But you need to get the strategy right for your business, your proposition and your locale.That's where a measured pilot campaign comes to your aid, de-risking your launch and speeding up Time-To-Profit through a tried and tested holistic approach.
Targeting the right people is tricky in every campaign and who you target is also driven by how well you are converting and selling. These three pillars need to grow together in unison if your pilot is to stay within budget and teach you something useful or if your expansion is to avoid high risk.
Visitors are pure vanity, leads are people likely to purchase. The funnel you create will help qualify visitors and encourage the right ones to convert into leads. Too many low quality leads will mean poor sales conversion and unnecessary expense or failing shopping carts.
Unless your shopping cart or direct-sales force is able to convert leads into paying customers, no amount of visitors or leads will make your campaign successful. Too many low quality leads can demotivate a sales force or slow down a shopping cart. The right balance is key, a plan for incremental improvement will then help you maximise returns.
Below is a sample of pilot campaigns from Spring 2018. Some are new products
and others are small businesses putting a first foot in the water with SEM.
You will notice that most of them recouped the entire budget or showed profit.
We agree the goals of the pilot, then we calculate how many leads we need in order to
gauge conversion success, highlight improvements and gauge the
future scope for the campaign.
You are always completely in control. We install scripts to prevent theft which are very effective and you can buy insurance for a very low fee if you want further peace of mind.
Once we set the campaign up we agree maximum expenditure per day, week and month and a lot of other protective measures to ensure there are no nasty surprises. The occasional day when expenditure can overrun is then balanced out the following day so over a month you meet your spend targets. That stops any nasty shocks occurring.
In terms of returns, you and we have to learn about how your customers see your proposition and how they like to buy it, so it may be slow and you may show losses, but not husge losses. About half of pilots are profitable, some very profitable and we do some desk research with you up front to ensure we are approaching a good potential market and so forth. You really have nothing to worry about.That is the whole point in a pilot.
If you have been doing this for a while and not quite satisfied with your returns, the starting place is to get an Audit, but this alone is not sufficient. You need the input of seasoned marketers and experienced PPC technicians to get it right. When we do consulting we find that for every £70 spend on advertising, just £1 is spent on conversion. That wont ever work out. Not only that visitors who dont convert are expensive.
Apart from the measures described above, the essence of a marketing pilot is to keep it simple. We need simple answers to simple questions or we won't be able to make safe decisions about what to do next. We test one proposition that is not too complex and look to avoid having to produce too much collateral, while at the same time ensuring the advertising is not let down by the conversion tools. All this will be decided in an initial consultation taking an hour or two after having seen your site and any information you can provide us.
Once you are ready to attack the market aggressively, or if you are already a seasoned campaigner, then we can help you invest a little more effort and hone more offers to fully leverage the opportunity we find.
About one in four pilots result in a very profitable first month and from there it is about planning for optimization and working out how to scale the operation safely.
If you are starting out,you will know a lot in a month, but occasionally you are still left with sufficient doubts to want to experiment for another month before setting a strategy to scale up. Caution and diligence are always wise and the competition or economy can never be predicted too far aheadThe fact that sometimes we will have a negative response to a month's trial can usually be interpreted by experienced marketers and we can give a definitive steer to stop or to change strategy and try again. Even If the answer is no, this approach won't be profitable, that is not to say that things wont be very different in a year or two.
Competition is always a key issue to be aware of. Both extremes can be difficult. No competition can mean there just is no demand, or you have to create the demand yourself which is more expensive.
Strong competition often accompanying very high bid prices can also be tricky to deal with, especially if a large global with a low cost base is willing to work at break-even or below to win share. Both of these situations are rare though and we can usually find a niche that is right for you and with good Quality Score and good research you can be very profitable in your niche.
Some clients spend 30k to 180k per month and are very profitable and seeing the their margins improve. This takes time to achieve through really getting to know your niche and how your customers behave, it often also means being able to compete in a fairly generic and global niche where there is huge volume.
Small businesses are generally more likely to be operating their niche locally or product position wise and can be very profitable by scaling their advertising to match the available search volume and focusing effort on conversion strategy and drip marketing campaigns alongside of Adwords
We have worked with a few agencies and had mixed experiences. Our Google account was in a mess and everything a bit disconnected. They did a great job starting almost from nothing again and building a solid flow of good revenue. We feel much more in control now. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them.
— Flori Busu
Wood company to work with. Strong communication with no bs and they are marketers rather than SEO types, we like that. We get a good joined-up strategy instead of what we had before.
— Greg Pani
Early days, but they are very easy to work with and we have a solid strategy in place. I feel very confident.
— Augustina Lore
It’s a big achievement to have turned this around in such a short space of time – the technical, procurement and project management challenges have been significant.
The successful launch points to some great collaboration and hard work across multiple teams – well done.
- Aaron Scullion
