8 Steps of Online Marketing
When you’re looking at your online marketing as a whole, there are eight different steps; SEO Pay Per Click (PPC), retargeting is a part of it, also there are different channels, paid online directories, your repeat and referral clients, people lead sites like Homeadvisor, and Thumbtack, your social media channels are also a part of it and last but not least, a marketing automation system that helps you to take all these leads, and systematize, classify all these leads and trigger some emails and text messages to those people without even touching anything automating that system is an important part because you’re getting some leads from your website and right away you may send them an email, or you may give them a call but after a second call or second email, those people may fall to the cracks or you don’t even remember what was that about or what was that lead. Those systems help us to understand and you give them the exact footprint, the exact timeline of their behavior in the system so that we can see where these people come from. What that means is these systems are as important as other steps. Your business is in the middle of those steps that you need to differentiate your marketing strategy or online marketing strategy as a whole.
Also, you need some sort of authenticity at a very certain level, you cannot automate everything and generate sales. But until the time that people raise their hands and say yes, you need to start authentically talking with those customers, before that you need to automate that process to raise these people’s hands. That’s why we use ‘’Super Susan’’. This is the CRM system that we created, there are a lot of different systems in the market but we do Super Susan. We created a Kitchen and Bathroom, Countertop specific CRM system to follow up and just to handle our leads.
The first seven-step could behalf of the 1st 50% of the battle and number eight could be another half of the whole online marketing ecosystem. In order to avoid missing training, you need to focus on all these seven steps, because all these channels need some sort of expertise. For instance, you cannot just go there and enable your Yelp ads or enable your Google Local Services ads and wait for results, if you’re trying to do it yourself, you need to train yourself. That’s why these blogs are important for you.
The Reasons Why Your PPC Campaigns are Failing: A Guide to Understanding the Kitchen and Bath, Countertop Industry
There are some very obvious reasons for the failure of PPC Campaigns. Most of the Pay Per Click campaigns failed because of failing to understand the Google Ads auction process and the complexity of the Kitchen and Bath, Countertop industry.
Google cannot know when and how to show you the ads, you need to configure those ads and you need to introduce your industry to Google, and Google will understand what you’re trying to do. But the complexity here is if you do not separate your ad campaigns with the kitchen cabinets and countertops or bathroom remodeling, if you try to do that in one melting pot, it’s not going to work because you need a separation. We need to identify our business model to Google in the best way possible. But you don’t need one ad group for all services. For instance; you’re offering kitchen cabinets and countertops and bathroom modeling, you don’t need to put everything in one ad group and try to advertise, keywords will be different. When we say keywords, we don’t mean positive keywords we also mean negative keywords. Negative keywords are different for each campaign, even the location could be different.
Your target location could be different, you may target one specific town for kitchen cabinets, another specific town for countertops, you can do that too. But in the first place, your keywords are different.
There are also landing pages. A landing page means, when you list your web page on Google and when your prospects click on it, they do not go to your homepage, they are going to a landing page. Why? Because if they’re kitchen cabinet customers they want to see kitchen cabinets on the page. But what they are going to see on your main page is the countertops, bathrooms, and some other distracting details. They don’t really want to see that, they want to see what they are searching for. You need to prepare a landing page specifically for kitchen cabinets or the same thing for bathroom innovation. If they are coming to your pipeline with the bathroom keywords, you shouldn’t show any kitchen or countertops to these people. The maximum you can show vanities with the countertop but not the whole kitchen. That’s why you need landing pages.
Also, you need to use specific text, as ads just point out those landing pages like a click on its call to action or an offer on the landing page. Let’s talk in detail about these facts; What is a call to action? This is an expected return from your customer. For example, when you have your web page, you need to put the ‘’contact us button’’ right there or the ‘’book your appointment’’ button there. This ‘’book your appointment’’ or ‘’contact us’’ button is a call to action. If you do not enrich your pages with the call to action buttons those website visitors can come to your page and they may just jump back as bounce back. We don’t want this to happen, we want to keep these people, we would like to take those people to our pipeline. At least they need to contact you to grab the information from these people. What makes this little easy here is offering something we call candy. Let’s explain it with an example; imagine a car dealership, when you walk into a car dealer shop that is always an event going on there, they’re always running special day sales events, and they are lowering the prices.
Here is a fact for you; it’s not going to be making a lot of difference, pricing is not going to change a lot. They’re just offering the same prices with different campaigns. Labor day sales will be the same discount as black Friday sales. That’s why they always offer something there; just to make you feel good because if you don’t offer anything you are not making that big sale. So, make your future customers feel comfortable when they see your web page. When you put an offer next to your appointment widget or contact form, those conversions will increasingly be 3 to 4 times more just because people have some sort of a reason to come and book with you to contact.
