Getting More Results With Customer-Focused SEO And Ads
Video Transcript
Lars Maehler
Is there anything that I can help you answer at this stage in regards to what we covered? Yes?
– [Balding Man] How many keywords? You said not too many.
– But look–
– Optimally, we can–
– If you really, really wanna be in specific, five.
– [Male Presenter] Conventionally. Throw a target at you, five, throw a target at you.
– Yeah.
– [Male Presenter] ‘Cause, just with one, just let me, complementary flywheel and funnel. I think they complement each other because if you go back to the flywheel page,
– I don’t have a flywheel page.
– We actually do take a flywheel approach when it comes to systematically creating strategies that actually work. So, you know, for instance, the way this runs in our flywheel, all the way down to Shopping, people are ready to make one decision. So the other day, you know, they’re in successful business plans, one that you actually… implement, measure, change, implement, measure, change. All right, it’s that cycle. It’s the same cycle we follow. It’s madness that we just think you gotta implement the same strategy that you implemented making for instances. It’s constantly measuring, changing, compromising until you get the winning combination. So this user behavior, is always gonna be the way that users actually shop online. It’s the case of how do you actually make sure that you’re implementing the right strategy. Aaron, would you agree with that?
– [Aaron] I guess I concur.
– [Male Presenter] Beautiful.
– Yeah.
– So, yes, I just wanted to clarify that ’cause of the confusion around is the funnel dead? It’s not really dead. It’s just that how do you actually plan each one of these steps? And I think we’re on the same page when it comes to planning and making sure that we are actually learning, for empathy, behavioral target for weeks. So which, I mean, how many of you guys actually take this approach? Yeah, so only what? So only one person in the room takes the flywheel approach or the actual flywheel approach? Is that right? So how many of you guys actually have quite extensive experience in digital marketing?
– [Male Attendee] In what marketing?
– In digital marketing, and how many of you actually spend majority of your marketing, spend on traditional marketing, such as billboards, printing, bus advertising, all that kind of stuff? So the only question is around, what we’ve discussed today, around SEO, SEM, hotspot, Google,
– Yeah, Aaron, Aaron,
– is there anything you’re
– Matt, do you wanna
– unsure about?
– come up here
– Oh, you wanna come up
– in front?
– here in front of us?
– Like, we’re–
– Come here in front of us.
– [Aaron] I don’t want to crash this party. I don’t want to–
– You’re safe.
– [Aaron] So I work for him, that’s not me. I figure that’s a company here in Hong Kong?
– Yes.
– And generally, from, from my experience, this kind of model, regards to the flywheel and funnel, probably is more relevant for products that you’re selling online rather than short-lived events.
– Experiences.
– So the events we run, probably only last a week at the most. Our campaigns run for about three months, so implementing a SEM strategy probably isn’t the best way to convert customers.
– Well, let’s say you have to build awareness leading up to the event, and that helps to generate interest. So you do need a bit of an approach when it comes to SEM anyway. PPC will be your main draw-in. You need a display aspect to your digital marketing strategy. You know, it’s build interest first, and what we do is, you know, for instance, Lars, can you give us an insight on our strategy, on how you built interest and how you got everyone involved.
– Well. When it comes to generating interest across events, I actually just talked to Charles about this earlier, because it’s short-lived, it’s a lot more difficult to kind of hone in on your target market because you don’t have enough time to collect data, right? See, so at the core of everything you do, you need to think about the bigger picture of what you represent as a drama company, for example. So what is the common theme across all of your plays? How would someone go about finding you in that event space? See, so you basically need to take a step back and think about the customer’s search journey rather than the, I like to call it the banana salesman who’s on the street shouting at everyone that he has bananas. You need to step back and actually see if people want the bananas, that maybe there’s a better way of selling them. No, Matt, do you have any other points to add from an SEM strategy?
