If you’ve felt stuck in your growth trajectory, wondering why your leads aren’t converting into sustained growth, you’re not alone. The growth chasm represents a pivotal period of challenges, where product-market fit, sales processes, and operations are put to the test.

The good news? With the right mindset, strategic action, and a tailored approach, this chasm is entirely crossable. Let’s explore what the growth chasm is, why it exists, and how small businesses can conquer it effectively based on our direct experience.

Video Transcript:

Jason Brewer (00:00) – What is the Growth Chasm?

So Matt, there’s this book by Geoffrey Moore called Crossing the Chasm, and it talks about how early stage companies, especially ones that are serious innovations, products, new products, that have some very early adopters, and then hit a point where they struggle, where that next round of later adopters has not connected with this innovation and they struggle for months, years through fundraising.
We see that, we work with early-stage companies, but we also work with a lot of small businesses who hit sort of this small business marketing chasm that I think is similar, where maybe it’s not quite the level of innovation in a product — it could be a service, could be a professional services company, whatever — and we start to drive growth for them, and we’re on our way up, and then we hit this point where we’re looking down into a chasm and we have to cross that somehow.

There’s a couple different ways that this comes about, but I think about this chasm. You’ve experienced it a lot, sort of in the middle of the situation trying to help companies. What are the most common ways that you see this chasm come up?

Matthew Sommer (01:15) – How to Start Identifying Bottlenecks

I mean, being in a marketing agency and kind of doing what we do, quite often we’re brought into a situation with the idea of “I just need more leads” or “I just need more opportunities to help my business grow.” And at the end of the day, that’s certainly an ingredient, that’s a piece of what goes into it, but your business won’t just grow with more leads or opportunities.

There’s definitely stages and phases of this where, “Oh, I got a whole lot more leads, but I’m not closing them. For whatever reason they’re not turning into customers and I’m spending good money generating these leads, but I need more of them to become customers.” So is that a sales funnel thing? We’ve had opportunities where the phone rings, but the sales person’s already on a call so they can’t pick up that phone when it rings. And maybe that person calls another provider or company. Or focusing in on the sales thing again, that sales pitch or the way that we’re handling that doesn’t quite connect in the way that we want it to.

Or again, it doesn’t have to just be sales oriented. It could be a whole product market fit aspect where the way we’re pricing it, the value isn’t perceived appropriately by the audience, and maybe that’s not a sales pitch problem, maybe that’s just how we’re thinking about the pricing and how the pricing is shaped generally speaking.

Even beyond that, we’ve had clients where all of a sudden 200 leads come in when the historic average was 50 and 200 come in a month. And maybe the sales team is able to keep up with that. Maybe we are getting them in the pipeline or one way or another, and all of a sudden our operational ability to deliver on it isn’t there, so now we’ve got this waiting list that’s a mile long and maybe this is something that’s kind of urgent for people, and so they’re going to drop right off that waiting list. Right?

So there’s just so many different aspects of this, and I tend to see that in trends or in vignettes I guess, right? Where, okay, we’ve gotten the leads and now we need to focus in on capturing them. We’re not connecting with them, and we spend a lot of time focusing in that area, and all of a sudden our connection rate’s a whole lot higher. At least we’re getting on the phone with these leads, we’re connecting with them via email, and that’s great, but now we’re having those conversations and that’s great, but they’re not closing. And so now we need to focus on that area and it seldom happens all at once, so maybe there’s not just one growth chasm, right?

Maybe it’s a series of dips. That growth curve, that kind of upward trajectory, the hockey stick we all want to see, it’s seldom actually shaped like that, I think. And really it’s a constant push through the next issue or the next problem that comes up throughout the business as a whole, not just from the sort of top of funnel marketing part of it — it’s how all those pieces fit together.

Jason Brewer (04:18) – How A Growing Pipeline Can Stunt Growth

But there’s definitely a difference we’ve seen when a million dollar company suddenly has a pipeline worth two and a half million and they’ve got to figure that out. And it’s not always… I mean it definitely highlights the issues pretty quickly. 

And when you have 50 leads a month coming in and your sales team can do very customized follow-ups with everyone and ask how Jimmy did in his baseball game on Saturday, and then all of a sudden you have 200 leads and you can barely get those follow-ups out and not in a timely fashion, it gives off a completely different vibe to your customers. So yeah, I think whether you’re used to a 3 million pipeline and that jumps to six or seven and you’re heading for that, it’s a totally different game.

Matthew Sommer (05:09) – Why There’s No One-Size-Fits-All Solution

And I think we’ve been in a position to see people in businesses come apart at the seams more often than a lot of people, right? Because that’s our whole job, because that’s the role that we come in for. And it’s just always a little bit different where those seams are, and how it kind of comes apart — what causes the wheels to start to come off. 

And every time it’s an all hands, we need to focus on this area and get it fixed, but it’s always just a very different solution or approach for how to look into that. I wouldn’t say that it’s the same problems and the same prescribed solution in every case it’s so different.

Are you a seasonal business and you’re trying to deal with the shoulder seasons or the off seasons? Are you a business that’s based on a certain thing happening that causes the problem that you’re solving and for months that thing stops happening, or the whole industry or the way people are thinking about that thing changes? 

