PPC Secret: Be a Storyteller for Your Audience
In April, the PPC Hero Conference brought leading professionals from around the world together in Austin, Texas, to learn the latest in top trends, tactics and strategies in the PPC world. PPC (pay-per-click internet advertising) is constantly changing, creating the opportunity for attendees to gain new insights into cutting-edge technologies.
Some of the common themes throughout the conference included tips on how to personalize your marketing to your audience, voice search and its implications on the market, and, of course, ways to maximize your PPC efforts.
One theme, however, stood out as one of the conference’s top takeaways: Be a storyteller for your audience.
Get Personal
One key mistake that marketers and advertisers tend to make is not catering their message to their customer base. You can’t speak to everyone in the same way. That idea was at the heart of Brad Geddes’ presentation, “Personalized Marketing in an Audience Centric World.”
So, how should you decide how to speak to your audience? Data! By segmenting your customer market and tailoring messaging to each individual segment, customers can address unique value propositions. Companies can segment by age group, gender, income levels and more. Data can be captured from an array of sources, such as your CRM data, Google Analytics, surveys, Audience Insights on Facebook and demographic information in AdWords, just to name a few.
Identify Your Audience
Once you’ve gathered your data, it’s time to use it to understand the market, align it with your customer base and create a story for them. As a PPC professional, I’ve implemented this method with one of my past accounts. I determined their main customer base in Ames, Iowa, was females, ages 18–24 (college students) within the 21–30 percent household income levels who are looking for cost-effective services. Creating ad copy that mirrored these findings and combining it with an offer led to a CTR (click-thru rate) increase of almost 5 percent—and conversions doubled!
Repurpose the Data
It doesn’t need to stop there. Use this data to expand your campaigns. Once you’ve pinpointed your search audience, you can use this information to create similar lists, similar audiences to remarketing, similar audiences to their customer match, affinity audiences and in-market audiences. If you’re using Facebook, you can create look-alike audiences.
Your job as a PPC expert is to tell a story. Make sure you know your audience well enough to tell them the appropriate story about your business. Align your messaging with their lifestyles and needs, and then use the information you gather to expand to similar audiences with similar needs.
