(upbeat music)
- Oh, hi.
You just caught me polishing some of the awards won
by the amazing team here at Exposure Ninja.
And in fact, today I wanna take you behind the scenes
of one of these incredible award winning campaigns,
because actually there are some amazing marketing lessons
that we can all apply to our businesses,
whatever we're selling
and whatever channels that we're using.
It's this one actually,
the UK Paid Media Retail Campaign of the Year.
Beat some huge global brands for this one.
Can't wait to tell you all about it.
First up, some ground rules.
Now you can find the name of this business online,
so what I'm not gonna do is give you their specific numbers,
like CPA or their budget,
because that would give their competitors
an advantage if they watched this video.
But what I will do is share the strategies
that we used and turn them into general applicable lessons
that we can all apply to our business,
because that is much more useful.
But before we get started,
let's set the scene about this business.
So there are physical hardware store based
in Ontario in Canada, selling tools,
and primarily to DIYers.
They have physical store, but during coronavirus
they've realised that they were going to have
to step up their online game,
which had not really been a focus of the business.
They had a goal of doubling their total monthly sales
through the whole business,
and online was gonna need to contribute a lot.
And of course, fairly typically in this sort of situation
when you're managing pay per click in house
against much more established competitors,
it's very difficult to get traction,
because you are going up against PPC specialists
and you are doing all sorts of marketing
and trying to run PPC.
So very, very difficult to get traction,
so that's why an agency often helps
in these sorts of circumstances.
Also important to say this business had a small budget,
not just a small ad budget,
but a small budget for Exposure Ninja as well.
So what's the first thing that you do
in a situation like this?
Well many people just go straight into whatever ad platform
that they want to use and they start setting stuff up.
But that's not what we do here at Exposure Ninja.
No, the PPC team,
led by fantastic Hajni on this campaign,
and by the way, I should say,
that all of the stuff that you see in these videos
is not from me, I am merely the blabbering mouth
at the head of Exposure Ninja.
This campaign, like all of the work that we do,
is run by our incredible team of ninjas,
all dedicated channel specialists,
and this is no exception.
Hajni and Charlotte on this campaign
have done a fantastic job,
and it is their work and their results
which we are looking at today.
Now, so when we start a campaign,
what we don't do is go straight into the ad platform
and start setting stuff up.
The first thing to do,
particularly when you're working with a restricted budget
is to think about strategy,
how are you actually going to approach this problem?
So step one, who's the target audience?
In this case, we knew it was gonna be DIYs,
predominantly people doing woodwork.
The second thing that you need to do
in your strategy is to work out what your strengths
and your weaknesses are versus your competitors.
So for this client, they had a fairly limited product range,
they didn't have as many products
as some of their competitors,
and they didn't have as much stock
as some of their competitors as well.
So we knew that that was gonna be something
that was potentially a challenge.
We also knew that there was a fairly limited budget, again,
compared to their competitors,
we were going in with much less click budget
and management time.
This was gonna force us to be ruthlessly BOFU,
bottom of funnel.
And this meant that whilst we would love to do things
like put together downloadables explaining
how people could choose the perfect tools
for their particular woodworking projects,
we just didn't have the budget to be able to do this.
We had to focus on the searches
that were most likely to convert,
that are most likely to purchase,
that's what we mean by bottom of the funnel.
Those people that were most likely to turn into customers.
Brand awareness, great,
but not for this campaign, this campaign needed money ASAP.
We also knew that because
this was a relatively small campaign for Exposure Ninja
and relatively low budget, we were going to have to rely
on automated bidding strategies and smart campaigns
in order to make the most of that.
And because we would have varying degrees
of stock availability,
what we didn't want to be doing is running campaigns
to product pages where there was no stock left.
So running these sorts of smart campaigns,
and in particular shopping campaigns,
where we could upload a product feed,
was gonna be absolutely key.
Another weakness that we identified
which is not uncommon, unfortunately,
is that the website had a relatively low conversion rate.
This means the percentage of people coming into the website
who actually purchased was quite low,
in this case, less than 0.5%.
If you don't know conversion rates, that's low.
If we were gonna make this thing work,
we had to address that.
And the final thing that we identified in our strategy
is that we wanted to improve the customer lifetime value,
ie, when someone comes in and purchases for the first time,
we didn't want that to be the only purchase.
We wanted that person to make repeated purchases,
this would increase the customer lifetime value
and allow us to invest more to get each customer.
Now, in this particular case,
we knew that we had to make that first purchase profitable,
we couldn't go negative on the front end.
