brands prepare early um so as we think about this um how are you planning now for holiday which is only four months away for our clients at mp digital we are having conversations now with our clients to understand let's look and prepare for your media flight your media planning and your media schedule for this coming holiday season the conversations are happening now because we need to do a lot of things we need to evaluate last year's performance what were the winners what were the activations what target audiences align what is your campaign holiday schedule look like this year when is the most opportunistic time to start activating your media and work backwards from a timeline so it it might be that you think you have four months but four months is not necessarily a lot of time when you come when push comes to shove and activations start happening a month before black friday cyber monday so time is of the essence yeah thank you chris and as as you mentioned there are several big holidays throughout the year but the united states is a very diverse country and if you are selling a niche product you know look up the holidays in your vertical or your industry that you can compete on when there's going to be a lot of people purchasing online and so you don't always have to compete on um you know a mother's day and things like that but for the big holidays um we call it the cyber weekend um in the industry but for that big holiday you need to know what the predictions are and you really need to start early um with your marketing so one mistake that we have seen with other businesses that we work with is that you know people want to get involved on the holidays so they only plan to spend their budgets right on black friday and cyber monday but the problem with that is you have not warmed your audience and you have not done any testing so you really do need to do the benchmarking starting now so that when you get to these larger um influx of of online traffic periods that your your algorithms are already set up the the the platforms know you and jump back one there you go so looking at the predictions um this year the national federation or national retail federation you know they had predicted last year that the 2020 holiday season would be a 3.2 increase over 2019 and it actually ended up being a 6.5 increase and you can see on the graph that 2020 was an incredible year in all different ways and very challenging but from a retail perspective it was the biggest record-breaking holiday season and this year even we're starting right now in july with these predictions we're predicting a 2.7 increase over that huge spike in 2020 and we're just predicting this now in in or actually emarketer and all the experts are predicting this now in july and with covid really nobody knows it could be so much higher this year and break a bunch of records again point number two is things that we know not necessarily just the prediction but we know based on consumer and digital trends and the first thing is mobile isn't going anywhere it's only becoming more of a prevalent need for you as a brand to be optimizing for a mobile experience the big takeaways is you need to expect that when you're activating media campaigns regardless of vertical now if even if you're a b2b advertiser tuning in right now you have to assume unless you're specifically saying you don't want to show up on mobile impressions feeds but your ads are going to generate impressions on mobile audiences first so you need to create and be ready for that mobile responsive ad unit and also the mobile responsive website consumption on media device our wobble devices is only going up and we have to take advantage of that consumption as it glows as it grows globally for a mobile placement some things to do that is to understand that mobile sales are only going to be higher this year obviously year over year with 73 increase i'm sorry total projected to be 70 of total ecommerce sales in this coming year so that tells us that your experiences for your advertisers need to be frictionless experience you have to set expectations in your ad copy and your call to actions and expect for the traffic to come via mobile devices you want to make sure that you're ready for that transaction to happen in a mobile experience because that's going to generate the best outcome for your user given the experience they expect and it's also why google has a mobile first index right it's just like they know more people are using mobile devices than these desktop devices when browsing so when it comes to planning and optimizing for mobile it starts obviously with your content and you're creative from an advertising standpoint you have to start designing for mobile placements think about creative that's going to stop the user and be considered thumb stopping but also is the content just overall mobile friendly is a visitor to that traffic going to bounce right we're going to talk about landing page speed but are you setting yourself up for a frictionless experience the content should be easy to load produce for mobile first user's mind and actually make sure that it's not elongated sort of in terms of content but it's quick short and to the point to get the user to act within mobile and one more point on the mobile side is at this day and age no matter how you built your website you have to have paypal google pay apple pay you have to have some sort of frictionless uh transaction capabilities because i will tell you like if i'm on the couch i'm not getting up to go get my credit card i will abandon my car and go find a place where i can purchase using apple pay or paypal and i think a lot of consumers are that way as well that term frictionless experience isn't going to go away you have to create as less friction as possible to get the user to act once you've invested in that cost to get them to your website you're paying you're paying as an advertiser to get them there so you have to do one of two things give them that frictionless experience and make sure the biggest one is an experience that they want and it's relevant to them so the