How to Improve Customer Retention Through Paid Search written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

A lot of marketers and business owners think of advertising as a tool to attract the attention of new customers. But the great thing about paid search is that it’s also a powerful way to improve customer retention.

Once you go through all the trouble of winning over new business, it’s worth your while to put in the effort to keep them coming back. Here are some ways to put paid search to use specifically in boosting customer retention for your brand.

Recapture Lost Customers

The great thing about digital marketing is that it puts a lot of data points at our finger tips. Using that data, we can get smart about where we’re spending our advertising dollars, and who we’re directing our advertising towards.

Remarketing allows businesses to show ads to people who have visited their website but not made a final purchase. This is effective in winning over new prospects who are further down the funnel, but it’s also a great way to recapture the attention of a return customer who might need one last nudge to make a repeat purchase.

There are any number of reasons they might have navigated away from your website. Maybe they got distracted before they could complete their purchase. Maybe they wanted to look up a competitor to compare pricing. Maybe they were at work and their boss walked past so they clicked out of the shopping tab! The possibilities are truly endless, but using remarketing allows you to direct your ad spend at people who have already expressed interest in your brand and may just need one final reminder in the form of a targeted paid search ad to get the job done.

Create Special Offers

Using data on existing customers to shape future advertising also empowers you to create tailored offers in your marketing campaigns. Search engines like Google allow you to create custom audiences for your ads.

This means that you can display certain ads to certain people based on prior interactions with your brand. If you haven’t seen a set of customers in a while, consider targeting them with a “welcome back” offer or discount, to hopefully bring them back into the fold.

Seasonal offers are also an effective way to create repeat customers. The holidays are a great time to engage retargeting tactics. If someone’s done business with you in the past, they might just need a friendly reminder about your brand to ensure that you’re the company they go to for their holiday gifts. Creating paid search ads that feature your business name front and center for these existing customer audiences is a way to reestablish that brand recognition at a time when most people are making lots of purchases.

Display Related Products

Defining your audiences in search marketing also allows you to show existing customers ads about related products and services. Let’s say you run an electronics company and someone just purchased a new air conditioning unit from you. It might make sense to target them with advertising for A/C replacement filters for the brand and model they just purchased.

A move like this not only allows you to make the upsell now, it helps to put you top of mind again and makes you likely to be the go-to store for their future electronics needs. The earlier on in your customer relationship you can establish a pattern where that consumer relies on you for all goods in your category, the better.

Think Visually

Back in the day, paid search was all about text-based ads. Now companies have a lot of options when it comes to the type of PPC ad they want to run, and a lot of them include visual elements. Depending on the industry you’re in, including a photo or video as part of your ad can be a great way to stand out from the crowd.

If an image of your products—with you logo and brand name in brand colors—appears at the top of search results, you tap into that familiarity your customer already has with your brand and give your business an additional leg up in standing out in search results.

Reduce Cart Abandonment

It may shock you to learn that the abandonment rate on online shopping carts is more than 75 percent! It’s so painful to lose a customer’s attention when they’re so close to making the final purchase decision. That’s where retargeting can come in. Directing your ads about specific products to people who recently almost purchased that product from you is a way to prompt those relevant customers to head back to your site and finish what they started! This is a tactic that works on both first time and repeat customers who have abandoned their most recent shopping cart on your site.

Once you’ve done the hard work of winning over new business, you don’t want to have to start from square one again! Instead, focusing on customer retention can help you increase the overall lifetime value of each customer, and can help you generate revenue success for years to come. Using specific paid search tactics can boost customer retention and ensure the long-term health of your business.

Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Rand Fishkin
Podcast Transcript

My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz and currently has a new venture called SparkToro, a software and data company focused on helping people understand how and where to reach their target audiences. He and I discuss his new book, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.

Fishkin is a frequent keynote speaker on marketing and entrepreneurship topics around the world. In his spare time, he likes to hang out with his wife and eat pasta.

Questions I ask Rand Fishkin:

• Where does SEO sit today?
• Why include the painfully honest advice in your book?
• What is some common advice you give people?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

• Why you need to discover your unique value.
• How Fishkin’s business point of view has changed over the years.
• What’s coming next in the marketing world.