It’s not a one size fits all solution in those types of situations. It’s thinking through the problem deeply and working together from all aspects — from marketing, from sales, from operations, from product development or whatever, to really pinpoint what that issue is and figure out how to solve it.

Jason Brewer (06:27) – Why Our Responsibility Extends Beyond Lead Generation

And at the end of the day, we are a marketing agency, but I oftentimes, in our deck that we’ll show to potential clients, one of the main things we say is we hire problem solvers because that’s what our job is a lot of the time. A lot of agencies say, “We do SEO” or “We do paid search, we’ll drive you leads” and that’s it. Our job’s done at that point, and you take it from here, good or bad. We have decided that as growth consultants that’s part of what that means, is our responsibility extends beyond that first wave of additional leads. It’s how do we handle those leads? How do we help you grow the business? And I think we’ve, through painful problem solving exercises, have gotten there.

Matthew Sommer (07:17) – The Multi-Sided Problem That is Growth

Several of the businesses I’m working with directly, certainly we drive opportunity generation or brand awareness growth or whatever that might be, but then we’re also helping with the recruiting pipeline. We’re advertising job openings and opportunities. We’re helping to sculpt the job descriptions in a way that’s appealing to the target market. We’re helping to gauge benefits and things like that relative to competitors to help make sure that you’re able to recruit, to fill the seats, to do the extra work that you’re now generating. Growth is a multi-sided problem, and so to call ourselves growth consultants and just run Facebook ads and report on the number of clicks or whatever, it’s just not solving the problem – it’s not going to help you grow.

H2: Jason Brewer (08:11) – The Need to Adapt & Change

Not to mention, we’ve gone through many economic cycles and seasons in 21 years now and we’ve seen how things change in the market. In one quarter we need to slow the leads down, and the next quarter it’s really hard to drum them up, and being able to adapt and change course and not just have a one size fits all strategy and solution is huge when it comes to that.

The post Crossing the Growth Chasm: How to Approach Scaling Your Small Business appeared first on The Brolik Blog.

Do you feel confident that your small business is ready to grow? Are you wondering how to scale a business from $10m to $20m in revenue? Before adding fuel to the fire with a marketing investment, you need to ensure your business is equipped to handle the resulting growth.

Even if your metrics have been trending upwards for several quarters, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re ready to expand. Instead of throwing money into marketing and hoping for good results, we’ll help you determine if marketing is a smart, profitable investment right now. Before taking the leap of faith, see if you have the qualities of a company ready to scale.  We’ve distilled down the qualities of our most successful partnerships into one checklist. We’ll help you decide if you’re ready to invest in marketing-led growth, or if it’s best to continue building the building the foundations of your business.

Stage 1: The non-negotiables

Before you even consider scaling up, it’s crucial to have these key pieces in place. If you approach a growth marketing plan without them, you can waste your time and money on efforts that aren’t aligned with your goals or communicating appropriately with your audience. 

Clear goals and KPIs

Whether you’re relying on an in-house marketing team or hiring an agency, you’ll need clear goals and KPIs (key performance indicators). Your team needs to objectively evaluate the impact of marketing efforts, and goals give a benchmark to refer to. Some of the most common and valuable KPIs include year-over-year growth targets, customer acquisition targets, allowable cost per acquisition (CPA), customer lifetime value (CLV), and return on ad spend (ROAS). Determining these for your marketing team will require a thorough understanding of the financials of your business model, and how this can be impacted – positively! – as you scale.

The more specific you get, the more you empower your marketing team to hit the ground running. If you know exactly how many leads you want in a year and at what cost, your marketing team can work backwards to break down what channels to leverage, how much advertising budget they’ll need, what cost per clicks they should hit, and the conversion rates required to achieve those goals. 

Without the high-level planning and benchmarks from your team, even the most experienced marketers will have trouble recommending the best next step confidently. It’s hard to decisively choose a path if your leadership team can’t help point you to where you should be going. 

A focused offering

Take a moment to consider the product or service you offer. Does it address a distinct need? Does it offer a unique value to people with that need?

Knowing exactly what problem your product or service solves helps marketers dive deeply into your audience’s pain points, craft the right messaging to reach them, and convert them into happy customers.

Operationally, there are benefits to having clear answers to these questions too. Getting specific and presenting a distinct, differentiated value will keep your product and business focused instead of spreading yourself thin. Specialization lets you differentiate your product, build credibility in your industry, and improve your profits as you hone in on a unique audience need. Otherwise you’ll be throwing all your product benefits at the wall to see what sticks with your audience instead of showing them why you’re different and why you’re the right solution for them.

Early customer traction

Similarly, knowing that there is a market out there for your product is necessary before any significant investment in marketing. 

The easiest and most valuable way to determine if there is a market to reach is through acquiring your first five to ten customers. It doesn’t matter if those first few customers come from your network, traditional sales efforts, or giving your product away for free to get it in their hands. Before investing in any marketing, you have to have an existing customer base that can provide immediate, invested feedback on your product and brand as you prepare to scale.  

Clear brand positioning

Once you understand your product, the problem it solves, and who will benefit from using it, you’re ready to communicate your unique value and niche within the market to win over customers. 

