Building a Strong Digital Marketing Strategy: Video #6 — Paid Media

John Jordan, co-founder of Go Local Interactive, walks us through the next piece to building a strong digital marketing strategy for your pest control company: Paid Media.

Editor’s note: Go Local Interactive is a digital marketing agency that works with a number of pest control firms. This following is the sixth in the video series “Building a Strong Digital Marketing Strategy.” John Jordan, co-founder of Go Local Interactive, walks us through the next piece to building a strong digital marketing strategy for your pest control company: Paid Media. Below is the transcript from this video.

Building Your Foundation- Hi, this is John Jordan with Go Local Interactive and today we are gonna be going through our final video in this series of building a strong digital marketing from the foundation up. In previous videos, we’ve covered everything from website development and building a site that can accomplish all your goals and making sure your data is collected and can be accurately portraying the information as it relates to all the various campaigns you’re running.

We’ve talked about local listings and establishing local relevance in creating consistency in the information portrayed through those local listings and building valuable citations for aiding in your organic efforts. We talked about SEO and kind of demystifying SEO and what all is involved in building a strong SEO program and ultimately seeking to ensure that the crawlability and readability of your site is established.

We talked about content as kind of that final component in your organic strategy and how we build topical relevance for the search engines that pertains to the most common questions that users are asking when they’re out there searching for products and services that you offer. Today, we’re gonna be talking about the final piece of the equation which is paid media.

Paid media is kind of that lever that we like to use on a market by market, product by product basis to drive more exposure and to drive leads where we need them when we need them. In our house analogy, I would say this is the dimmer switch on the wall, right? We walk up to it and we turn it up and down to the degree we need it on an ongoing basis. If that’s a good analogy, imagine a wall covered with dimmer switches and each represents a different product, a different market, a different ad campaign you are running and you literally are adjusting the dials on the wall on a weekly basis to account for where you need leads when you need them and the types of leads you need. So, we’re gonna talk about the basics of paid media and why that’s important to include in your overall digital marketing strategy. And, how it works or serves as that last mile, if you will, in terms of getting you the increased lead volume you need.

Digital Media Mix: Long-Term Strategy- So, what does this look like in practicality when you kind of combine it with organic? Organic is more of a long-term strategy and ideally you have something that looks more like this where, you’re using, you’re implementing the right organic strategy and over time that will continue to grow and eventually, hopefully become the primary source of leads to your business. That’s your long-term strategy.

Paid Media is kind of that supplemental piece that we use only to the degree we need additional volume and most of the time it ends up looking something like this where you’re spending more on paid media to drive leads initially in your strategy. And then, as your organic efforts kind of ramp up, you become less and less reliant on that paid media vehicle. It never really goes away because, as I mentioned, it’s kind of that supplemental piece that we use to drive volume when we need it and where we need it. You can’t really flip that switch on the market-level organically. So you need that paid media lever to kind of go to, when you need that extra volume. And, so, this is what it would like ideally

Benefits of Paid Media- In terms of the benefits I’m going to kind of run through, there’s a host of them. But I want to kind of run through some of the most critical ones to understand. The first one that I really preach to our clientele is that you want to be in control of your own destiny whenever possible. You don’t want to have to be reliant on third parties to drive your lead volume. You wanna be able to control your own volume and be more in control of your overall success from a digital marketing perspective. You also want to be able to control the quality of the leads and the type of leads you’re driving and where you’re driving them. And, a lot of the lead sources that people in the industry may use, they don’t give you that same flexibility to understand the source of the lead and therefore where your most quality leads are coming from and really refine and optimize that strategy to drive higher quality leads.

The second piece has to do with not being locked in to a specific spend, right? When you attract, when you go to some of these , when you’re attracted to some of these aggregators that are out there, they require certain levels of spending. They require you to set a set budget and you kinda stick to it for a month at a time. When you’re controlling your own destiny and running your own media, you only run the amount of media you need. And, it’s justified based on the results you’re seeing. We also like to say that you leverage the advertising when you need it. And that could tie into specific capacity needs, maybe you’re down a technician in an area and you really can’t handle any more leads. Well then, it doesn’t make sense, even if you’re driving leads cost effectively, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to drive leads when you can't actually handle those leads. So, having more control over your own digital marketing will build some efficiencies into your spending and then you won’t be locked in to that spend.