biggest thing is speed speed load time so whether it's the using a tool that allows to leveraging the speed uh page speed insights tool that analyzes your visitor probability of bouncing this is going to be very important you want to make sure that if you're investing that they get to the website it loads fast you're giving the content they need and you're setting them up into the funnel of conversion that they expect awesome so the fourth secret is that big brands test everything so when i mean everything um we mean everything so testing your pages different features across your pages test all of your ads against each other against your control against your brand um test different audiences and this is the this is when things start to get overwhelming i think for business owners and you know direct digital marketers as there are so many things to test what we do for our customers is we put together testing matrix and like i said we need to start planning now and doing the testing before the big cyber weekends hit and things to test test creative you can test creative against copy do some audience research layer in a different audience and test that creative again you also can have different bid testing uh capabilities and you can really take your time between now and then to test different combinations of this too within every single platform there's multiple different placement opportunities um different types of ads not just text different texts that you can layer over and around different images so creating um your testing different creative types as well like are you going to have your image with a person and at the slice of life type of creative are you going to make it a cartoon is it going to be informational and educational are you going to use the company's cover boy aka neil and then within all of those different creatives you have that copy so as you can see on the screen there's several different ways that you can approach your audience with that messaging and again this is the goal for your testing is to figure out what is the right message for the right person at the right time and as you can see at neil patel you know he is very creative and very open to doing all sorts of testing so these are some examples of just a static image ads that you know we are testing across all the different platforms so testing creative not just within one platform but within every platform and as you can see there's um different you know moods that neil is in in these images there's people in the images that aren't neil we are testing um using the illustrations or the doodle approach and then after we run a test we really try to measure the success of those creatives and then we choose the winners and then test again and then when it comes to on-page testing so once you've tested all of your creative and a lot of these tests are multivariate happening at the same time you can also lead um you could be running in the background on your website some very very simple tests so even the add to cart button is what we're going to call it for this k this example but you can change that add to cart to add to bag you can change it to add to shopping bag you can test different variations to see which one actually resonates the best with your audience and neil i don't know if you want to tell here like which call to action you know you've seen work the best out of all of these but i think there's actually a clear winner yeah it's so funny in which it's like people want to use different variations for anything adding to cart and uh it always ends up being where add to cart just wins and it's the default the other thing for like sass start my free trial or subscription that tends to convert really well anything that's relevant for like um service-based business anything that's relevant to what the audience is looking for so for example if you were to fill out a lead form on one of the neil patel pages we continually test them but you typically the winner tends to be like yes i want neil to help grow my traffic or uh you know let's schedule a call and grow my traffic because that's the benefit of what you're looking to do so keep that in mind when you're testing some of your call to actions amazing and then i i can see in the chat someone said you know for big brands that have a lot of traffic it's easy to do testing because you do get to through the learning period faster but small brands can there's there's different ways to increase traffic and and pay very little for traffic across different types of facebook ads and and also google display so you can run tests at this very small you know cost per click just to do the testing even if you're not focusing on the roas at the time um but things on your web page as well this is a an example of a really clean and clear great product page so take a screenshot for anybody who is watching you want to have your your logo section and header up and to the left you can test where that logo is this is a these are also opportunities to test um product descriptions you you really should have the product reviews there you want to build that credible credibility in brand trust also at the bottom you can see a brand guarantee that's really important as well any credentials that you have as a business we do see a lot of our small business clients with tons of awards that they have won in their industries but they're not showcased anywhere that the client or the customers would really see it that's going to help influence their purchase and neil can probably talk about this in in an entire webinar but you can also use structured snippets on your product pages so that all this information that's on the site can actually show up in search results as well yeah which will help increase your click-through rate so it's definitely worth doing so let's do some math if we were just talking about conversion rate on your website and you were able to spend some time testing right now let's say you have two two out of every hundred people see your product ads actually end up converting so if you you're driving 600 visits a day at 45 and your sales are 