Brand positioning is how you differentiate yourself from your competition in the mind of the target customer. A focused product offering and an initial customer base can validate the product you’re selling, but brand positioning goes beyond that to identify what makes your business the go-to solution for a specific audience’s problem. Brand positioning answers the “Why should I choose you?” question for potential customers. Having a clear and concise answer to this question can empower your marketing team from the onset to craft this vision of your business in the mind of your target audience.  

Stage 2: Be prepared to figure these out quickly

Once you get the ball rolling with a marketing investment, these operational questions will become important to answer. You don’t need to have everything below figured out as you plan  a marketing launch, but they will become pressing issues the closer you get to initiating and implementing a new marketing strategy. The more thought you can put into them ahead of time, the better place you’ll be in to make smart, strategic decisions as you grow (and the less money will go to waste as you are figuring things out).

Tracking, attribution, and feedback

Without getting end-to-end tracking in place, it’s impossible to attribute success to your marketing efforts or find opportunities to learn, iterate, and optimize your approach. Tracking lets you see where leads came from, how they engaged with each stage of your marketing funnel, and when they converted, all of which can be leveraged to optimize campaigns. Once leads start rolling in, there also needs to be a feedback loop with your sales team to identify quality leads and adjust campaigns to capture more of them. 

Tracking also gives you the ability to identify where people are dropping out of the funnel, so that those funnel leaks can be plugged. End-to-end tracking will show you where someone learns about your brand and what actions they take from there so you can identify what points will increase chances of conversion, or stop a lead in its tracks.

For example, if your top of funnel advertising directs people to an educational hub where they sign up for your newsletter, you have better visibility into their funnel journey now that they’re part of your owned audience. Maybe you send a follow up email with a related blog article and then you never see someone open your emails again. Or, you send a discount code in your follow up and see people convert immediately. Tracking helps you identify these points and verify your tests so your marketing team can optimize your efforts.

Customer acquisition economics

Once you have goals and KPIs, the next step is to define more specific targets that measure your growth so you can evaluate your progress. The most essential KPI is your customer lifetime value (LTV), or how much revenue you can expect to get from an average audience member over their lifetime as a customer. Combined with a solid understanding of your cost of services or cost of goods per unit, customer LTV will determine your maximum allowable cost per acquisition (CPA), a key metric in any marketing effort. CPA determines your budget for ad spend and tying it to a KPI gives you a solid foundation to plan your paid campaigns in a way that brings a positive return on investment, instead of spending frivolously on gut instinct.

Want to connect your paid advertising efforts to strategic KPIs? Download our Ad Spend & KPI Planner.

Sales process that can handle leads (and close deals)

Growth opportunities can come with operational challenges, especially on the sales side. Instead of pushing leads to an unprepared sales team and potentially losing out on deals, it’s best to consider how you’ll scale your sales process as you grow. A manual system is fine for now, but as you fuel your marketing efforts, you need to start forming a plan of how you’ll ensure your sales process stays as frictionless as possible. 

We’ve worked with companies where an influx of new leads come through, but get dropped by a sales team before they can turn into customers. A good marketing partner will be ready to audit and improve your sales process as you grow, ensuring that your team is ready to make the most of any opportunity that comes your way. Whether you’re missing out on opportunities because you don’t have a reliable, robust CRM or an untrained receptionist holding you back, Brolik can help you spot the gaps and tighten your operations.

Social proof

If you’re considering scaling your business, odds are you’ve already seen some success. Tapping your existing customer network to gather reviews and testimonials, advocate for your brand on social media, or produce other user generated content (UGC) like case studies will help you convince a broader audience to take a chance on your company. Social proof is one of the most powerful tools in digital marketing as it creates trust and signals credibility. It shows potential customers the results they can expect from your product directly from those without a vested interest in your company. 

It will be a necessary part of middle- and bottom-of-funnel marketing efforts, so gather some customer reviews or at least a list of happy customers you can reach out to for testimonials and case studies before considering a marketing engagement.

A good, quality offering

You don’t have to have the perfect product or service immediately when you launch growth marketing efforts, but having a solid offering that will win over customers – and keep them – will make a huge difference. It is extremely difficult to successfully acquire and retain customers with a sub-par product. At the very least, you need to meet their expectations and satisfy them, otherwise your customer turnover will be extremely high. 

For businesses that rely on frequent repeat customers, even if you keep throwing money at acquiring new customers, you won’t have a sustainable business if each customer buys once and never comes back. Your customer acquisition efforts will always be chasing your customer churn – a position you don’t want to be in.

Sufficient supply to meet demand

With an influx of customers from your marketing investment, you have to be ready to meet the increased demand. Do you have a plan to scale operations? Will that require a bigger sales team? Or a bigger team to deliver service? What about manufacturing capability? What other aspects of your business will need to ramp up as you scale? 

You don’t need to start implementing your plan now, but you need to know where potential bottlenecks will be and have a solid idea of how you will address them. This speeds up the troubleshooting process when you hit roadblocks so you can resolve bottlenecks quickly. If you’re not prepared, you can hit marketing success and delivery failure at the same time. Without an idea of how to accommodate increased demand with increased marketing, your efforts can be for nothing.

Consistent outbound messaging

Even with the best product in the world for a specific audience in a huge market, growth will be difficult without solid messaging that communicates exactly why your solution is right for your audience. Building off what you established with brand positioning, your brand messaging will help you craft the right way to talk about your offering to show your audience how it will solve their problem or pain point. 

