Running successful, effective paid media strategies across Paid Search (Google/Bing), Paid Social (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, etc), and online display can be a challenging task for anyone, even marketers with tons of time. For marketers tasked with dozens of items, it becomes exponentially more difficult even for the most savvy and experienced digital marketer to keep up. Using marketing automation to enhance digital paid media campaigns can create new layers of efficiency and create a more integrated strategic approach. Here are four tricks for how you can leverage marketing automation to improve your paid media campaigns.
Use Marketing Lists to Build Defined Audience Targets
Whether you are advertising on Google, LinkedIn, or Facebook (or many other channels really), marketing lists are a significant benefit to creating a cohesive strategy. If you have an email list, how you segment this list can help you create a focused campaign audience. How can you use marketing lists to enhance your campaigns?
- Create a segmented list of people that have registered for a whitepaper or newsletter (or whatever “free” content you offer) but have not taken any additional steps in your defined buying journey. I.e., they haven’t scheduled a demo or requested a sales contact. You can use this list of “cold leads” to create a campaign designed to drive further interest in your product or service.
- If you run an ecommerce business, you could create a running list of people that have not purchased a product in the last 90 days (or whatever makes sense). With this list, launch a “re-purchase” campaign that is designed to bring previous customers back to purchase another product from your store.
When using these customer lists, there are some important things to note:
- With Google, you have to have a steady advertising history in order to use customer lists as an audience layer. You also need to have a large enough list (minimum of 1000 matched customers) in order to run these types of campaigns on Google.
- With LinkedIn and Facebook, the match requirements are less, but there is still a requirement to have at least 300 matched customers.
Create Customized Landing Pages for Paid Media Power
Landing pages and conversion rate optimization are a key factor in successful digital media campaigns. Driving traffic means little if you aren’t optimizing your landing pages for conversions, you are basically giving money away! Marketing automation software like the emfluence Marketing Platform offer landing page generators that allow you to create customized pages for campaigns of all types.
We generally recommend ongoing A/B testing with your paid media campaigns so that you can continually strive for ongoing conversion improvements. You can do this by creating multiple landing pages within your marketing automation platform, or you could also consider adding a dynamic landing page optimizer (i.e., Optimizely or Google Optimize) to allow you to create experiments dynamically.
Use Lead Nurturing to Maximize Lead Conversion
Paid media is a great way to generate a large volume of leads quickly, but if you don’t have a good nurture campaign built and ready to go, it may be a fruitless effort. Nurturing your leads allows you to identify customers that are truly engaged with your brand and your messages and those that may have just signed up for a free whitepaper or newsletter or whatever the case may be. By creating these lead nurture workflows, you can quickly segment these customers based on their activity.
Lead scoring is a part of this. With lead scoring, you can develop a model that attributes value for every action a contact in your list completes. Once they’ve achieved a pre-defined lead score, you can move them through the funnel to the next stage of the communications (whether that is more mid-funnel nurturing or a call from sales).
You could also further this lead nurturing campaign by creating a customer segment list (as described earlier). You can create a customized campaign with unique messaging for this segment that is specifically focused on promoting a new product, promotion, or sales opportunity.
Identify High-Value Keywords to Use Throughout Your Automated Marketing Messaging
One last thing we can do to ensure our paid search strategy is well-integrated with marketing automation is to continually monitor high value keywords. If we find that there are high value search queries driving new leads, try to ensure those are included in all other aspects of your campaign assets – from ads and landing pages to email communications and social media messaging (and all things in between). This can lead to a more effective communications strategy in the long run.
Additionally, using consistent messaging across ads, landing pages, social media, and nurture campaigns can drive home a key message relatively quickly. Your future customers are engaged across all of these channels and will benefit from a consistent message. Note: consistent does not mean identical. There are many ways to communicate your core message effectively.
Wrapping It Up with a Bow
To Summarize:
- Use your customer/contact lists to create focused target audiences for paid search, social, and media campaigns.
- Create custom landing pages for your media campaigns that use consistent messaging.
- Make sure you have lead nurturing campaigns in place for your paid media campaigns.
- Tap into your PPC search queries list to enhance your nurture messaging.
Want a little more help? Drop us a line at expert@emfluence.com.