– I just want to, to dive deeper into, into the businesses you’re running right now. You said it’s like a short-lived event, and you feel like SME, er, SEM is, might not be the right approach, but at the moment, what is the best acquisitions treasure that you think is working the best for you guys?
– [Charles] Right now, with the general demographic of younger families, we do a lot of Facebook and Google advertising which is driving people to our website.
– Right, right, so, so it’s the same thing. Like, when you advertise through Google, it’s pretty much like SEM, right? So when you say, this path, like funnelling, or like flywheel, like this path doesn’t work for you, like what is the thing that you feel like is missing the connection with you or your customers? What’s that part?
– [Charles] I think, well, judging from all these talks, where it’s clear to me is that we’re having one approach to reaching all of the audiences, so regardless if you’re a 30-year-old male with no kids or you’re a 50-year-old family man, we’re using essentially one strategy to reach all these people.
– So from a segmentation process, do you put them all into one bucket, or do you have various ads that approach your different segments, because–
– One bucket.
– Oh, okay.
– This is probably why the disconnect is there.
– Okay.
– Yeah.
– See, so, if you do want higher results, it’s all about targeting because, the idea of relevance is so important, you know? Someone who sees an ad for, I don’t, just an example, I saw Disney on Ice like all the time. So that is something I can relate to because I have a little kid that loves Minnie Mouse, so do I want to potentially go this event? No, but she wants to, and I’ll do everything she likes. So I’m that target market. It works for me from a mass market approach. Now from an online marketing approach, I wouldn’t fit your single man like, wants to watch whatever play. I would fit the family category.
– Yeah.
– You know, so I do think that adding a little bit of focus in regards to maybe splitting your segments into at least, I like segmenting by male-female first, you know? See if there’s a disconnect between the services you provide or how they’re interpreted over your website because, I mean, different people will connect differently towards your content. The second element is age brackets. You know, look into different age brackets. You said you’re pretty varied, right? So what would you say is the youngest individual that would put money down? Would someone that’s 16 put their pocket money down to watch one of your shows?
– [Charles] Probably not, so I guess the youngest
– Okay.
– [Charles] would be 20, 21?
– 21, okay, see, so we start with 21, and then, we’ll have a young group. We’ll have an intermediary group, and then, we have a wiser group, and then, we have a, and then, we’ll have a, one that basically has the entire range. So you can basically see where your returns are the best, and then, I mean, especially on, when you’re on Facebook, you have Interests, right? So when you’re looking at Interests, I mean, again, this is a longer discussion, but really sit down with your team, nail down every single interest. Might vary from play to play, right? Because you’re going through maybe romantic tragedies. Others are comedies. Other are purely just horror. I don’t know, you know, so that would again be kind of a segment you’d be looking into testing, but the one bucket approach, yes. That might be the reason why you’re generating a lot of traffic, and that’s what you usually see. If you don’t add focus to any of your campaigns, you’ll see a lot of traffic, but you will not see the conversions, and your bounce rates are gonna be high. So I always look into bounce. Traffic doesn’t mean a lot anymore these days. It’s all about conversions. So if I’m seeing that I’m driving 1,000 to 3,000 people in a new campaign, my initial feelings are to obviously get excited because the more people come in, the more people are likely to convert, but then, if I let the ad run for a good two weeks, and I see that the conversion rate is less than 2.5%, which is really the minimum of what you would expect from even a retail component, then you know you’re doing something wrong.
– Yeah.
– You know, and that’s where the adjustment needs to take place, but I hope that helps.