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Rand Fishkin:

• Read Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World
• Learn more about SparkToro
• Learn more about Moz
• Follow on Facebook
• Follow on Twitter
• Connect on LinkedIn

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. If you’re looking to grow your business there is only one way: by building real, quality customer relationships. That’s where Klaviyo comes in.

Klaviyo helps you build meaningful relationships by listening and understanding cues from your customers, allowing you to easily turn that information into valuable marketing messages.

What’s their secret? Tune into Klaviyo’s Beyond Black Friday docu-series to find out and unlock marketing strategies you can use to keep momentum going year-round. Just head on over to klaviyo.com/beyondbf.

To Niche, or Not to Niche in Your Business? written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch on To Niche, or Not to Niche in Your Business?

There’s a big movement today of people selling advice, programs, and courses about how to build your business that all sound like this: “Find a niche, run Facebook ads to this niche. Then become specialized, and get rich.”

While I won’t go as far as to call this a marketing scam, I will say that I think it’s bad advice. Here’s why I think it’s not a great way to get started on your entrepreneurial journey.

You Get Boxed In

When you’re just starting out, how can you possibly know what it is that you really want from your business? This obsession with finding your niche before you get going will keep you from experimenting and testing. You become focused on a very specific client from the get-go, and are unwilling to think beyond this narrow profile.

However, as time goes on and you start to actually run your business, you may discover that you don’t like working with that very narrow audience you’ve selected for yourself. The tough thing is that once you’ve gone all in with targeting and marketing to a small subset of the population, it’s tougher to pivot and broaden your approach. It’s usually easier to get more specific in your focus as time goes on, rather than to start hyper-focused and move outward.

You Stop Up Your Creativity

The other major risk to defining your niche too early is that you can stifle your creativity. When you only work with a narrow segment of the population, it’s easy to fall into the trap of offering cookie-cutter advice. While your suggestions may be useful to the businesses you consult for, it’s not a whole lot of fun for you.

I find that a lot of the fun of the entrepreneurial journey is constantly getting to try and learn new things. Getting to understand new industries, tackling new problems, and finding new challenges and solutions along the way is all part of the excitement!

Why Do People Fall for the Niche Approach?

There is certainly some validity to the concept of finding and leaning into your niche. For lots of entrepreneurs, particularly those working in B2B industries, you’ll encounter clients who want to work with people who have worked with similar companies. Those clients want the assurance that you already understand their industry and have a proven track record helping other businesses like them, so there are some pros to understanding a niche.

But there are some real cons to it, too. Sometimes getting too entrenched in just one industry keeps you from considering new, innovative ideas from the outside. I find that working across industries invites a cross-pollination of ideas and strategy—sometimes I’ll see something happening in one industry that inspires me to think differently about a challenge a client in an entirely different field is facing.

Share Your Point of View

To attract ideal clients, you don’t want to pigeonhole yourself with a niche, but you can’t just leave it to fate, either. Rather than doing either of those things, start by defining your point of view.

In the case of Duct Tape Marketing, our point of view is that marketing is a system. This is a simple tenet that we live by, and it’s at the core of all the products we offer, decisions we make, and advice we give to clients.

While it’s not a hard point of view to get behind, it is one that differs from what the majority of marketers say. This unique point of view allows us to attract customers who are interested in this way of thinking, rather than those who are obsessed with finding a marketing firm that knows their industry inside and out.

Identify Your Ideal Client

Sharing your point of view will help to attract clients with the right mindset to your business. When you’re first starting out, you can’t go in with a rigid concept of your ideal client. Until you’ve done some work, you won’t know the types of problems you want to solve and types of people you like to work with.

Once you’ve gotten good results for a client in a specific industry, chances are other businesses from that industry will reach out, too. Either they’ll get referred by your original client, or they’ll see work on your website and be attracted to you because they feel you know their industry. But as you begin to build up a roster of clients, that’s when you can start to take control and make decisions about who you want to partner with in the long term.