45 average order value that's just under 100 000 at one percent conversion rate so one percent conversion rate is is not abnormal it's it's a little bit low and can be improved upon but once you get your testing down and you find the niche and you find the combination of all these things that on your page increase conversion rate that hundred thousand dollars now turns into almost three hundred thousand so two hundred and fifty thousand just by increasing the conversion rate on the page that's a hundred and fifty thousand extra dollars in your pocket that you earned not by spending more money but by testing things on your website to increase and get people to purchase through that funnel faster and to go back to the previous poll you're going to want to make sure you identify that you know conversion rate optimization whether it's from a desktop traffic or mobile traffic so is the mobile like we mentioned before is it a responsive website is it mobile immersive experience are you giving the user a frictionless experience to convert so you got to keep those in mind that some of these points align with one another and they play a bigger role when you combine the initiatives and actually that's a good segue into combining initiatives but also combining channels right you have to really think about that the consumer is does not have a linear path to purchase um you're on your phone you're on your work computer you're at home you're watching tv you're actually consuming content and it's being exposed to brand content and just exposure across the board from multiple devices so how do you plan for the right content mix in channel mix a good way to look at this is understand where your consumers are coming from now go into google analytics look at your referral sources of the traffic and see if it's a youtube channel if it's your linkedin page if it's facebook email marketing see where your current saturation points for audiences are now and then what similarities or what other platforms can we go out and discover because you have to be screen agnostic and platform agnostic you have to be visible regardless of where they are because once the consumer gets into the research phase or the purchase phase they're going to start researching across the board you can go to the next slide as far as like i mentioned it's not a linear path to purchase so once someone's influenced to buy something they're going to do their research they're going to understand and do reviews and look at youtube videos they're gonna do price comparison shoppings they're gonna make sure it's the right product for them and look at images and this is just google's own properties there's other ways to actually look at content that's exposed to them on facebook or they go to um etsy and see if they can buy something that's similar but maybe from a local sort of by small business right there's different ways that they're going to bounce around and do research and those are going to be ways for you to identify where you should be active within that purchase path other ways is making sure that you want to know that from an organic standpoint not only is this going to be beneficial for you to get visibility organically through google product feed but this setting up your google merchant center benefits both those things whether it's organic feed on google and your shopping feed for paid uh shopping on google ads so if this is something that you have a product feed already you just enable directly into google's merchant center for the purpose of getting that additional visibility so once you actually able to drive that sort of activation you're driving that traffic you're driving that ad unit and you get them to act as brooke mentioned earlier she is on the couch browsing she's a she's uh she sees a pair of sheets that she wants but she doesn't have her credit card and she just added them to her cart but she's not going to get up to buy that is basically in her inner cart ready to go maybe next time she might purchase but she might forget this is a happens often car abandonment rates are high for most cases if you don't provide that frictionless experience to check out it's up to us at average as advertisers to plan for these occurrences what are you doing to segment that traffic how are you using specific ad tags and pixels to identify and know that that consumer added a product to their shopping cart and how do you go after them and remarket to that user or activate an email drip campaign to say hey you left this in your shopping cart come back and buy you need to set up those reminders and those occurrences to get them to finish the activation that they started which is purchase and then last but not least there's other sort of means of activating sort of reminders of that is push notifications so push welcomes we could see a drop-off i'm sorry a click-through rate on average depending on the industry of a six percent click on the notifications or questions i believe this is specifically to your product neil is that correct uh it used to be not anymore but yeah it works really well it's an easy way to get people to come back we do it all the time and it's one of the most effective ways to really just get people to continually come back awesome excellent so number six big secret that big brands do is really study customer behavior trends and help people to buy so i do see still a lot of chatter around testing duration and and how it's hard to get traffic but you know you don't have to go in and test this you know broadly and spend all your money you know if you do the research and you study that customer behavior then you can roll out tests that are very niche and you can save money in that way the other aspect of this is once you understand the buying behavior you can start to give things to client or to prospective customers for free just like neil is giving everyone this webinar for free you know he's he says hey i have information i want to give to you guys it's very similar to a buyer guide for the holiday season you can teach people you can jump to the next slide um you can teach people you