Platform Expansion & Holistic Marketing – All Things PPC Podcast Ep1

the tips and tricks for demand generation and and catching the eye and that prospecting tool is to have a [Music]

Hello I am here today with Mark who is one of our senior client managers how are you doing today? I’m Grand how are you sir I am good thank you so today we’re going to talk about a bit of a word salad this platform expansion and holistic marketing so what does that mean I think we’re talking here aren’t we about full funnel marketing and how clients want to expand out to multiple channels both PPC channels and other channels what what does it mean to you I think it’s exactly that and it’s a conversation that I have a lot with clients and built into this conversation is this and we’re going to go on to it I’m sure later on but we have this notion of risk embedded in when clients start with us and we do a good job after three months we are happy to turn around and say this is your target Rass this is your target cost per acquisition lead they’re happy we’re happy it invariably leads after that qbr to what next and what next is well if you want new business we don’t keep doing the same thing and what we need to do is to expand to full funnel which is you know let’s be honest most targets are predicated on the bit at the bottom of the funnel the stuff that we can count and inherent in the top of funnel is a sort of sense of a lack of control I think sometimes clients feel because what’s this money going on I don’t really understand demand gen I don’t really understand the role of YouTube in performance Max what is it and it can be quite a tough I don’t want to say sell because we’re not sort of selling Google’s products or Microsoft or Facebook what we’re trying to do is say this tool enables you to get this but not all tools lead to a sale straight away so it’s about making sure that we try and communicate that there is a link but your reports are going to look slightly different and your profitability kpi is to disc discuss upwards with stakeholders potentially could become a bit more of a complex conversation so quite a few things to unpack there I think we need to First ly Define why this question comes up so from my point of view it’s because most people just want more all the time and they think and the problem with digital marketing is there’s just so many channels you can be on that you feel like you’re missing out if you’re if you’re just honing in on on Google ads you feel like you should be doing meta or Tik Tok or whatever so there’s that and then there’s this concept of when you start to maximize potential or get some stability in your main Channel you want to then expand out and that is overlaid with what the funnel is now the funnel is something that marketers like to talk about how much how much um actual directors of companies or marketing managers care about the funnel versus just the results is kind of up in the air but just for the sake of clarity can you just Define in the context of you know a PPC podcast what what we Define as the full funnel the full funnel um if you imagine that close your eyes because it’s a podcast so you don’t need to look at me if you close your eyes and and envisage that funnel um what you’re trying to do is to lead potential clients through a journey if they don’t know you they don’t know your product or your brand so at the very beginning you want to catch their eye using some kind of asset driven um content that that that might follow them around a little bit um be it on YouTube um Google ads Facebook so what you to try and do is to get a breadth of books that people can read in the library that keep referencing you and then when you when that user rather starts to sort of travel a bit closer to actually consolidating their purchase be it um Ecommerce Sports clothing or a high-end um International holiday because you’ve been front of Mind using that top funnel for a while when they start to then look specifically for that thing for you and then they find you further down the channel using performance Max or by using you know old school search ads then that then leads them down after they’ve been to your site or they’ve spoken to you to actually purchase online or if it’s a lead generation client to actually speak to you book some time in and then close that potential sale whether what regardless of what that is but the journey is different depending on the user and what it is that you’re trying to actually sell but Google recently said that that your average your average customer your average user uses multiple touch points before they actually close a purchase or close a lead that means the full funnel is just making sure that you are front of mind and you become a sort of reliable source all the way through that journey and if you’ve just got one particular Channel and you’re smashing it that’s great but in isolation what you’re doing is is missing opportunities to just to be front of mind at the top and then across the middle when it goes down the intent funnel I think one of the interesting things about working with clients if we do really really well for them which we invariably do what tends to happen is they they trust us and so what they want to say is okay you we’ trusted you with x amount of money how do we get more and I think part of our discussions with clients is also about competition so suddenly they become more aware of who it is that they’re up against and they take a bit more interest in what it is that they do and they go I can see that X has X I can see that X has Facebook I can see that they’re using more of this how do I get there and a lot of the conversations start from there but they’re not the easiest conversations to have because it is about changing behaviors so yeah so the the funnel in its Essence then is the widest part of the funnel is is awareness and building that awareness then there’s the consideration phase and then there’s the intent phase at the bottom where people are actually doing so the analogy I like to use is if if you if you use a red pen and the red pen Runs Out you go to Google type in red pen and you buy a red pen now if you’re a company that makes red pens but they’re out of bamboo so you could serve that market but you need to people might not be thinking about that so you need to drive consideration so how you target people is different for for like an emergency dentist they they always convert really highly don’t they their conversion rates are high because if you smash your tooth you need it straight away