– [Male Presenter] Essentially, one point, one thing of that is you, like he said, segmentation’s really important, but you also need to give yourself the ability to mirror, to mirror the buy designer. So it’s like a pixelene holding up a mirror against its face and saying this is you, and this is what, maybe we can help you with that. So you want to create a connection. It’s called personalization. Personalization’s a huge thing in these markets. A lot of people are experiencing a lot of bad winders. Have you ever noticed that you don’t even pay attention to the ads anymore? Do you place them in Feed ’cause there’s so many of them? See there, that’s bad winders, so what you wanna do is you wanna create a connection with your audience, winder and everything. So when you reach someone for the first time, you try and find some sort of commonality with that person, like breaking the ice, so it’s like, what kind of interests does this person have? So as soon as you find an interest, then you can, then you have some topic to talk about, and you get to forming a conversation with that person. You effectively do, having the same effect online. So you want to facilitate touch points at least online, to correlate with each other. That way, you’re smiling constantly with your marketing messaging, so you wanna make sure that you’ve got the message consistent, but it needs to be very specific to the point. Otherwise, it’s gonna get lost.
– Yeah?
– [Attendee] Again, just to add to that, as a frenal event Concept company, I mean, you guys are the experts, so we expect it to be done well, but for, in our experiences, events are usually more a luxury experience. It’s more people don’t need it. So what we do on content-wise is very important in creating a demand to your event. People were rounding to such hate, let you go for, I’d do a sport, I do sports events, so I do a buyer’s and spy race to the people who are rounding and saying hey I would join that. So what around the marketing is our very number one priority when it comes to digital strategy? So how do we make people want new content? Videos is what we focus on. And then based on the ways that were built through our content, we then do optimization and conversion on that. Our challenges is we don’t know how to get these content, uh, content out to a larger population that we think could be interested.
– So what are the tactics you use to actually get the word of mouth? To make it more viral, what sort of courses of action do you have? How do you draw the activity?
– [Attendee] Share. A lot of our content through social media is sharing and we use personal stories. So we did a lot of interviews with blocks on past twist bits. Keep appearing readers to one of our very big drives.
– Beautiful. So you really want social credibility around your advance. Show that it has a lot of value to you. Absolutely.
– Stefan do you want to add?
– [Attendee] Yeah, we have increase, but we also value wins.
– Yeah.
– [Attendee] And I actually, I don’t find it’s significant to actually arouse interest and to find the right people who will sign up. So it’s you can easily sign a hundred parents. But then very often the difference is that maybe only 10, 20, percent actually show up.
– Show up. Yeah. So what’s your follow-up though, for the events.
– [Attendee] How do you actually know for sure that these people will show up? I should point to say we have plenty of registrations.
– I think… I mean… Well actually, well, what I’ve found is that yes, if an event is frayed, the flake-rates are higher, because there’s nothing to really hold anyone accountable to that. And Hong Kong isn’t getting anyone together in a group of six or more, you know someone’s going to, like, bounce. It’s almost 100%. So really what I look into is the follow-up prior to an event. You guys all received an email that we were essentially at full house, y’know, so out of an event of 35 people, we had 31 show up. That’s actually pretty impressive. Don’t you guys think? So that was through a mix of personally reaching out to individuals that signed up for the event, that’s a mix to basically letting everyone know how the participation rate is going that we’re excited to see you. Like, I mean, you need to genuinely get people involved in the process that will bring value to them Like, obviously when it comes to signup, you have someone like Charles who’re pushing the event like Spartan Races, y’know, it is extremely physically challenging, y’know? You can’t just on the fly say yeah, I’ll join this. Whereas like, if you’re hosting an event for your kids, yes, there’s already a psychological influence that if you don’t go to an event that will be good for your child, you’re a crappy parent, y’know? So like, there’s a higher psychological pressure for me to join your event than to join Charles’ event.
– [Attendee] I would also add to that is, to have limited capacity listed. 30 people only 100, and if they know it is limited, they sign up and they know they’re exclusive to the event.