With time, your business will change. You will change. Your capacity to do certain types of work will change. It’s better to learn as you’re going rather than to enter into things with a set outcome in mind.

Focus on Behavior

When you start to undertake the work of defining your ideal client, behaviors matter more than demographics.

For me, I like to focus on business owners who have the mentality of investing in and giving back to their community. The business owners who I most enjoy working with are those who are engaged in their communities and do work to lift those groups up. Perhaps they participate in industry boards or are involved in relevant nonprofits.

I’ve discovered over the years that there’s a link between the behavior of giving back to the community and the mentality of wanting to invest in professional services. Business owners who understand the importance of investing in their community also see the value of investing in services like marketing. So rather than looking at demographics, I look for this behavior that indicates a certain mindset of the type of client I most enjoy working with.

Once you understand who your ideal customer is, that’s when you can start saying no to those who don’t fit that profile. And when you start saying no to clients who don’t make sense for you and your business, you will organically fall into your own niche. The idea that you need to start by identifying your niche is poor advice; in fact, I think it’s the exact other way around!

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Smartpress, a premium online printing company. Since 2009, Smartpress has been on a mission to enable professionals to create brilliant print by providing them with a powerful online ordering platform, expert service, and uncompromising print produced with world-class print technology.

Check out smartpress.com/dtm to find out more about Smartpress and get a free paper sample book, exclusively for Duct Tape Marketing Podcast listeners.

While research shows bias around sexuality and race has declined precipitously over the last 12 years, the one area where unconscious bias has barely shifted is ageism.

Advertising has rebranded the term, and it isn’t a positive change.

PROMOTED | Inclusion is a key issue for any recruitment professional, but how can you make sure your business is doing all it can to attract, and retain, a wide-range of talent?

A guide to applications and software to help foster community and productivity in a remote team. Some examples include Dropbox and Loom.

Want to a different way to organize your information? Try these unique ways to make Trello and Microsoft OneNote work together.

Want better marketing results? Here are four Agile principles to use.

Weekend Favs July 27 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

• MorphL – Quickly predict search intent for any user queries using AI.
• Lead Generator – See who’s visiting your website to generate leads.
• Noto – Email yourself reminders with one click.

These are my weekend favs, I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape

How to Put Together An Effective Remarketing Strategy written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Remarketing is an incredible marketing tool. Before the days of the internet, if someone came into your store, browsed, even picked up and really considered a product, but then left without purchasing, there was no way to guarantee you’d ever see them again.

However, remarketing allows you to reach out to those prospects who are on the fence. When someone browses your website but doesn’t convert, it’s now possible for you to pop up again in their field of vision through the power of remarketing! You can target them with your advertising on other websites, and hopefully staying top of mind will eventually lead to that much-desired conversion.

This already sounds like a pretty great marketing tactic, right? It is, but there are ways to build a remarketing strategy that can take your efforts to the next level and get even more conversions from interested prospects. Here’s how you do it.

1. Set Goals

As with any great marketing campaign, an effective remarketing strategy starts with goal setting. What are you trying to do with these ads? This will depend on the kind of business you run. If yours is an e-commerce shop, selling relatively inexpensive items, you might be looking to get someone to make a purchase.

However, for those who run businesses with longer sales cycles—for example, a B2B consulting firm—your ideal conversion might not be a sale. Instead, it might be getting someone to give their email in exchange for access to a free ebook.

No matter what kind of business you run, it makes sense to set really specific goals for each remarketing campaign. Rather than creating one ad that you hope will serve various audiences, it’s best to establish a handful of specific goals and then create different ads that speak to each goal.

2. Decide Where You Want to Advertise

Remarketing can be done via search engines like Google or through social media sites like Facebook. Once you’ve established your goals, you can begin to think about which platforms make the most sense for your ads.

The major benefit to advertising on social media is that you are likely to get likes, shares, comments, and reposts from interested people (and since you’re retargeting your messaging to those who have already been to your website, you know they’re already interested in your brand!). Search engine marketing, however, will follow your customers across any websites that are ad partners with the search engine you do business with. This means that your audience will be greeted with your advertising across the web, not just on the social media site you’ve selected.