know what they should buy and so here's just some of these shopping behavior trends for 2021 and you can look online you can research very niche verticals so if you're selling clothing you could look up clothing retail and look at more statistics based off of this data but right now you know we're looking at people starting that shopping um early and in in the search marketing world we call that discovery marketing and to chris's point you know being being present on youtube is really important and and creating and testing ideas for ads where you're introducing different products and giving people these product guides you're basically helping them discover what they're want what they want to purchase and you know 80 percent of global shoppers say that you know they get what they want from product inspiration and that's when you start thinking outside of the box between google and facebook and you think well how can i be present on pinterest and how can i start to create some interesting content for tick tock and other channels that are going to get people into the brand fold and then help them along the way make those purchases so here are quite uh quite a daunting list of different things to think through as when you're launching your paid campaigns these are all different testing opportunities as we mentioned but also different things that you can do within paid search to improve your results and to really combat and embrace at the same time those shopping trends that we just shared and chris i don't know if you want to take a second to kind of talk through some of these things like brand safety and you know the geo and device targeting yep these are all things that should be a part of your checklist as a search marketer an advertiser that you're looking at and from a reoccurring optimization standpoint as your brand shift as your brand objectives change your content strategy changes you need to make sure that you're adjusting your campaign settings and the nuances of search to align with them but also just staying up with best practices and making sure you're taking advantage of all the features that search has to has to offer absolutely so back to talking through buying guides so when you um create your drip programs that chris mentioned and you talk through your you know push notifications be thinking about what content you're actually going to be serving those people and those um potential customers make it so that you can share with them the the top products sold on your website for example you can give it to them in a in a perspective that it's like a catalog as if they were shopping in the store walking from shelf to shelf present those products to them here's an example that microsoft did you know here's happy valentine's day you know find out what you know people are interested in and here's a focus on the entertainment and then you can browse through these different guides and different products so you're the expert in your industry never forget that people want you to tell them what to buy and this email um setup is a great way to do that and you can create multiple different emails along the way leading up into holiday and then people will also remember your your product your brand name basically from this type of guide email and as you're planning those brand guides whether they live on your website or their specific print document like the example you see here or the example that um from microsoft or email think of it and make sure that it's able to be repurposed for multiple channels as we mentioned before your consumer does not follow a linear path to conversion so how can you repurpose that content for facebook and getting exposure there versus a tweet versus something that you might see on an instagram story make sure that if you're designing and planning your calendar now plan for multiple assets to be leveraged across multiple channels yep and this here a buyer's guide is is very similar to a packet you would receive in in your in the mailbox like for direct mailer and you know thinking through if you're selling a service not um products for example you want to offer buyers guides even more because the chances that your service is way more niche than just you know buying um a gift for someone for example if it's a solar company an hvac all these different industry verticals that have very complex um products that need a lot of education the buyer's guide is that much more important and think about your blog on your website in the content on your website also as the potential opportunity to give people a buyer's guide as you know we look at that customer journey it's no longer linear people are researching popping around you really need to make sure that you are giving information at each stage in that funnel and then when it comes to your website so you've already done all the work to get someone to your website they don't see what they want necessarily on your website you need to have these dynamic product recommendation type um widgets on your site so that once they're on the site they're searching for something it's like oh you know we have we all as consumers have an attention span of like a very small child so oh look oh i see another product with five star reviews and it's a little bit cheaper and so you want to present those dynamic product recommendations and you can set it up so here great segue to facebook you can set it up in a way that is tracked so people go to your website they do different things they go to different pages they look at different products you can create that widget on your website to give them dynamic products that they've already viewed you can also use facebook ads to serve dynamic products we have a client mater boomi they sell fair trade gifts um that are all ethically sourced and every time i'm we set up the ads and i'm still shopping on their site like all the time for gifts because their ads when they're served to me at my house i'm like whoa i'm just scrolling through the products i've already seen like i was gonna buy that but i didn't and then it hits me two weeks later i'm like okay i am gonna