– The issue is turning people away. Because then we will deepen out, so, it’s quite interesting, it feels more exclusive. You, ah, it’s late, it’s too late on this. How about the next one? Creating a what you say word of mouth effect. It’s getting something out of them. But another thing, you know. For instance, with hotspot, you got the sequences emails. Where you can actually send. And the whole idea about sequences is that you want to send a chain of emails where the next email gives you more value than the last. So you can actually automate that process. To add on to Stefan’s plan, sorry, we’ll go back with you. I think we need to have a realistic expectation when it’s promoted as a free event. So drop off rate is 60%. This is based on my experience running events, alright? So I think it’s very important for you to have an end goal in mind. How many people do you want to fit into those seats? So it doesn’t matter how many people, like, don’t show up, but it matters how many people show up. And that is one key, I mean, shift that, and we have to be very clear about that. Going to Charles’ point, on how do I expand my current pot? Right? I think first, you need to understand what is a temp? Because without that, you will ignore your gap, right? And now that, for let’s say, let’s say Hong Kong has, what, 7 million population right now? Right? All of half, in the past weeks, I will say 87% predominant male, is that good? 60? Alright, something like that. Then you split out your demographic, alright? And how many unaddressable people are there, and what are the top reasons? Why are they not signing up for spanew? Do they have alternatives? Or is partner seeking too expensive? Or is it too boring to cost this? Because people might have drop off after joining for two years, three years, alright? So I think that there are several elements that you could expand, right? Beat what we call in solways tier existing participant or the past participant. That is where we’re looking together. I track them back. It’s always easier to get them back, to get them spending again, than getting them to invite other people. With their friends and mates. That’s how you can expand people. People like Ben to hang on to, like, we are like-minded, right? So that’s an interesting thing to think about.
– [Attendee] The contrary to that is, by concept and in theory it works, but when it comes to actually implementing it, budget it a huge constraint. To do what you said requires a lot of money. It has to, we’ve tried. I don’t know whether that’s the case, but I don’t have a lot of money just to guilt awares the trying person. So how do we play with a limited budget, obviously limitation is defined differently. How do we use that limited resource to maximize our outcome?
– Right.
– So you want to look at your start bud. You want to see which segment, or which buying persona had the highest conversion rate. If we have the highest participation, we actually follow through with the process, and then you want to segment that audience, and you want to focus all your budget to that audience. To maximize your rhythms, to maximize your reach and frequency. So the biggest challenge when it comes to pay traffic is impression share, right? So when you get to a position where everyone’s got a limited budget, y’know? ‘Cause besides the becks, money’s burned. But when you have a limited budget, you just need to identify where is the campaign that will go well and then maximize your exposure. Maximize your exposure to more quarries, it’s that simple. But look at scheduling your ads as well. ‘Cause you want to also look at what times of the day they’re converted, when they actually really need to make a buy in decision, and then just, segment or focus your budget on scheduling and ads in areas of the day, and by time of the week, but actually buying, purchasing, making purchasing decisions. So yes you can work it well into budget. But you have to be very focused, you have to realize, you have to cut a lot of things. Or cut costs on the bottom end, as you would say, right?
– Bottom first.
– Bottom first. Prioritize your energy into areas that come out to working the most.