The final piece is just having more control over the targeting and the optimizations and driving the types of leads that you desire. So, one of the great flexibilities of paid media is that you can actually set up campaigns that are specifically structured to drive certain types of leads. So that could be seasonal in nature or it could just be based on pure profitability. Hey, this type of customer is more profitable to us. We want to maximize our ability to drive those types of leads. So you allocate your budget accordingly.

This final piece is lowering your cost per leads over time specifically, I wanna call out, machine learning and AI. I think this is an area of confusion. People hear these buzzwords often. Often machine learning and AI. And we really don’t know what that means, right? What is machine learning? What is AI? Essentially, it’s taking all the data that’s collected on you as a user like through these devices, these cell phone devices, and, it’s taking that and leveraging it so that every time a user comes through your website and ultimately ends up converting, Google in the background can see what are the attributes that are unique to that individual? And, as more and more customers come through and convert on your site, they can start seeing what are the commonalities or what are the common attributes of these users that lead to or ultimately result in a transaction or a goal attainment through Google Analytics. And, so, the more and more customers that flow through your site the more and more this AI and machine learning is narrowing on here are the key attributes of someone who is gonna convert or have a higher likelihood to convert for my business. When you own your own media, when you’re controlling your own media, you ultimately have the ability for your campaigns to get better and learn. And, you can apply those learnings by really digging into the data and applying it and specifically targeting audiences that Google's identifying as more likely to convert for you. And so we always say that you can lower your cost per lead over time by running campaigns on your own because that machine learning, that AI, is really kicking in in the background.

Strategy: Channels- In terms of the types of channels, there are a myriad of channels you can go to. These are the three that we mostly commonly use in this industry: search ads, responsive display, and discovery ads. We find that you first wanna maximize search because these are the people that are actively raising their hand and they’re saying “Hey, I have a need for the products and services that you offer in this market that you service. So those are kinda the low hanging fruit, if you will. We want to maximize our presence and our visibility with those guys first. Then alternatively want to look at responsive display and discovery ads to increase the visibility we have with those users kind of follow them around, if they don’t, through retargeting if they don’t actually come to fruition in terms of goal attainment on your site. We really want to make sure that we’re leveraging these channels and we see a really good return on investment. Historically, from our clients, we leverage these three.

Mockups-  In terms of , you know, what makes a great ad, there’s a lot of things that go into it but we are kind of giving you a few things to kinda hint at it here. Some keys to great ad copy include including things like specials and pricing that kind of differentiate you within the market. We definitely like location call-outs. Like things that are specifically identifying neighborhoods or the actual physical location where your location is so that we can, we can make sure those customers know that we are truly local and relevant to them. Any unique selling propositions we have. I always tell customers, “Think about how you train your staff.” “How do you train the folks that are actually interacting with customers to uniquely sell you. Those things should also be communicated through our ad copy and through our website and anything else we’re doing online to reinforce why we’re different, why we’re better, etc.. We also want to leverage keywords that are found on the website. We need consistency. Assuming we did everything right on the SEO side and, our website is, and content side, our website is accurately reflecting or depicting the keywords we want to target that are the most advantageous in terms of gaining new customers. We need to also leverage those keywords in our ad copy to reinforce that we offer what the customer’s looking for that’s most important or most critical to them.

There’s also a myriad of extensions. These extensions can come in a wide variety of things. You can see some in the example over here on the left. These buttons, free inspection, buttons to drive the user to different parts of the website are considered extensions. The address here listed below, I think there’s actually, we cut it off, there’s a phone number down there as well. Those are also extensions. There’s a ton of different types of extensions you can add. What it does is it buys you more real estate. It also adds more clarity for the user in many instances and gives them multiple options for why they should choose you or what jumping point they should have into your website. It more closely aligns with what they’re looking to accomplish. So, we would say always try to leverage as many of these extensions as possible . They all have their own unique need. And, testing them certainly would be critical to your long-term success.