No matter where someone finds you or how they engage with you it is crucial to be consistent in how you communicate your value. With effective messaging you can foster a sense of need from your audience, without having to convince them to give your company a try.

Stage 3: Areas for improvement over time

These don’t need to be squared away immediately, but they will need to be addressed at some point. The sooner you can wrap your head around these potential challenges, the smoother your growth trajectory will be.

A plan to scale your team

Expanding a business goes beyond having enough product to meet your new demand. As you scale your operations, your team and its capabilities become more crucial than ever. You don’t want to risk bottlenecking your growth because your team isn’t able to accommodate the extra business.

Before investing in marketing, you should have an idea of what teams will need more support and how you’ll hire more people. More importantly, you should have a sense of what a good fit for your team looks like, to ensure you add the right people to your team at the right time. Hiring is expensive and time consuming, so having a solid recruitment strategy makes all the difference. Planning ahead as you grow will make it easier for you to onboard people when you need them, rather than playing catch up and scrambling to add someone to your team. 

Strong digital foundation

These days, a strong digital presence is the most important asset for the majority of businesses. For many businesses, that means a website that offers at the very least a good experience for users and is optimized for search. For other companies it means relying on other digital platforms, like a strong social media presence. 

Even if marketing efforts direct traffic to whatever digital platforms are most valuable for your company, without a thoughtful structure that informs and encourages valuable actions you may bottleneck your operations and stunt your growth. For companies that rely on their website to drive leads or convert customers, site architecture, information, and ease of use are all crucial. You want to provide useful information at the right time with a logical layout that makes your site easy to navigate while providing a good user experience. Use your site to inform, combat any potential customer hesitations, and provide clear calls to action and valuable conversion points.

Cohesive visual identity

Eventually, you can take your branding to the next level with a visual identity that complements your brand positioning and messaging, while expressing your unique aesthetic. A brand’s visual identity is one of the most impactful assets you have as it builds credibility, familiarity, and communicates your product, all without words. Think about some of the biggest companies out there and how the majority of people can recognize their brand just from a swoosh or a golden set of arches. It’s a type of brand recognition you can’t buy, but which gets built over years of careful cultivation of your visual identity.

Often visuals are the first thing that grabs attention, and it’s key to have a consistent identity across your physical and digital presences. A clear visual identity can also communicate how you want to see yourself in the future and get customers to buy into that vision. While you may not have a sleek, high-tech product now, you can set the tone early on with the right modern visuals and work up to your goal. 

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When you’re ready to expand, the right growth marketing team can provide the guidance and tactical know-how to achieve your goals. We’ve made it work for clients across industries and delivered results like growing a family business from $23MM to over $40MM in revenue that ended with an acquisition, or growing revenue 450% in a year for a local B2B service. But without the proper foundation for success, you may not make the most of your investment or waste it entirely. 

If you’re eager to scale your business, take our quiz and see if your operations are in a place where you’ll benefit from growth marketing efforts. With all your ducks in a row, those dreams of double digit growth for your business can quickly become a reality. Or, if you’re not quite there, you’ll have a clear set of priorities to hit in order to be ready to scale. No matter where you are, our growth experts are ready to guide you to whatever your next stage is.

The post Are You Ready to Scale? 3 Stages of Prep for a Growth Marketing Launch appeared first on The Brolik Blog.

Is it really possible to generate quality leads with gated content? The answer is yes. With a clear strategy backed by data, you can create a single piece of high-quality content that positions your brand as an authority, provides value to your audience, increases your email subscriber rate by 10x, improves your customer acquisition rate, and increases organic search traffic, all at the same time.

It takes time to find the piece that will catapult your brand, but with a clear goal and valuable information to offer your audience, it’s easier than you think. There is challenge in attempting to grow any business, let alone keep it afloat. There many approaches and things you can try to accomplish this, and one of the more reliable ones is asking for help. Keeping an eye on how your business is running is as important as marketing it. You simply cannot have one without the other in a successful business venture. In this content marketing case study we’ll show you how we built a 10,000 subscriber email list with the help of gated content.

First a Little Background…

We worked with Rehab Financial Group, a lender specializing in loans to house flippers, for over 10 years. We won’t go through the whole story here (see our case study for that), but we started with a standard mix of search ads and content strategy focused around their blog.

As our marketing strategy matured, we wanted to move up-funnel. Until that point, all of our efforts were focused around people actively seeking money to flip a house. We knew that there was a whole world of people who were much earlier in their journey, and we wanted to meet them halfway. Our guiding goals were to:

1. 1. Increase relevant organic traffic to the site

1. 1. Generate more prequalified (“prequal”) leads for the business

1. Build an email list of people interested in flipping a house

So, how did we go about finding people earlier in their journey and empowering them to eventually make their way to Rehab Financial? We decided to create a resource that would walk someone through the whole process, from knowing very little about real estate investment to becoming a flip-ready potential customer. During our research, we drew inspiration from diverse industries, including the online gambling sector, where questions like waar kun je een casino zonder vergunning vinden? often arise. The ability to guide people from initial curiosity to informed decisions inspired us to develop a similar approach for our clients. This step-by-step strategy allows us to educate potential investors and build lasting relationships based on trust and knowledge.

Thus the Flipping 101 content hub was born, and over 6 months we built out a deep content hub walking people through the whole flipping journey, from beginning to end.