but like you said for our holiday clients some of them you know they’re selling holidays at 20 30 Grand in the highend holidays that’s what we call a considered purchase so you need that awareness layer we tend to work with clients don’t we at the bottom of the funnel first and build out from there and that’s how the ethos of how we want to work we want to demonstrate that value where intent capture that intent so this discussion comes when they’re trying to expand out now a problem with that that you’ve highlighted is that when we’re used to doing that bottom of the funnel people type in they buy things it’s all great the RASS is good the the more you start to need to expand because you’ve captured all the intent that can change the metric so it’s not just predicated on roas for example can you talk about how marketers need to consider the the metrics when they’re going to expand to more platforms and have a more holistic marketing approach yeah I think for me again using an analogy that I that I use with clients is not every tool is designed to sell something so for those at the bottom of that funnel when they’re actually purchasing something the kpi is quite obvious it is how much is that lead worth to them how much was that sale Worth to them so it’s those Rass CPA targets but if you change strategy and you have to have that conversation with clients well that was that was phase one phase two is we’re not only doing that Evergreen Ecom stuff we’re now trying to get new business we can’t use that same unit of measurement therefore what we have to do is have a blended strategy or a blended a blended kpi and that sometimes is a bit of a a learning exercise but it’s also on us to communicate in a way that that makes sense to them because invariably what will happen is somebody’s going to have to have your client is going to have to have that conversation internally and if you’re not able to jump on a call collectively with all of the decision makers and stakeholders we’ve got to try and speak in a language that people understand that what a blended kpi is and why it’s relevant to them for that particular tool I mean you you’ve you’ve done this a lot is is you and you’re really good at analogies is there something that you’ve got that will actually explain that to non-m marketer types well the the thing I the thing I like to call it is you’ve got demand capture in two two Essences you’ve got demand capture and demand generation capture and demand is that someone types thing in and then demand generation you a part of that is educating the market and you have to accept like it or not that when you’re educating the market there may be competitors Who can capture that education um and this is why you know the bigger the brand and these big SAS companies the multinationals vcbs or big household Brands they can spend a lot more on this awareness marketing because you know they’ve got the downstream metrics and then all they understand the lifetime value when you’re going expand it’s a lot I think it’s a lot better to expand from the from the high intense of outwards so from capturing demand to then starting to generate demand but by its nature generating demand has different cost metrics but what matters to a business if you’re if you’re just an e-commerce manager or a paid manager in a company your bit is your bit but actually you might have you know you might have someone in the team who runs events you might have someone in the team who just does SEO you might have a sales manager and 50 % of your business comes in from existing accounts when it rolls up to the top level of the company then it’s the how much does it cost to run the company and how much money do we make is the essential thing and all those metrics need to filter down and a lot of companies just don’t have that level of insight to be able to tell us their lifetime value their average order value and it’s always oh I don’t know or ITC it’s because so to that end if you start on a simple PPC campaign you have your product feed you just need to sell it then that that becomes easy I need row ass of this because my margin is this but once you say Okay I want to grow by 20 30% this year you then have to accept some other metrics coming in of what you’re going to have to do to to build the bricks over over the long term so I think you’ve been recently speaking to one of our clients about about this and having experimental budgets and things like that is is there any examples you can give there from a real world real world scenario yeah so this client um is in a super competitive e-commerce Market where the products themselves have a small margin so therefore um we need to be very mindful of profitability kpis there isn’t a lot of play Within the business for us to squeeze that particular row ass Target however they’ve challenged us rightly with we’ve been with you a long time how is it that you’re going to grow our business and the the difficulty in having that conversation is that it’s almost impossible to say well we can absolutely confirm that everything we do in this discovery phase of testing phase is going to get you exactly the same Ras kpi and the agreement then came through from the client who said okay you could take 10% of this year’s budget to experiment how can you measure that how can you measure the value of that now the difficulty is is that what we’re now doing is reach and volume versus just pure sales so we have to use um make sure that we communicate purposefully the use of this tool the other bit and I don’t know if I’m jumping the gun here Chris the other bit is is that a lot of those top funnel um testing a lot of that top funnel testing that we want to do is using for example if we look at Google using the elements with inside demand generation so a lot of assets um visual assets image assets text assets and and YouTube shorts which the success of which is is basically about how many people how many eyes are on this of course eventually what will happen is we’re able to judge what percentage of business is coming through his new business and we can look at how that’s expanded but it’s about holding your nerve because there is risk baked into the original you know the initial stage um and there is an element of of of these assets are going to have to be generated by the client themselves so should they wish to engage in it they have to understand that there is going to have to be some involve Google ads we can do you know being Microsoft ads we can do that content if you want to look at Faceook Facebook