Reach Your Target Audience Right Where They Are-   In terms of targeting the audience, so, historically, the options here on the right are how most advertisers, what most advertisers have leveraged over the last few years. Demographics, no secret that we’ve used demographics for years and years in targeting marketing not just online but offline as well. And the geography. We have specific areas where we want to pull customers from. And, those are still important today, however, we don’t want to lose sight of that user journey, the customer journey as you hear it, and how customers are engaging with different types of digital media and how can we interact and engage with them where they are. We basically want to go to where the customer is and make sure we are always visible to them especially in that time of need when they’re in market for whatever products and services we’re offering.

Paid Media Targeting: By Household-  In terms of traditional targeting, it’s actually gotten quite good over the last few years. We’re able to actually target down to a household level with certain types of paid media. Where, if you’re looking to build density within a certain neighborhood and you have a certain number of houses and you know the addresses of those homes currently, then you can basically exclude them from your campaign and say “ I want to target every other house in that neighborhood. And, you can identify the specific devices by IP address that are located within those homes so, even these kind of mobile devices that we carry around with us we can identify them and associate them with a specific address or home and then we can target those devices so that when they leave their home, they are still seeing your ad campaigns. This is a really great way if you wanna build density and you’re really looking to expand your presence within a very small geographic area.

Use Full-Funnel Strategy to Increase Revenue-  In terms of the, this is probably not a secret visual for you. It's one that you’ve probably seen many times in a lot of different ways. Your traditional marketing funnel where you’re starting with brand awareness. You can kind of grow into that consideration phase and then you kind of get into the conversion phase where people are actually transacting. We wanted to give you an idea of how that might look from a digital perspective. So, we’ve broken up the different types of media here. And I’m not gonna go through all of them. But, you can kind of see that it will give you an idea of where these media play a role in that whole user journey and at what point in the process you would be establishing brand awareness with different types of media versus that consideration phase and leveraging the data Google has to say “this person might be in market for your products and services soon and so we want to put your brand in front of them with some timely messaging.” And then that bottom of the funnel being, okay now they’re raising their hand and specifically saying, “I’m looking for what you offer and I need to be present everywhere they go until they actually end up converting.”

Targeting Based on Current Behaviors and Interests- In terms of what that looks like on a user-level. So this is the kind of day in the life of someone, right. They start off, they wake up in the morning. They have their iPad sitting by their nightstand. They pull it out and they start looking through, reading some news or whatever they’re accustomed to looking at in the morning. And they see your display ads running. Then they get to work. They check email midday, they notice you in their Gmail sponsored promotions. Then, after work, they’re commuting and they’re looking at social media and they see that you’ve targeted them with an ad there. Then, a little bit later in the evening, they’re shopping for furnishings online after dinner and they see your search. They consider you when they see you in the search ads. And, then finally, before bed they’re looking again at their news clips, maybe a YouTube or some similar type of media and they see you through remarketing there and they end up deciding, “yeah, that’s who I want to go with.” So this is kind of puts a face on an individual, right? And what the lifecycle of that individual might look like and the different media they might interact with throughout the day. We have five different types of media here. And in ways to reach them at different points in their day and build that awareness. As long as you’ve targeted an audience that’s already given you some indication behaviorally that they’re in market for your services, this is very effective to have a comprehensive media mix that can really give you a better shot of closing that customer.

Paid Media: Dynamic Search Ads- In terms of the different techniques there’s, I mentioned, there’s a lot of different types of paid media. There’s also a lot of different ways we can leverage that media. I’m gonna show you just a few examples of things we use successfully here at Go Local. Dynamic search ads. This allows you to basically customize the ad message based on what Google knows about that user and on the way the user actually searched. So, your ads are built in a way that they can dynamically change out terminology, descriptions, and other information to more closely align with that unique individual and increase the likelihood that they’re gonna select you and select your ad. These are really great ways to, you know, we used to AB test. We’d have to manually create all these different variations of ad copy. This is a tool that actually allows us to do that in a more AI driven way, a more automated way, where literally dynamically each person searching in the exact same way in the exact same market, maybe even standing in the exact same location would get different results and see different versions of your ad copy based on what’s uniquely positioned for them in the way they searched.

