As digital marketers, it’s important to always be thinking of new ways to generate revenue for your clients or business. While you are reading up about the latest PPC feature to test in your account, you might not realize that you probably already have valuable tools at your disposal. Below I will discuss how one company created online marketing synergy by using a lead generation strategy to increase revenue through PPC advertising.
Why PPC Synergy Is Important
Most businesses have departments that focus on their own area of expertise all while working toward a common goal of making money for the business. While this set-up works well, it also has flaws if information across departments is not shared. This example holds especially true for marketing departments.
Within a marketing department, there might be teams for:
- Social
- Display
- SEO
- SEM
- Sales
There may even be a separate company running each of these areas. In situations like this it becomes hard to make sure all the right messaging and information is being shared across the teams. Each of these teams are potentially sitting on a wealth of knowledge and tools that could help the other. If that information is not communicated, a company could really be missing out.
For example, there may be an SEO term that your business doesn’t rank well for so you may want to make sure you try and get coverage through PPC. Or, maybe there is a blog post that does particularly well on social that could be shared with the PPC team to help increase revenue – which brings us to this case study!
The Objective: Increase Revenue
For this case study, we worked with an ecommerce account that was looking for new strategic ideas to boost orders over the long term, a pretty common objective I’m sure many businesses share. The client organized a brainstorming meeting with the social and PPC teams to discuss strategies and messaging that were performing well across each channel in an attempt to come up with ideas to grow revenue for the business as a whole.
The Challenge: Limited Marketing Resources
Because this account is mature and already utilizing many PPC resources we needed to be creative in how we went about generating incremental conversions efficiently. While this account does use some social (Facebook) and email marketing, the business relies heavily on PPC to help drive the bulk of the orders. Another challenge was the click to conversion window for this account tends to be longer as users spend more time researching and getting familiar with the brand before actually making a purchase. These higher funnel research terms tend to be more costly to advertise on using a last click conversion attribution for PPC.
Solution: Lead Generation To Increase Revenue
After a great brainstorming session, we were able to identify several blog posts that had heavy social engagement on Facebook and decided to create a lead generation strategy around those posts to drive more engagement through PPC.
To accomplish this, we created native ads in Yahoo Gemini that drove traffic to these top performing blog post pages, which offered a free ebook signup. This account typically saw lower CPCs in Yahoo Gemini compared to some of other channels, which is why we chose this platform, however you could use the same strategy across other platforms. The native ads used a call-to-action of “download a free ebook” which had users enter their email addresses to download the ebook. This same strategy could work using a newsletter or rewards sign up.
This common lead generation strategy allowed us to help fill the funnel by increasing new users to the high engagement pages at a lower cost. As the new users engaged with the site, our remarketing lists also started to increase in size and so did our list of email addresses.
Results: Engagement Increased By 64%
By using PPC to improve engagement with the blog and promote the ebook, we were able to increase ebook downloads by 64% at a CPA 55% lower than what we see for an order. While it’s still early, we’ve already seen a lift in our remarketing campaigns that also convert at a CPA much lower than other display campaigns that generate orders. Even when adding together the cost paid to acquire the new user from the ebook download and the CPA for the remarketing campaigns, we are still paying less per conversion than a cold sale, allowing us to achieve our goal of generating incremental conversions and revenue for the business.
What’s even more exciting is that now the internal marketing and sales teams can also use the leads generated from the ebook to help increase revenue for the business. In addition, PPC can continue to advertise to these warm leads using features like Google’s Customer Match or Facebook’s Custom Audiences that allow you to show ads to users based on their email addresses. While this is exciting stuff we also want to be cautious about over serving users with ads. Make sure to exclude converters and implement frequency capping.
Final Thoughts
Synergy between all marketing channels will help grow revenue for your business as a whole. This test was successful because of knowledge sharing between channels, a creative strategy and understanding the importance and power of attribution. It’s easy to get lost in the data of a particular area or focused on your small part of the business but by opening communication between channels you can open new growth doors for the business as a whole.