buy that this time so you need to be able to serve people the products that they want to see and we talk about you know having ads that stop the scroll but it's more important to have the information and the product that people want not necessarily um to stop the scroll but to get their attention and like serve to them while they're browsing what they want and these dynamic product ads on facebook are really really great for that and then go ahead chris and they help people buy so that's the segue into this it allows them to put content that's relevant to them based on their previous browsing behaviors right so as these could be aligned to shopping cart abandonment you could actually pull the specific content that they left in their shopping cart and populate it into an ad unit within facebook or within a display banner retargeting banner on the web you know that aligns to a product feed so you want to be able to give them content that's relevant to them that they expressed interest in yep and another hack uh just to go beyond retargeting i i saw in the chat also kind of talking about the death of the cookie there are ways now with the different platforms and their specific audience targeting that you can go after and retarget off of your competitors website behavior so for google display you can set up custom audiences where you literally punch in your competitors website and you tell google i want to serve my ads to only people who have visited my competitors websites that is a way for you to get very very specific with your targeting you know that your audience is the same as your competitors and it's a way for you to reintroduce and introduce your products to them once they've been to your site as well as your competitors site and you can kind of grab them in that consideration stage and a lot of this is automated once you've set it up so that's another opportunity there to save you time and money with your testing it really eliminates the the targeting guessing game and it's more acquisition focused like i said pulling people from consideration to purchase like really quickly and i keep going um so looking at the lifetime customer value you know you can start to do some predictive analysis to help people buy so you know here's an example you can see where you know customers spend tens of thousands of dollars in like a five to ten year period um you can look at all of your customers databases and you can help people by by giving them a little bit of that information and you can help move the needle forward faster by looking at that prediction and you can really hone in on your ads and you could say okay the pat the buying behaviors of these customers you know in this case the customer's been ordering every 12 days since january 2015 and so now you can see okay this is a better customer for me to target this person has a lifetime customer value that's much bigger than new customer acquisition for example you can kind of hone in on that audience and go after them specifically awesome trick number seven actually goes back to the planning as we mentioned the conversations we're having with our clients now is planning campaign timelines what sales are you gonna activate what is the timeline of those sales and this kind of aligns to creating that sense of urgency if you're gonna have to activate specific um you know sales for pre-black friday versus black friday versus black friday weekend versus cyber monday there's specific deadlines and that helps align to creating urgency um and aligning it to the features and functions of the tools that we use to buy the media but also in terms of inactivating some of that agency within the ad copy so you want to create those limited time offers and you want to create scarcity and you know obviously we know and become accustomed to what amazon has done and saying this product is on sale today or today's deal only or exclusively today that sort of ad copy that sort of urgency creates the need to buy it now before it's too late or before it's out of inventory so you can do this in multiple ways whether it's setting up via the ad copy or just taking advantage of the consumer's psychology that they know that there's a scarcity scenario aligned to a specific product by either tying back stock and inventory related to that product or making sure that the urgency around the sale is going to end soon so as again amazon does really good with this and saying today's deal only or having a deal of the day or a deal of the week you want to be able to put some sort of time frame or reference to a product if you can maybe you're trying to get rid of remnants of inventory that you have or you're moving into your next season and you have to get rid of it you want to be able to put some sort of level of that's only available for x amount of time before it goes away so how we could do that is not only creating urgency within headlines but there's other tools and features that you can use specifically within within google there's sort of countdown promo extensions that you could use as sitelink extensions within google as we mentioned earlier before updating your product feed directly into google merchant center you could also upload a promotional feed and say this product is marked down for specific time frame and it will showcase what the markdown value of that price is to tell the client the consumer that this is on sale now and it's only for a limited time you're implying urgency using specific colors typically strikeouts of the dollar amount over the existing previous dollar amount that what it was or showcasing what 25 off or 45 off you want to show what the consumer is saving um with that sort of urgency and call out and secret number eight big brands plan for the worse so when you're thinking about the upcoming holiday season and you have all your budget and everything set up you know you really need to think through a backup plan um in my experience i've gone through probably 15 or 17 holiday seasons now with clients um and it is very very challenging when um something goes wrong and you're not able to kind of get and tap