Case Study: How Much We Spent on Clients, What They Get in Return
As a case study example, we want to mention how much we spent on our clients and what they get in return. Number one; between 11th August and 8th September, it’s almost a month, we spent 1200 dollars and we got 11,000 clicks, we also had 37 conversions. What is the conversion? Let’s explain that; the conversion is the result of your call to action. For example, if you’re asking those people to contact us by name and phone number and when they contact you that’s one conversion. If you’re asking those people to book the date and time of their appointment by their email and phone number that’s another conversion. We don’t usually count the phone calls as a conversion, but you can also add phone calls as a conversion. For the home emergency services, like plumbing or electricians, they may count the calls as a conversion because mostly they got the call. But in our industry, calls are not a good way to connect.
Let’s take it all over; in this case, we spent almost $34 per appointment. Let’s calculate the return on our investment; we got 36 appointments, not everyone will come and show up in your office or your showroom, at least half of them are going to be eliminated along the way but you will have at least 50% of those people will show up somehow, so we have 18 appointments, here is a metric that you need to know, it’s all about your selling, the ability is your conversion rate. In this case, our client can convert four contracts out of 18 appointments, this equates to almost approximately 22% of the commercial rate. It means that we have a 22% close rate on our appointments. If you have 50% or 75% that is great, that’s going to increase the numbers. The average ticket here is $20,000. When you get these four contracts with $20,000 you have $80,000 total revenue. Right now, remember what we spent, we spent $1200 and now we have $80,000 in return as total revenue. Let’s go ahead and add another layer to our calculation. What is your net profit? No one knows your net profit, let’s work with a round number and say 30%. This $80,000 revenue will turn to $24,000 in profit. We can have another layer in our calculation and we can say we got 18 appointments, we got four contracts out of that and we generated $24,000 just by spending $1260. That’s a live example. Every $1 that you send Google will bring you to give it back like $19.
Number two; we spent $1400 in one month, this is another customer, and we had fewer conversions, it wasn’t like over 30 conversions, it was just 19 conversions. Remember that was 37 before we got 19 conversions. Right now, our conversion rate cost to conversion is even higher, almost doubling the previous one. What did we do with this $1400? We had 1600 clicks, and we got 19 people who were filling out that form. We had a $75 cost for the conversion. Let’s do the same calculation with different numbers; we have 19 leads, and in this case, we have a 60% appointment rate, 19 leads the alternative 11 appointments in this case and these 11 appointments will be converted to three contracts, three actual clients. These customers’ conversion rate is 27%. It means that for every 11 appointments, they can get three contracts. Let’s get another level and estimate a 30% net profit and $90,000 will turn to $27,000, and as a summary, we have 631, $30 turned to $27,000. We have 1 to 16. 5 returning investment. What happens when we spend 1600? What happens if we spend 3200? This is the whole magic about advertising, when you double that you can increase that profit from there when you triple, it’s not going to stay the same for sure.
How to Set Up and Structure Pay Per Click Campaigns: PPC Management
Let’s talk about how to set up and structure your Pay Per Click Campaigns and how to create those campaigns.
- You should start by targeting, What’s your target? Where do you want to decrease the cost for the lead? Do you want to increase the return on investment? Answering these questions is going to help you to create a campaign. Create your campaigns for minimum cost per lead and maximum. First, when you’re running your campaigns, you need some elements. For example, conversion tracking is a big need. What do we mean by conversion tracking? You have different channels, different ad groups and those different ad groups will perform differently. They’re not going to perform equally, and you should know how those appointments are coming and what is the source of the campaigns? That’s why you need to track those conversions and another tracking thing. If you are sending a group of cures to a specific landing page, let’s say five cures connect to one landing page, another five cures connect to the other landing page. If you are getting most of your leads from the number one landing page why are you investing your dollars?
- Number two; when you’re optimizing your campaigns, you always consider the best one as the best for performing one. That’s why conversion tracking is really important there. You shouldn’t put everything in one campaign, you should break it into smaller ad groups targeting the various services that you provide SEO. That’s why it’s going to be a great match with the searcher.
- Also, there are keyword match types. We have three different match types; broad match, exact match, and phrase match. For example, if you tell Google to show your ads to people who just type kitchen cabinets in the search bar when you identify this cure is an exact match you won’t be showing any ads when people put just a kitchen there or just cabinets there or different cures there. You will be ranking for the specific keywords and the broad matches. When you put kitchen cabinets abroad, match kitchen cabinets, how to paint kitchen cabinets, you’re going to be listed for those how to paint kitchen cabinets and you don’t pay attention to those leads, you don’t need this broad. That’s why the exact match is going to help you to create the most specific strategies when you’re creating your ad campaigns.
- Also, there are some negative keywords. Negative keywords help you to filter down the people and you shouldn’t kind of destroy your campaign’s not by adding any negative keywords.
- As another step to create your campaign, you need ad copy because that is going to entice your target customer to click on your ad versus the competition. When you just search for something local, like a restaurant or somewhere that you will see they’re listening to their reviews and location. Those extensions will give you a better space on the top of the page, and instead of being listed in one line, you will be listing with several lines, and it’s going to give you a little more extra real estate there. Also when you assign your landing pages of specific campaigns that you need to show those people what they’re looking for, do not show them anything else. If they’re looking for a bathroom remodel, do not show them kitchens, if they’re looking for kitchens, do not show them bathrooms.