There’s no need to limit yourself to one platform. There’s often a huge benefit to being seen multiple times by your audience. Most people need to see a brand seven times before they decide to engage with them, so the more times you can get your name in someone’s field of vision, the better.

3. Define Your Audience

Once you’ve come up with your set of goals, you can begin to define and segment your audience. Let’s say you own a clothing store that has both a brick and mortar and e-commerce presence. There are a number of ways, then, that you can and should break down your audience.

You can segment and target based on location. For those people who have visited your website and live within a certain radius of your store, you can target them with advertising about your brick and mortar location. These ads, of course, are not relevant to people living on the other side of the country, so those folks should instead be targeted with advertising specific to your e-commerce offerings.

Those who have visited your store and browsed your men’s clothing options, you can retarget with messaging specific to your menswear options (and you can target those interested in women’s clothing with those offerings). You can even retarget customers who have taken specific actions on your website. For example, you can set your campaign to only show to customers who have put items into their cart on your site and then navigated away without completing the purchase.

The goals you set for each campaign will inherently be aligned with a specific audience. Defining the audience for your campaign early on ensures that your advertising is only being shown to the most relevant people, meaning you’ll get the greatest ROI on your campaign.

4. Set Your Creative

Once you’ve set goals and decided on your target audience, it’s time to settle on your creative. A huge part of creating great content is understanding your audience and speaking to them in your brand’s voice and tone.

There are also tools that help you to optimize your approach when it comes to content. If you’re running your remarketing campaign through Google, you can use responsive ads. With responsive ads, you input your various creative elements—different headlines, copy, and images—and Google runs them in various combinations so that they can learn which ones are most effective. From there, they’ll run the best-performing ads on your behalf, to give your ads the greatest shot at success.

5. Run Your Ads and Track Results

The final step is to get your ads up and running! Fortunately, advertising platforms provide detailed analytics so that you can accurately measure the results of your campaigns. The analytics allow you to measure engagement and conversions on each ad. Armed with this information, you can tweak your strategy as you go.

If there are certain ads that aren’t doing well, consider changing up the creative. If there are certain websites where retargeting is not effective, you can ask that Google not show your advertising on those sites any longer. Being willing to pivot and change tactics along the way is a huge part of finding long-term success with your retargeting efforts.

Remarketing is an incredible opportunity for you to recapture the attention of consumers who have already shown interest in your brand. When you take things step-by-step and develop a real strategy for reaching out to various segments of your audience, you can create campaigns with a great ROI.

Why Reviews Matter to Your Business written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Aaron Weiche
Podcast Transcript

My guest on today’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Aaron Weiche, CEO of GatherUp. GatherUp is a platform that helps businesses capture customer feedback, testimonials and reviews.

Prior to joining GatherUp, Weiche worked for 20 years in digital marketing, most recently as COO of Spyder Trap, a digital agency based in Minneapolis. He speaks nationally about search marketing, web design, and reputation management.

On this episode, we discuss Weiche’s work with GatherUp, and he shares everything small business owners need to know about soliciting reviews, and monitoring and managing their online reputation.

Questions I ask Aaron Weiche:

• Do reviews matter in every industry?
• Do consumers understand the difference between first-party and third-party reviews?
• What drives a happy customer to take that extra step and write a review?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

• Why depth of information matters more than the source of the review.
• How small business owners should respond to reviews.
• How reviews play into a business’s SEO.

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Aaron Weiche:

• Learn more about Aaron Weiche
• Learn more about GatherUp
• Connect on Facebook
• Follow on Twitter
• Connect on LinkedIn

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Break Through the Noise, the new book from Tim Staples. Staples is the co-founder and CEO of Shareability, a company that uses content, data and technology to drive explosive growth for major brands like AT&T, Hyatt, and the Olympics and major celebrities like Cristiano Ronaldo, John Cena and Leonardo DiCaprio.

In this book, Staples shares his nine-step approach that anyone can use to launch their product or service, capturing the attention of millions of people online, without having to spend millions of dollars.

Learn more about the book and order your copy here!