Paid Media: Opportunities- Local services ads. I think you guys are all probably aware of local service ads by now. They’ve been around for a while. But they are taking on an increasingly larger role in the home services vertical in general. And, it’s important for you to know that they need to be a part of your media mix. I know there’s some pain involved sometimes with getting them established, set up. So, you might need to seek out an expert in getting those set up for you. But they do need to be a decent part of your budget allocation. I would say, on average, somewhere between 15 and 25% most likely. They are what we call “absolute top of page” meaning they’re shown above traditional paid advertising. They come with, from a consumer perspective, they come with the Google Guarantee which is appealing for a certain subset of your customer base. You do pay for qualified leads that have kind of gone through a process with Google so that’s attractive in that you’re not just paying for clicks; you’re actually paying for leads and opportunities. And they offer the user the opportunity to either contact you or book service through the listing without having to visit your website. So, it’s just another lead channel that you can control and you can set and allocate your own budget towards. You can set all the parameters up for how you’re going to target those campaigns that we think that you should consider as part of your mix.

Paid Media: Performance Max- As your campings mature, this is a newer product from Google called Performance Max. And, this is where, when your campaigns have started to mature and enough of that AI, machine learning has happened in the background for Google to really start to better understand what are the attributes of an individual that would be more likely to convert for your business, that’s where Performance Max can come into play. This allows you to set a specific budget and then basically hand the keys to Google and then say “we can distribute your budget in the most effective manner across all these different Google properties with the goal or intent of driving conversions”. So, we can say, Google can then determine on where your budget should be allocated and what percentage should go to search versus display versus YoutUbe and take the same creative assets and basically distribute those across all these different Google media channels to maximize return in terms of conversion. Again, we’ve seen this work better when a campaign has matured, campaigns have matured to the degree that Google has enough learning in the account to be able to ascertain what a good customer looks like for your business. So it wouldn’t be something I would suggest starting out right out of the gates with. It should come down the road when your campaigns have been running for quite awhile with Google. And that machine learning is already kind of kicking in. Even in those scenarios, we’ve found that it just doesn't work well in every market. So, I would be really closely paying attention to your performance max campaigns and seeing “where is it working, where is it not.” And, just because it works in one market this month, this quarter, doesn’t mean it’s going to work next month, next quarter. So keep a close eye on it to make sure that it’s still working as effectively as it should. And, if it’s not, don’t be afraid to turn it off and take back the reins from Google and say “okay I’m gonna control my spending and put in for this market or for this campaign specifically for where I want it to go.

Paid: Call Tracking and Analysis- This is one of the last pieces today I want to talk about. It’s call tracking and analysis. This is actually one of my more passionate areas. I think this is really under leveraged on the whole. We have all this terrific data we can garner from the phone calls that are happening as a result of our ad campaigns. Still to this day the preferred option for consumers is to pick up the phone. They just don’t often get all the information they’re seeking through the website or through contact forms. And they want that immediacy of talking to someone and getting something arranged or that follow through set up especially in an emergency need situation which arises a lot in the home service verticals. So what we say is if you’re getting all these phone calls, why don’t we actually leverage the information that’s being, that can be derived from those phone calls. Let’s listen. Let’s call record. Let’s listen to those calls.

The first piece here, call dispositioning, is that aspect, let’s listen to the calls and ascertain, what’s happening on the calls? What’s the most frequent questions we’re getting? Are those calls being handled well? Are they being answered in a timely manner? Really trying to understand, how are we handling what is traditionally our highest source of lead volume. Are we handling it well? Are we addressing the user quickly and are we giving them all the information they need? Are our technicians or service reps handling those calls well and positioning them, our business well to convert? This can give us a lot of keywords and a lot of information that can help drive some of our other ad campaigns, our SEO strategies, our content strategies, and even our paid strategies by just listening and saying what are the words that are being used to describe the problem by the customer. It likely will correlate to the way they search online as well.