But if we could increase that customer lifetime value
whilst having a profitable front end,
this was gonna make a big difference
for the revenue and profit of the business,
and allow them to scale their marketing.
For this, we would need email marketing,
which we're not gonna cover in loads of detail in this video
but we do have another video all
about how to improve your customer lifetime value
using email marketing, so go and check it out.
After this one, obviously,
link in the description.
Now the first general lesson here is,
know the games that you can afford to play.
By identifying that we had a lower budget
than our competitors, we had lower stock availability
and a smaller stock range than our competitors,
we were able to pick certain games
that we wanted to compete with.
We weren't going to compete, for example,
with text search ads, because people coming through
the text search ads would expect a wide product range.
We knew that we were going to be targeting shopping ads
because then we could show people
the exact product that they'd search for,
we could show them the price that they could price qualify,
and we were gonna minimise the resistance
that person had to purchase.
We also knew that we couldn't afford to play
the top of funnel brand awareness game,
we just didn't have the budget for that.
We had to focus on ROI.
The next lesson is to make sure that
that high ROI low hanging fruit is taken first
before you start playing in brand awareness.
So many times we get a business
come into Exposure Ninja saying,
we want help increasing our brand awareness,
we want our brand to become more famous.
Well, we'll take a look at their digital marketing
and realise that actually there's so much low hanging fruit
we're generating actual sales first,
then you can go into the brand awareness stuff.
The trouble with focusing on brand awareness stuff
right at the start of a campaign is that it takes so long
to actually build brand awareness,
you can die of starvation on that journey.
If you've got a campaign that's earning you ROI
of two to one, and you've got a brand awareness campaign,
which one do you kill first when the going gets tough?
Of course you kill the brand awareness,
because the ROI one is generating you actual sales.
And of course, if you get the ROI focused marketing right,
then you'll build brand awareness by doing that anyway.
The next lesson is to know your weaknesses
and identify them ahead of time.
So for example, in this case,
we knew conversion rate was a weakness,
we had to fix that, otherwise nothing was gonna work.
It would've been tempting to say, well,
this has got a low conversion rate,
but we're just gonna try anyway.
Without a good conversion rate
everything else is gonna suck.
And the final lesson before we move on
is always be looking for ways to improve
your customer lifetime value.
By building automated email sequences for this client,
we're able to increase their customer lifetime value,
which means that we improve the ROI of their pay per click,
as well as their SEO, as well as their content marketing,
as well as their branded and direct traffic.
Okay, so how do we set up the campaigns?
Well, we set up three types of pay per click campaign,
firstly, Google Shopping.
We gave about 85% of the daily budget to Google Shopping,
because this was gonna be the traffic
that was most commercially qualified.
Google Shopping ads allow us to show the product to someone,
it shows that image of the product
so people know what they're clicking on,
and it shows the price,
so there's very little price resistance.
There's no chance, for example,
of someone clicking on a product,
only to be shocked at the price on the product page,
because they've just clicked on the price.
If they were shocked by that price
they wouldn't have clicked on it in the first place.
So pre-qualifies people
and make sure that they have maximum commercial intent.
The next type of campaign that we set up
was a branded search campaign.
Now this was a relatively small campaign
with a very small budget of, you know,
3 or 4% of their daily total.
And this was targeting the business' brand name,
not the brand names of the products that they were selling.
The reason for this is the business doesn't rank
that well for its own brand name,
and there was a small,
but reasonable search volume for this,
so we wanted to make sure that we were picking up
any of that branded traffic.
The final type of campaign that we set up
was a dynamic search ads campaign.
Again, this was relatively small,
and really, we were just mainly testing this
to see how well it performed
so that when we could increase budget later on,
we could be a little bit more aggressive with this strategy.
Next we had to increase conversion rate.
Now unfortunately,
Luna's conversion rate optimization skills
aren't so sharp these days,
but luckily we had the CRO team from Exposure Ninja on hand
who made some excellent recommendations and interventions
for this client to improve the conversion rate
of their website.
Now, some of the things that we implemented
and recommended maybe feel a little bit counterintuitive
for an Ecommerce store.
For example,
adding a click to call phone number in the header.
Now we did this because this was a local business,
this is a local store,
and adding that phone number gives a bit of reassurance
and credibility to an otherwise unknown Ecommerce store.
We also encourage them to add a description
of the business, and in particular,
emphasising this is a family owned and local business.
Now usually, smaller,
local owned family businesses would try
and make themselves look bigger,
but we knew that this was gonna be a losing battle,
because with the limited product range,
it was fairly obvious that this wasn't a huge store.