ads and if you want to look at kind of the more um Dynamic asset driven content within all platforms really there’s going to have to be some collaboration and work their end of producing bobon Brands and um logos and shorts we don’t do that it’s got to be on them to get the corporate voice to make sure it’s just it’s their corporate voice performance Max can create videos for them they’re not bad but they’re not ideal um we prefer to work with the creative teams that are the Specialists there aren’t they so I think we’ll we’ll come on to now some to some of those methods to actually expand the platforms beyond beyond a core PPC but it reminded me of an example of a key Challenge and and kind of positive thing of working with a particular client who works in the diet industry and they they do meal kits now a big portion of their marketing is brand based they’re a well-known brand when it’s a consumable product like a protein shake or a meal kit or something like that there is an element I once heard that if cabri stops advertising their sales drop 50% because it’s impulse that’s not quite the same with protein shakes and meal kits the difference there is it’s a consumable product so people will consume it and then if they like it hopefully they’re Buy in you know every week or every month when you cross reference that with advertising on TV as this client does or some other clients advertise on I mean we’ve even got clients who advertise on the Underground which has a lot of eyeballs on it you then need to be able to track those brand versus non-brand metrics and that becomes part of the holistic marketing now the the people who do the best at that are the ones who understand the lifetime value of their customers to be able to then say okay when we come on to what we’re going to come on to next about here’s all the fancy stuff we can do YouTube we can do demand generation the metrics that apply from that if you start going out with demand generation you’ll have lower click three rates and it will generally cost you less but you’ll get fewer conversions so it’s about that’s what we talk about with holistic marketing we’re only essentially because we are Specialists talking about one piece but you need to understand that bigger picture and and I think too many people get lost in the weeds of understanding how it all rolls up to the business objectives which is something we instill from day one isn’t it so let let’s have a look at what are some of the methods that we’re currently talking about with clients to expand um expand out to more platforms and when to put them in so the classic one is we have a Google ads client um where can they let’s say they’ve M you know their 90% impression share on their core Target they’re happy with roas and they want more where do they go from there I think the interesting thing with those clients that are going after uh B2B rather than b2c clients is is that for them the Microsoft platform works really well just by D of there are some companies that don’t allow employees to use anything other than Edge than than Microsoft products yes so if you have somebody in HR for example one of our clients um deals in HR products if you have the decision maker which is the usually the financial officer and the head of HR within a company and they’re at a company that isn’t allowed to access Chrome then the expansion for them is using the knowledge of just why don’t we just take a smaller budget trial the best performing content and Google ads and let’s just move it across to there I that sort of client wouldn’t really benefit from um say some of the more Dynamic Facebook Etc so when you have for example the client that that you raise that does diet plans they have a really large marketing spend a really large marketing spend on television um thankfully they’re a brilliant client to work with because they generally understand that brand is going to perform very differently than the non non-brand and therefore we have those blend Blended kpis and cpls right which is fantastic but what we’re doing at the moment is we’re triing social advertising to see what is the content that best works on Google ads does that actually work really really well in Facebook what can both platforms learn from one another and actually what’s been fascinating for me as somebody that is not their Target demographic is how different assets work and resonate with different platforms so with those three platforms Google Microsoft and Facebook one particular um image advert can work completely different on all three and this notion of always be testing be brave put it out there and sometimes it doesn’t work and if you can if you can just say right we’re going to run this for a month hold your nerve the CP you know the cost per acquisition might go up but let’s just see where we go but but within that we can say okay you know what we found in January of 2024 that this asset worked really well at this time of the year for you that that and you learn not only for this year but for next year and you build up this portfolio of different ideas and different things that work on different platforms did that makes sense yeah yeah absolutely I think I think there’s an analogy is how do you have a thriving hot dog business it’s a it’s like a famous business study question and you the the lecturer ask the audience that how you have it and people sh oh I’ve got I’ll have the freshest buns or the longest hot dogs or the best sources or the most choice and the lecturer says no you need a starving crowd so you need to put what you’re doing where the audience is and that’s what needs considering when we do Platform expansion it’s like a set of your audience the lower down the funnel intent base will be doing searches on Google ads but then when with certainly with BTC although it does work for B2B as well with BTC like the D Clan customer they know very well who their Target customer is they know their Avatar they know you know their age group their income level where they tend to live in the country their interests and then by we can then Target those people and but the intent is different there and that that’s the key thing and that’s why different creatives work in different way but the and with your analogy in B2B and how they to use Microsoft or Bing don’t know how long we’re going to have to call it both but that is you know that is that’s a certain subset of people and that’s when you’re this is again thinking about it strategically which I like to do is where’s the best place to go to strategically rather