– I think the point to add to that thing, if you see a kind of theme across the three questions, we hear about finding the right customers, or how do you make these, like, firewheel, funnel both works, we have for expanding our reach to our body audience. We have the question about how do we improve the turnout rate for the event. I think at the core of these are all data. And I think, in fact, a quick poll of the room, which one of you would think data’s important in business of in recent, regards of like office would-raise rate. But how many of us have a proactive approach to manage and look at your data at a regular basis? A few. And when you plan your next campaign, would you ask yourself the question, what other data am I gonna get out of it, and how am I gonna use it? Right? Do you actually do this? Maybe even one or two, right? We all know data’s important, but are we taking a very structured and productive approach to have this managed, and make sure data’s gonna work for us, so for instant, the turn out rate. I think we’ve shared our personal experience. Even Google is like, a huge growing rate. So we never worry about attendance and stuff, but even when you plan for events, our events at the hotel, basically any event, we always assume there’s around like 60, 50% of like, just like drop off rate. Simply because people in the city, obviously they would have things to do at home and they feel like they can’t come today. Maybe they’re overrun. Just a natural drop off rate. So we have to build up that packed line, and we have to pull off all the ends for them to come. But then over time we also, every single time we do it, we look at like, which ones of the audience actually drop off? Which ones showed up? So next time we can do, like, better than before. So this is, again, like, data. And to get back to Charles’ point, how do we reach broader audience and then, budget, I guess this like, data. Like Bor mentioned, like, what the conversion rate on a higher segment, in the last campaign. And how do we make use of that? And to that look, I think we do have one free assurance in our system that we could use. It’s called similar audience. So when you import your audience into the audience centers, how many of you have used that feature before? Or know, are aware of it? Not really, right? So I’m gonna get a bit into that. So when you import your data into your database, we, just now, we showed you the affinity segments, like, what their interests is, what they’ve been doing, get them a work profile. And what we can do is then, you tell me, okay, this is the segment of audience who have came to my show. This is audience that have turned up better, that has came to spot and raised. And they have certain personas. And we can base on that, that those attributes to find you people who might not be on your website, but they share similar attributes. They might be interested in sports, they might be a parent, they share these, all kinds of features that are same with the segment of people you want to talk to. So if you have a limited budget to start with, of course, you want to start with the one who have been, who’ve like, been Spartan Race before. Been to your show before, but they can only go to Spartan Race like, once or twice a year. They can’t do it every week. You’ve got to find someone who is similar to them, and then get them to your business, get them to your show. So you start with your customer data, your remarketing list, your current copy list, and then you move on to someone who is similar to them. So then you don’t cast a net into the wild, but you start with something, a more targeted group when you have a special, when you have a budget to pay with. So I think, at the essence of this, I’m hoping to answer three questions at once, it’s about the discipline and the approach to look at data, the structure of data, so that again, go to your, I want to apply to the five rule approach. Some of these will help you get matchment, get data, fitting into the system to become like, a positive reinforcement cycle. So I hope this can get back to your questions. I personally don’t think there is like, one solution that can solve all problems, like, going to google, stop all your problem, gonna face, gonna stop what the problem is. So it’s a combination. But at the core of all those things you saw about data.
– That’s a really good point, that’s a really good strategy, actually.
– [Attendee] Is it real or is it paid parts?
– If you use Google app, it has the attached Google app. When you use it in at house, go to either Youtube, or, you can’t do that on Facebook. So you can ask Google instead of Facebook.
– That’s a really good strategy actually. You segment your email marking list, and you actually identify which people turned up to the event, and actually followed through, signed up. Segment that list, upload as a custom audience, can even use Facebook advertising. So what it’ll do. Facebook will actually remark it, and Google will remark it to those specific people, so you got a line to those emails that are used when they’re logging into Facebook, but also, Facebook will also scrape the demographic and will actually show your ads to people who fit the same demographic. So there’s a good way of actually getting more feedback. And that’s not hard to do. So it’s a really quick fix.
– [Attendee] On Facebook, you can…
– Yeah.
– Guys, there are a few of you that told me this morning that they do need to head out at the specified time, but we can continue this discussion. For those of you that do need to head out, we completely understand. We want to thank all of you on behalf of Hubspark, Google, and ourselves that you made it out here. We hope that we are able to add some value towards your strategic thinking of how you will tackle digital issues in the future. And we hope to host more events like these every single quarter. And, based on your feedback, that we’ll hopefully be getting over the next few days, we’ll be adjusting how we approach these presentations as well.
– So guys, we don’t have to get out. Feel free to hang around. Get to know y’all. That’s what I plan.
– I will also be running around with a bowl, if you guys want to get all of these decks, I just drop your namecards in and I’ll send them out to you over the course of early next week. Yeah? Okay, thanks so much.
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