into all that potential revenue so get organized and you guys again take a screenshot or you know neil will send this out after the the webinar but we're giving you guys this checklist to make sure that you're ready for the upcoming holiday season and in general you know this is something that you can use any campaign launch or any season but get organized double check that conversion tracking i will go through just a few of these um making sure that you're you know targeting long tail keywords what is that strategy making sure that you're able to save and that cost per click and test early again um making sure you have a negative keyword strategy set up i have seen it very very sad when it happens and um this is something we we look through when we do our audits for potential clients is we look to see that you know they have a negative they have a broad match keyword that's set up that's you know incredibly broad like the keyword intern on accident and that is matching to all kinds of things we go in and we say wow you could save you know ten thousand dollars just on this keyword and so making sure that you have that match type strategy plus the keyword negative keywords is really really important um and then you know going through just each one of these to make sure that everything is set up correctly and that you can plan for potentially anything to happen along the way this protects you um from having to go through those learning experiences yep you always you want to audit everything start now start your your structure of evaluating what's been performing well where your gaps are and just look at the basics again in preparation for the holiday season so you want to understand what your current structure looks like making sure that the objectives are aligning to your business outcomes that you're trying to drive are you using the right functionalities of audience targeting whether it's custom audiences pixel-based audiences look-alike audiences know and understand what's worked well for you and making sure they're set up for success moving into q4 of this year the other things is not only just the foundation and the setup but also what you're doing to take advantage of all those functions and features that you know in this case facebook has to offer so are you using dynamic product ads are you using um your product feed integration with google facebook calls it your catalog integration with your feed are you setting up creative testing now to learn from now that you can apply your best winning creative strategy in q4 that's going to generate the highest click-through rates you have to assume that your cpms are going to rise 20 30 and upwards of 40 percent going into the holiday season so how do you put your best foot forward in planning now um for those campaign activations and what creators are going to be best what call to actions are going to be best what sustained copy is going to be best in your product titles versus your ad copy and you want to apply all of that methodology from learnings that you're doing now in the summer at a low time to win in q4 and as everyone mentioned you need to plan for the worst you know from what if your website goes down to once you run out of inventory to what if there's a lag in the reporting and you need to know that kind of stuff to fine-tune your spend so just be prepared for the worst and as long as you do that you should be fine and you will be able to scale the other thing that i would do is really ask yourself how adaptable is your strategy and the reason this is important is you're always thrown curveballs when you're running ads especially in marketing with things changing so fast and other people you know throwing wrenches in your strategy especially competitors so you need to be able to adapt on the fly some key takeaways prepare early work with predictions optimize for mobile i recommend you test everything and even if you test and you find winners you need to retest later on because things change a great example of this is we used to have call to action and login buttons that say log in with google worked extremely well in the early days and then privacy issues and security and what we saw across the border's clients were actually getting some decrease by only forcing people into that option yeah you need to do an omni channel and if you don't do omni channel you're not going to do as well you always want to study consumer behavior and trends because people adjust and they're adjusting now faster than ever do whatever you can to help people buy and one of the things that really pushes them over the edge is creating urgency and of course plan for the worst um and if you need help with any of the planning you can always check out our ad agency np digital um and now it's your turn you know just take one of these things and just try to implement it and if you can implement it you're great if you do that one a week awesome and of course if you need help we're always here at np digital to help you grow so now let's dive into some q a i can i can kick it off with some of the chats that came through while we were talking chris this one is for you what is one what's the number one most important metric that a company or brand should be measuring oh wow it's number one and most important metric it's gonna different by brand's business objectives i actually had a call this morning with the client asking are we gonna align with your business objectives as you log into linkedin facebook google twitter they're asking you what is your brand what is your objective of the campaign are you looking to generate traffic generate conversion drive phone calls drive leads so us understanding what your business objectives and your outcomes of the ad campaigns are that's what's going to align to the kpi so if you tell me leads is the number one thing we want to make sure that we align to how much we're willing to pay for those leads the opportunity cost for those leads how much volume is out there to generate those leads and we're aligning the conversation back to that specific business outcome or campaign objective so it is