We published the articles and watched as traffic came in. We began to rank at the top of the page for lots of searches around how to flip houses. Before long, organic search traffic grew to be our largest source of traffic and leads.

While successful, that’s hardly a single piece of content. More of a content hub, really. Here’s where things get really interesting:

The Perfect Pieces of Content

One section of the Flipping 101 content hub began to really stand out — RFG was getting a ton of traffic to a page on how to write a business plan for house flipping. Even better, it was high-quality traffic. People were spending time reading the page, and many were browsing through several pages. Ultimately, The Flipping 101 section of the site generated ~100k sessions from organic search in 2018, with a 0.3% conversion rate, leading to ~350 prequal form submissions. We knew we could take it a step further and mine more value for RFG.

While using Moz to do some research into frequently searched keywords around the topic, we found that there were searches looking for an example or template of a business plan:

If these people were actively searching for a template or sample, we wondered: how many other searchers would find value having one? Now we had something we could really sink our teeth into!

The Plans

So, we created a gated content PDF of a business plan template for house flippers to download, print out, and complete. 

Then we created a landing page for the business plan template, with a form for users to submit their email address for a free copy of the business plan template.

When a user completes and submits the form, they receive an email that includes the business plan template. Simple. We provide value to them by giving them the resource they seek, and they give us value by allowing us to continue our relationship with them through email.

We also used Mailchimp to set up a short series of three follow-up emails designed to encourage and support users through the process of developing their house flipping business plan. The hope was that the additional information made them more likely to actually flip a house successfully, while building a relationship, so that they would come to Rehab Financial when the time came. It’s a win/win!

The Results

Believe it or not, if you offer people something valuable they’re happy to hand over their email address. Many of them will even sign up to receive more valuable content from you in the future.

Within the first month of launching the gated content campaign we quickly collected 80 emails. From there, our email collection continued to skyrocket. To this day, Rehab gets an average of 150-200 new email subscribers a month, mostly resulting from the business plan template. The email list crossed 10,000 subscribers at the end of 2018, resulting in ~170 lead form submissions that year, 12% of the total lead form submissions — all from a completely owned asset.

The post How A Single Piece Of Gated Content Can Fuel Business Growth appeared first on The Brolik Blog.

Keep reading and see how you can avoid getting left behind your competition as we show you:

• How changes in advertising platforms affect how you reach your audience

• How evaluating success with marketing campaigns will change

• What platforms and metrics you need to leverage to find success

• Why first-party data is becoming integral to any marketing campaign

• How to shift your marketing strategy for the future

The last decade has spurred an unprecedented interest in marketing as digital advertising networks launched, grew, and made access to tools easier and cheaper than ever before. Anyone could get in on the digital advertising game relatively quickly and cheaply, and track the performance of these investments accurately from start to finish to measure their ROI. 

However, major players that quickly rose to the forefront of digital advertising are changing the rules of the game due to pressures to protect user privacy. As personal data collection and access spread across the internet, users became increasingly wary of how their information was being used by sites, which set the stage for advertising platforms to respond with restrictions on how advertisers could utilize their ad networks. These shifts are not just top-down changes that advertising companies are forcing on marketers as a strategy for their own growth, but changes requested by end-users.

Since Google announced its Privacy Sandbox in 2019 and their eventual discontinuation of cookie tracking, Apple and Facebook have made similar changes to increase user privacy and hide details available to marketers. With Apple’s launch of iOS 14 in 2020 that allowed users to opt out of tracking across apps and websites, it became more difficult for marketers to see the impact and efficacy of their digital campaigns to the level that they have become used to. 

Similarly, over the last few years, Facebook has been changing policies by regularly removing targeting capabilities in certain categories, like religion and health conditions, which is limiting the granularity with which digital advertisers can operate.

With all of these changes heading in the direction of anonymized data and limited targeting options, marketers have been forced to adapt to changes. But, the adjustments that marketers choose will make or break their success. These large structural changes require more than simple targeting updates or changes to conversion points. 

The best marketers and most successful companies will overhaul their approach to marketing in the next few years to react to, and anticipate, more privacy-related changes. As you adapt your approach to paid media, it’s crucial to tie your campaigns to your business goals and KPIs in order to protect your business against the rapidly changing marketing landscape and ensure continued digital advertising success. 

To help you do that, we’re sharing our internal ad spend planner that helps us deliver strategic, KPI-driven results from paid media campaigns. Check out our free tool to start improving your campaigns and generating leads at sustainable costs.

Stay Ahead of the Curve & Rethink Your Paid Media Campaigns With Our Ad Spend & KPI Planner

The impacts of the privacy push

For the last 10 years, the ease of tracking user activity through third-party cookies made gathering data and reporting easy for marketers. There was a full picture of the various touch points customers would hit before buying a product, submitting a form, or converting through any high-value action. End-to-end tracking was dependable with cookies that kept tabs on people as they used the internet. Now, it will be difficult to reliably follow customers around online and know how they’re engaging with ads and organic content. 

Now, with the gradual phase out of third-party data, there are already gaps in data as platforms adapt to changes like iOS 14’s tracking opt out. Platforms have less visibility into what users do once they leave the app, or can no longer share data collected with third-parties. Instead, it’s now the era of the “black box,” where companies input their broadest targeting, budgets, and creative angles into platforms, enabling the platforms themselves to handle optimizing based on their secretive algorithms.