The second piece is a matchack analysis. So, we’re gonna take the inbound callers’ phone numbers and, at the month, we’re gonna match that against all of the phone numbers of the individuals who signed up for service or completed service with us. That way we can definitively tie back the phone calls and say these phone calls resulted in these sales activities. It’s often a missing link when people are talking about their tracking. They don’t have that tie in between their CRM system and their marketing efforts and it can often leave this big gap in their understanding of what’s happening with our digital marketing. Well matchback can help in that regard in that you can take the actual phone number that the person used to call you originally through that ad campaign that was tracked and now tie it back to that phone number that individual gave you when they signed up for service. It’s not 100%. I would say it’s probably, on average, capturing about 80% is what our experience has been of those actual resulting sales that came from phone calls. Because, sometimes, someone might call you from work but give you their cell phone number to put on file so you can’t make that match. But, it does give you a pretty good idea of where these leads, how many of these leads that are coming through phone are actually ending up converting? And, it can give you some ideas of the quality of the leads from different channels. When you’re tracking your calls by channel, it can give you an idea of where that quality is being derived in terms of call activity.

The last piece is just the data analytics piece and identifying, you know, some baseline metrics that we want to track ourselves against and then measuring those over time and ongoing so that we can better understand what to expect from the call volume we’re receiving. Like, what’s typical? What’s the conversion rate for our business look like? It should fall somewhere in that 20-40% range on average. If it’s better than 40%, then you’re doing great in terms of converting that call activity. But, we want to monitor that on an ongoing basis and really trend it and say are we getting better or worse in terms of how we’re dealing with those inbound opportunities via phone? Are we converting at a higher rate or lower rate? How does seasonality play into it? What should we expect? In other words, if we generate 100 phone calls, how many resulting sales should be coming from that? That can help drive a lot of our decision making when it comes to budgeting and deciding how much we spend to generate the sales we need to hit our overall goals as a business.

Paid Media: Attribution-  The last piece here is really attribution and I know this is a touchy subject. But, there are tools that will help us, at least on a surface level, better understand attribution and who or how to get credit to the various media campaigns you’re running. This is just a screen capture from one of our clients from their Google Analytics account. And, it shows, you know, let’s look here specifically, paid search number 5 here on the list. These individuals started with paid meaning the first time they interacted with your website was through a paid search camping. But, then they came back direct meaning they knew your URL at that point. They typed it in. They came direct and they converted. In a last click scenario, we would be giving these 132 conversions, we’d be giving credit to direct channel. And, that could send some false signals, right? We could say, oh that means that these people just knew us because our brand is strong or maybe some billboard or some other type of brand related media we ran in the market drove that sale. That’s actually a false reading when in fact, what happened was, paid search drove that conversion to you and late they wrote down your URL or they just remembered it, bookmarked it, what have you, they came back later and ended up converting. But, the main reason they knew you and came to engage with you was through paid search. So, really in this case, first click should be getting credit or at least partial credit. You could give half and half. Half credit to paid, half credit to direct. I always say if it ends in direct, you probably need to look back a couple of channels to see what was the original way they came to us. Here’s a little more ambiguous one here. So, paid and organic. Person started on paid then later came back and searched again, found you organically and came organically. That could’ve been you might need to dig into that a little bit more. 60 individuals, in this case, did that and converted. If they searched by brand, then likely paid should be getting credit for that. If they searched generically for the pest type or the specific problem they were seeking to resolve, then it may be that they saw you from paid but you weren’t memorable enough to transact with and so they searched again and just happened to find you organically cause you were doing something right there. And then you ended up winning them. So this is a scenario where you give 50/50 credit in that scenario. But, understanding, kind of, this attribution piece is really important to ultimately understanding what’s the return on the investment from that paid media? And then, you can in turn understand how should it continue to be budgeted as a part of my overall media mix?

Thank you- So, that’s it for today. Again, this is John Jordan from Go Local Interactive. I hope that’s helpful in terms of understanding paid media. I hope overall this walk we’ve done through digital marketing and how to establish a strong digital marketing program from the foundation up has been helpful. Until then, thank you very much.