based on the individual brand's objective awesome all right one for neil what's the biggest mistake you've seen business owners do when launching campaigns or running their own ads they don't have their funnel fine-tuned and even if you don't have your funnel fine-tuned um you need to analyze every step of your funnel and at least have the analytics and metrics here so you can figure out where the drop-off is and then once you figure out where the drop-off is you can go and fine-tune also when you're launching your campaigns i see a lot of businesses optimizing for quote unquote first time uh checkouts uh instead of optimizing for lifetime value which is another big mistake and funny enough on the screen you see something that's quite interesting a little barcode you can always take out your mobile phone scan it and if you need help you can just fill out your information and it'll send you a web page and we're here to help awesome any other questions you see chris actually with that barcode you know back to uh it's asking what is the ideal client to work with npa and for npd so go ahead neil you could probably answer this better than me it's actually anyone so whether you're just starting off or whether you're a large corporation we work with brands of all sizes it's not about what is the ideal customer for us you know if you're interested in working with us apply and we'll do analysis on your website and we'll figure out if we're actually a good fit for you what i mean by that is sometimes we can't help out businesses sometimes we can't produce a roi and we like doing analysis first because then we can tell you if we think we can help or we don't and we have a lot of data so we know typically what we can do really well with and what we can and the reason i say that is like i've had people who have this new technology that very few people have demand for and they're selling it to government organizations like how can help with marketing i'm like not really you only have one customer which is your government you know you don't need to go rank on google for all these terms instead i would just cold call so there are certain times where we're not the best fit and there's cheaper alternatives and we'll just be honest and transparent and recommend them but as i mentioned if you need help you can always just take your phone out you know your camera look over the barcode and they'll send you to our site thanks neil um one question here which is really good since we talked a lot about retail and i'll answer this question which is how to create urgency for b2b um and and the answer goes back to those buying guides i think that it's really important for you as a b2b offering to create a comparison chart whether that's on your website or if it's something that you put behind the gate so that you can capture their information but what you need to do behind that gate is make sure that they realize on that landing page that what you're about to give them is very top secret something that they can only get from you and that's going to help them and so that's what your landing page should cover is you know we're going to compare these you know five different features from our brand to these other brands and then that's how you're going to create that urgency and then the other thing is like have information do do consumer research have have something of value to give them and make sure that value is is not something they can get for free from your competitors and make sure you put that behind the gate because your number one goal is to get those leads so that your sales team can then go um and close those deals for you and it's it's very impactful it's going to be the difference of of making or breaking your business sometimes for for um independent b2b uh clients we'll do one more question and then we'll uh let everyone go i'll ask the question uh chris or brooke feel free to ask answer it any advice on display targeting and exclusion of low quality inventory for legion absolutely this is something that you want to put as one of your reoccurring monthly optimization plan on your monthly optimization plans and something we do for our clients is to analyze the placement inventory of where your ads are being shown and identify inventory that's of of quality versus not based on the actions that are coming from that click so google will tell you how much traffic is being driven from a specific domain is that traffic bouncing is a high click-through rate and it's bouncing not leading to an action those are where you want to start excluding specific placements or specific uh inventory that you know is just not relevant to your brand or aligns to your brain's safety if you have inventory that's exposed on youtube for instance and there's specific channels or content that you don't want to be associated with those are conversations that you typically have with our clients on the front end before launching but once ads are live we can kind of see an export of where our ads are being shown and start excluding specific channels specific placements and inventory as we go through the optimizations plan monthly and what chris means by oh sorry go ahead neil i was going to say it what he means by optimizations monthly is like just continue to sharpen the sword so you don't have to do everything at once make a road map and go through okay you're going to check this and optimize this you're going to check this and then optimize this awesome well everyone thank you for your time as we mentioned if you ever need help we're here to help in any way we can whether it's our blog neilpatel.com where we try to get free marketing advice tools uber suggests to even our ad agency np digital seriously from all of us we really appreciate you guys taking the time during your busy day to attend this um we look forward to seeing you guys next month thank you thanks guys

Channel: Neil Patel

Views: 26,509

Keywords: SEO, online marketing internet marketing digital marketing inbound marketing marketing

Id: LL3wfT-kElc

Length: 57min 15sec (3435 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021