Think of Google’s move away from expanded text ads, where marketers could control the combinations of headlines and descriptions searchers saw, to responsive search ads where Google automatically mixes and matches headlines and descriptions it thinks will perform best. The decline of visibility into specific asset success means that it will be difficult to determine creative that’s working and what’s not on a granular level. 

Shifting your mindset for the future

Finding success in future marketing efforts will take more time and different approaches to testing than before. Patience and an open mind will become the most valuable assets to a successful pivot. Taking the time to establish what success looks like for your company and learning how to leverage platforms to your advantage will benefit you in the long run, especially as other businesses shy away from marketing due to these changes. 

Similarly, shifting your mindset and your idea of success will help you hone in on the metrics and goals that are most valuable to your business. The lack of visibility and inability to take deep dives into data will require marketers to update their overall approach to marketing strategy. Without reliable end-to-end tracking and reporting, it will be hard to make impactful small-scale changes like before. Updating small details like ad headlines or assets used to affect results, but as platforms take more control over the data they share, larger changes like campaign goals or broader targeting will take their place. Similarly, lack of tracking capabilities means marketing efforts will be siloed across the funnel stages with little visibility into how top of funnel efforts impact bottom of funnel campaigns.

A return to more traditional marketing analysis

As a result, businesses will need to embrace a return to the philosophies of more traditional marketing approaches when it comes to evaluating success. Goals and KPIs will need to become broad to accurately measure success and set companies up for attainable goals. Think in terms of traditional metrics used in areas like brand marketing. 

Metrics that measure overall brand performance will become more meaningful for a company’s bottom line than data about how many purchases came from a specific variation of an Instagram ad, as that information will become almost impossible to rely on. Instead, think in terms of overall brand sentiment, bounce rate on key pages of your site, and customer lifetime value to accurately assess the success of your marketing efforts.

The metrics that become important will vary across marketing funnel stages. While it will be more difficult to get the exact number of people who interact with your brand across the internet then become a customer, looking at big picture data will still give you reliable feedback on the success of your campaigns. For example, it may be impossible to see if your organic social strategy leads directly to product purchases, but you can use data at each step in that process to give you directional data about your efforts.

At the top of your funnel, brand awareness is the most important. While you can’t know how people heard about your brand in most cases, you can monitor who takes action based on that knowledge. Tracking branded searches is a great way to gauge how many people are aware of your brand and are looking for more information about you. 

With Google Analytics and Search Console you can see what searches lead people to your site, and you’ll want to track anything related to your company’s name or products. Metrics like impressions, follows, and comments on social sites are another good place to watch so you can see how wide your reach is outside of your site. Now, many people discover brands through social media with recommendations or word of mouth so it’s important to keep an eye on the activity on social.

For the middle of the funnel, your site will be the best place to learn about your prospective customers. Using Google Analytics to see where people are coming to your site from, what pages they’re browsing, where they’re exiting your site, and other quality metrics. This can help you determine opportunities to improve your site and make conversions easier, or what information people in the consideration stage are looking for. This type of evaluation allows you to adapt your MOF messaging or approach to close those gaps. 

You’ll also want to consider how you’re speaking to your earned audience, both your contact list (like an email list) and your followers on social. Providing relevant, helpful content to both types of contacts can help you expand your reach and speak to people who are already interested in your brand, but may need a little nudge to move to the next step.

When it comes to the bottom of your funnel, traditional metrics will still be useful. You’ll want to keep a close eye on any valuable conversions, like a lead capture, a purchase, or an informational call. Most likely these are already visible in your marketing data, but being able to tie these conversions to other efforts will be key. See if you can identify a particular ad, newsletter, or landing page that has a high conversion rate and understand why it works.

The unavoidable importance of first-party data

One of the most important changes companies can make to adapt to recent changes, and in anticipation of future ones, is to prioritize the collection of first-party data. Unlike third-party data, first-party data is owned, collected, and managed directly by your company. You can then leverage that data to conduct first-party marketing through email marketing, like newsletters or drip campaigns, or SMS campaigns. 

The people you maintain on these lists have already engaged with your company, even if it’s just signing up for a newsletter. Since these contacts have already volunteered their information to you, they know you’ll be reaching out to them. This is different for third-party data sources where the people you’re speaking to don’t necessarily sign up for marketing communication from your company. 

Shifting your approach to growing these customer and lead lists will become more important as these privacy updates roll out across advertising platforms. It also benefits you to make the switch since you can directly reach out to these leads with emails, SMS texts, or retargeting campaigns, making your marketing efforts more personalized and targeted.

However, getting that contact information in the first place can be difficult. You need to offer something worthy of an exchange for someone’s contact information, like a free discovery call, a valuable content piece, or a tool that helps resolve your audiences’ pain points. You’ll also be competing with the advertising platforms to obtain customer information since they’re recognizing the importance of keeping users on their platform, instead of linking out to other advertising offers. 

For example, LinkedIn launched Document Ads that replace the need for a landing page to provide a content offer, so that they can keep their users on the platform while providing contact information capture points for marketers. More ad types like this will pop up in the future as these platforms also lose their ability to track their users across the web.