So we obeyed the classic sales principle
of sell what you've got
and emphasise the fact that this was family owned,
and this was a local business.
We recommended adding testimonials for the store itself
and reviews for the products that had them,
and we also recommended opening
the product descriptions by default.
So when you go on a lot of Ecommerce stores,
you see the product description or product specification
is in these accordion boxes
and you have to click to open them.
The trouble is with this is when you land on the page,
there's no information there, and if someone doesn't click,
then they don't see any information about the product,
so it makes no sense to keep these hidden by default.
So by opening them by default, (hums)
customers could see information about the products
that they were trying to buy.
Simple genius.
Okay, so what are the general marketing lessons
that we can apply here?
Well, firstly,
this idea of selling what you've got.
People always look at their competitors and say, oh yeah,
but they're bigger than us, so they're more reliable,
or they're more established or,
oh, they're smaller than us,
so they're more nimble, but nobody realises
that whatever your situation,
there is a way of selling that.
For example, if you're a small business,
then you are local, you are family owned.
If you're a large business and you are established,
you're trusted, you're well known.
What about if you're a medium sized business?
Well, maybe you are small enough to care,
large enough to deliver.
It's all about identifying where you sit,
compared to your competitors,
and finding a way of positioning
that so that it's attractive to potential customers.
Another lesson, conversion rate always matters,
did we mention that?
Pull that lever as hard as you can, as often as you can.
Okay, let's talk about some results.
Oh, by the way,
if you're watching this thinking,
oh, this is really cool,
I'd love the Exposure Ninja team to work on my website
and give me some recommendations, then lucky you,
we actually have a completely free service
called the Exposure Ninja free website and marketing review,
which you can find out exposureninja.com/review.
All you need to do is answer a few short,
simple questions about your business, nothing too taxing.
One of our team at Exposure Ninja
will then go and record you a video,
showing you how to increase the volume of leads
and sales that your website is generating for you.
This service is totally free of charge
and it is completely awesome,
or is that completely free of charge and totally awesome?
I don't know, but you should go request it,
exposureninja.com/review and go and find out.
Alright, you want another quick trick?
Check this out.
So whilst this was a national business,
this is an Ecommerce store, so they ship nationally
across Canada, but they're based in Ontario.
Now we knew that because we were emphasising
the local aspect of this business,
we were expecting to see an increase in conversion rate
from traffic from Ontario, which is exactly what we saw.
Now obviously this doesn't make
that much sense logically, right?
Because just because an Ecommerce story
is based in your city.
Ontario, city, Ontario, city.
- [Narrator] Province.
- It doesn't mean that they're necessarily better,
but it taps into this human thing, right?
I remember when I was a kid and I went on holiday
and I saw another kid from my school on holiday,
and you're like, oh my gosh,
we are like best friends,
you feel this huge sense of rapport with this other kid.
I wouldn't have waved to him in the street back home,
I definitely wouldn't have gone over and talked to him,
but all of a sudden, because we were both from our hometown,
but now we are on holiday, thrust together in this new,
amazing world, we have this amazing magnetic rapport.
And I still remember, what,
probably 28 years later seeing him on holiday
and my mind being completely blown
at this sense of rapport that we've got.
And it taps into this weird tribalism thing,
so just because an Ecommerce store is in your city
shouldn't mean that you have
any increased affinity with it, but it actually does.
And we see this in the stats.
So click through rate from the ads for traffic
in Ontario is about the same as Canada as a whole.
In other words, people aren't clicking on the ads more
because they're from Ontario,
because they don't know that the business
is also from Ontario, but,
once they come through to the site,
seeing that they are also in Ontario
means that they are converting at almost twice
the rate of Canada as a whole.
Yep, they've seen the other kid on holiday
and they're almost twice as likely to go over
and talk to them.
This meant that the cost per acquisition
was about two thirds of the cost for Ontario traffic,
as it was for the rest of Canada.
And in a campaign this size, that makes a huge difference.
Combine this with the almost doubling
of the conversion rate,
based on the conversion rate optimization recommendations
we made, and here are the results.
In four months, we more than tripled website sales,
sales from pay per click increased nine times,
and a PPC conversion rate of over 1%.
Boom.
Now you'll notice that conversion rate optimization
has been fundamental to the success of this campaign,
it's not just PPC, it's also the CRO
which helps this to get such good results.
We actually have another video, which is much more detailed
about conversion rate optimization,
and shows you how to improve the performance of any website,
whether you're Ecommerce, service based,
lead generation, go and check this video out now.
It's really detailed and gives you step by step
with examples of how to improve your conversion rate,
whatever you're selling and whoever you're selling to.