than I’ve just read a blog post or seen a YouTube that says I’m supposed to do this thing on this channel because all marketers should be on this channel and like hang on what are who are we targeting where are they where’s the starving crowd and how can we target them in the right way and all mixed up in that is relating it back to a measurable kpi so that that’s goes across the pillars of what we do here it’s not just about you know vanity metrics and clickr rates and all hacks and stuff it’s having these pillars of you have a strategy you measure everything you’re focusing on the right things and that’s how we can do successful platform expansion so getting on to the tips and tricks then what within within Google ads for example there’s there’s a lot of play I mean these are Timeless principles we’ve talked about but actually in the last you know 6 months to two years there’s been a lot of push towards opening up Google as a channel itself for more demand generation so how how are we discussing that with clients and what are the advantages of that it was re it’s really nice to be a premier partner anyway a Google Premier partner but one of the benefits of it is that we were able to press play on these before everybody else did so we actually have a have more of a an experience of running these and actually what works you mentioned a starving crowd demand gen is about trying to find your new starving crowd so what you have to do is have regular conversations about what assets are going to try what what’s what’s the point of this what’s the point of this what’s the language that people use can we find that language that people want to use so there’s quite a lot going on and it’s a little bit vague especially when you have had this sort of Evergreen four six eight times Rass the thing to use that we find is even people as old as me are influenced by Tik Tok Instagram reals so this notion of search campaigns and and it being a bit of a static sell in terms of just the actual ad or the shopping ad itself the tips and tricks for demand generation and and catching the eye and that prospecting tool is to have a very uh a sort of quiver of arrows having different assets that perform at different times but have a variation of those assets using a consistent color Livery that’s based and predicated on your own logo on your website so it breathes that familiarity but and there isn’t I think my biggest tip it’s not a trick my biggest tip um is that there is no quick fix so it it is about time we can carry on testing but if we make loads and loads of changes constantly we don’t know what works what sticks so sometimes you have to give us some time you have to give us four to six weeks four to six weeks in in in a kind of cycle of Market is a long time for some people not to see or to start seeing their row ass or go down a little bit or the cap profit profitability kpis go down a bit so it’s about holding your nerve that’s one tip it’s about giving it time but also and I’m not just saying this the reason why I work for this company is because it’s predicated on transparency so if it’s not working I can say that’s the data this isn’t working on this channel why is it working on this channel that’s really interesting let’s look at the audiences let’s look at the actual um the tool that that you know who is it that that audience uh excuse me who is it that that that platform is actually speaking to um because they’re different and it’s about it’s about learning from all of them but not not having a one-size fit fits all it just it’s just not going to work that way also just technically sometimes Google is a little bit snippy about some of the assets that are actually okay on Microsoft and okay on Facebook so there’s also the technical aspect of why isn’t that worked Mark I mean that’s a good question I’ll reach out to Google and ask why they don’t like that particular advert but Facebook or or meta are fine with it you know but all the gang comes back to those Evergreen principles doesn’t it of doing the testing the right things measuring them properly having the kpi to work with and explaining to the client and that the other stakeholders what what’s needed essentially to do anything well not just PPC you need to focus on the right things you need to do it to the right quality and you need to do it for the right length of time so what’s essential come to Quality over over a sustained period is how you get success and that’s that’s true of everything everything we do here so I think it all wraps up to to having that that strategic positioning in place and the measurements so cool okay well we’ve talked about quite a lot in in a short space of time then what what the funnel is we’ve talked about examples of when you would want to expand when you wouldn’t want to expand we’ve talked about the need to test of course our Evergreen principles of strategy and testing and measurement uh and how it overall fits in the other marketing metrics and resource allocation and and graphic designers getting involved at the right place and all that kind of stuff are there any fin tips you want to share for the audience on how to best think about expanding to more platforms and being thinking about your marketing as a holistic piece I think new business to to generate new business within that is a modicum of risk and I think that if you if you trust us as an agency then trust us to give this a go we’re not going to put you in the wrong direction um but we need to find a common language that everybody can understand not just the one I’m having with a client but the one that they’re having actually in their place of work with their stakeholders but it’s it’s a fascinating time it’s it’s it’s about Evolution if you want to grow you need to evolve and that includes your marketing yeah cool that’s a good place to leave it thank you for all your tips and insights it’s a topic we could talk about for a long time but um I think there is as as the modern world progresses faster and faster there’s so much fomo in the marketing space and I think my my part in words would be yes you need to explain to more channels and yes your agency partners or in-house teams might get more budgets or charge you more but it has to be done in the right way at the right time and and just don’t spread yourself too thin otherwise you will you know you’ll get you just there’s that whole jack of all trades master of none isn’t there you’ve got to have that balance so thanks for your time Mark and uh we’ll see you on another episode all the [Music]