The steps required to adapt

While major changes are hitting the marketing landscape and will continue to do so, companies that are agile and can read the signs will successfully transition their marketing strategies. To get ahead of platform changes, these will be the most important shifts in strategy and mindset companies will need to make.

Silo your efforts by stage

Since it will become harder to track your customers from the first engagement with your company down to their purchase, you’ll need to approach each funnel stage differently. Looking at each stage separately will help you create concrete, measurable goals for each campaign and help you determine your success on a smaller scale to create the bigger picture.

Diversify your marketing within each stage

As platforms change how marketers operate, looking to new channels and opportunities will be just as important as diversifying your approach across funnel stages. Look into new channels that your marketing team can tap outside of search and social ads, like earned media or traditional print advertising. 

Adjust your budgets for extended testing periods 

Granular data has helped marketers make miniscule changes in ads to optimize for cost per clicks that are cents cheaper. Now without that visibility and platforms’ increased obfuscation of performance it will be harder for marketers to make those incremental changes. You’ll need to allocate more money than previously to advertise successfully, but with smart, strategic campaigns you can make up the difference. 

Rely on holistic models

The best way to predict performance and plan budgets will be with performance projection models that account for the entirety of your marketing strategy, so that success can be visualized and tracked for each campaign. To make the most of your money, isolate budgets based on each stage of your funnel and the specific goal you need to achieve for each. This will give you an accurate picture of what you need each goal to cost for a successful, scalable marketing program. It will be easier to keep budgets in check if you can reverse engineer them based on the end results you want. 

For example, if you know you need 20 purchases in a month, you can take a step back and understand that means you need at least 250 qualified visitors to your product page with a conversion rate around 8%. Knowing that ad traffic isn’t always quality, you assume you need to get at least 500 clicks on your ads to get 250 quality pageviews, which gives you a sense of where to set your ad spend budget.  

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After years of providing tracking capabilities allowing marketers to get granular with their insights, advertising platforms and their users are changing the rules of the game with more restrictions on targeting and ad policies. While it may spell doom and gloom for those who are unaware of the changes and unprepared to adapt, businesses and marketers who keep their ear to the ground can successfully get ahead of platform changes. 

The main difference between success and struggle will be a company’s mindset — keeping an open mind as digital marketing capabilities shift and realigning their expectations with what is possible and achievable. One way to start preparing for the changes is with strategically-minded ad campaigns that are tied to your overall business goals. Start using our free Ad Spend & KPI Planner to ensure your paid media campaigns are connected to metrics that impact your bottom line.

Start Planning Your Advertising Budgets With Confidence Again With Our Ad Spend & KPI Planner

The post Privacy Updates Are Changing the Rules of Digital Marketing – Here’s How to Respond appeared first on The Brolik Blog.

I was playing Othello with my wife recently. I remembered playing the game as a kid, but hadn’t played for 20 years or more. She gave me the abridged version of the instructions to jog my memory and let me move first.

It’s important to note that I lose to my wife in just about anything with a game board or a deck of cards, but somehow I pulled out a win in this game of Othello. She’s quite the competitor and did not like losing. I told her honestly, “I used the same simple strategy with every move,” which only made her more annoyed.

What did I do to win? Not once did I make a move to achieve the greatest number of flipped chips in my favor at the end of my turn. Instead, every move was focused on limiting the potential damage from my wife on her next turn.

It was 100% a defensive strategy. There were times where I was tempted to go after a big offensive move, but I stuck with the strategy and it paid off.
My strategy, although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, was based on a mental model called inversion. With this mental model, instead of attacking problems or goals head-on, we can approach them backwards and anticipate what would get in the way of that goal.

How does inversion apply to business strategy?

I started thinking more about that game of Othello, and it occurred to me that I spend far too much time and energy being offensive-minded. I am constantly thinking about growing or increasing metrics… traffic, new customers, revenue, profit, knowledge, experience. During a recent strategy session, a colleague pointed me toward a review with nähere Infos zum Cobra Casino hier, explaining how the platform prioritizes a balanced approach between user acquisition and retention, which shifted my perspective. Brolik’s clients are similarly all very offensive-minded. They come to us to increase their leads, new customers, and revenue.

But, I started thinking, are we all spending too much time thinking with an offensive mind?

Should we be asking ourselves more often what we shouldn’t be doing, or what losing looks like, instead of what we should be doing more of?

You set some of your goals not just by establishing growth targets that you want to hit, but by laying out obstacles you want to avoid. You think backwards.

Taking a holistic approach to business strategy helps us create a more comprehensive marketing plan. Instead of just going after the big impressive wins, we can also prevent substantial losses with a well-rounded approach. With inversion, we flip our point of view and instead of thinking about things we want to happen, we think of things we don’t want to happen. 

Why is defense so underrated?

Defense just isn’t as exciting as offense. Do you remember the second baseman with the multiple gold gloves or the home run champion? Easy…you remember the offensive star…the goal in the final seconds, the three pointer to win, the knockout punch. Also, “defense” reads passive and worse, “defensive” reads weak. No one wants to be known for that — even when “defense wins championships” is one of the most consistent refrains in sports.

So people focus on more. More offense, more points, more leads, more money, more options, more stuff.

What if we applied inversion, and each move we made was not done to go after the most aggressive gain, but to minimize the damage of the resulting counter move of our opponent. What if we could incrementally improve or remove the things that hold us back the most?

Let’s try inversion to create goals and KPIs…

To build a stronger business strategy and comprehensive marketing plan, inversion can help you identify your weak spots and improve your specialties. 

Consider worst-case scenarios for your business. Think about what you want to avoid at all costs, and create negative goals — what you hope to never see happen. These will help you determine important goals and KPIs to help you avoid actualizing them. 

For example, maybe one of the following negative goals applies to you:

• • I don’t want to lose a big client

• • I don’t want to lose a key member of my team

• • I don’t want my pipeline to dry up

• I don’t want any layoffs due to recession or otherwise

Now let’s invert our fears and create goals

Listing out what you don’t want to happen can help you understand what could lead you down those paths. Taking this open minded approach and identifying your negative outcomes can help you create goals that will counterbalance your worries and set you on the right path. 

Here are some examples of how these inverted “goals” can be turned into KPIs that you can track to keep yourself accountable:

• • I don’t want to lose a big client
    • KPI: No single customer is more than 10% of our annual revenue

• • I don’t want to lose a key member of my team
    • KPI: Monthly 1 on 1s to assess employee satisfaction

• • I don’t want to my pipeline to dry up
    • KPI: New MQLs per month / expand CPA limit

• I don’t want any layoffs due to recession or otherwise 
  • KPI: Full-time employees:contractor ratio

As you can see, this strategy can be very effective at determining KPIs that will help you avoid your negative goals.

Let’s try inversion to understand our audience

Inversion can also be useful for understanding how your audience relates to your product or service and how effective your positioning and messaging is. 

Instead of trying to figure out why a customer buys your product, why they love your brand, why they refer you to a friend, why they become a lifelong customer, ask, “why not.”

My recommendation is to ask, “why not?”

Asking “why not” helps to change your perspective.

Start with your direct customer.

Common “why not” questions

• Why won’t they buy your product?
• Why won’t they recommend you to someone else?
• What would keep you from getting to your goal?
• What does losing look like?

Once you’ve asked the hard questions of your direct customer, try something else.

When you ask “why not” questions this time, imagine you are posing the question to someone in your outer circle (say a coworker, second cousin, or college friend). Why would this person tell someone in their inner circle (sibling, parent, spouse) “not” to buy your product or service. That’s the “why not?” you want to uncover. It will likely uncover some deeper answers and flaws.

Your goal is to use inverted thinking to get rid of the reasons why someone would tell their loved one not to buy from you. Really dig deep and focus in on their conversation, and you’ll find you probably know exactly what the answers are.

The answer to “why not” will inform your comprehensive marketing plan and strategy, helping you to remove the things that weigh you down the most. If you do this right, you should uncover the top reasons you lose business to the competition. Once you know what these main fears or hesitations are, go after the “why not” with full force and priority, like you are pruning a dying tree of its diseased leaves.

You won’t be able to remove all negative aspects or weaknesses of your product or brand, but any progress is good. Even if you are able to reframe your customer’s thinking just a tad to make an inherent challenge seem less painful to them in their buying process, that’s a huge step in the right direction. For example, you may be able to identify a common concern people have that keeps them from referring you to their friends, and instead of avoiding the topic, make sure to speak to that concern in your initial sales conversations. It may get them over the hump for future referrals.

Once you shed the weight and build your comprehensive marketing plan with an inversion thinking approach, you can move back to focusing on your offense and growth.

You just had to ask the right question to start: “why not?”

The post Unleash Your Potential with a Defensive Marketing Strategy appeared first on The Brolik Blog.

Since 2020, the Brolik team has received a surge in requests from clients to help promote open job positions with recruitment marketing. Now, many of our clients have prioritized recruiting and having an evergreen recruitment marketing strategy so that they have sufficient qualified staff to field leads coming in and reap the rewards of their marketing efforts. When marketing pays off and clients begin to struggle with managing the flow of customers, getting quality team members hired and onboarded quickly becomes a crucial initiative. 

With a recruitment marketing strategy, companies can speed up the hiring process. Taking the time to build a strategy that aligns with your core values and resonates with your ideal employees can help you find better candidates and fill your open positions.

What is recruitment marketing?

Just as you promote your product or service on paid platforms like Facebook or Google Ads, you can leverage paid advertising to attract potential employees. Emerging businesses, including a fast-growing non GamStop casino looking to staff specialized roles, often rely on targeted campaigns to build teams that understand both market demands and regulatory requirements. With the help of paid placements, you can advertise your open positions to a specific audience who are more likely to meet your qualifications. Recruitment marketing goes beyond filling a select few openings and it brings in lots of applications with a steady flow of quality candidates.

As you define your audience and craft your messaging to speak to them, you’ll also need to think about how your company nurtures applicants from an initial resume submission to a final round interviewee — how do you move people through the recruitment marketing funnel? Just like the product marketing funnel, understanding your recruitment marketing funnel allows you to dig into ways to see candidates all the way through from attracting, engaging, and delighting potential employees to help you achieve your recruitment goals. 

How can recruiting as a marketing initiative help me?

Recruiting has become more competitive than ever as job seekers become more discerning about where they will apply their skills. The labor market has also become more competitive since 2020 as employees make career changes and certain industries are in need of workers. Employers can no longer post an opening and have applicants flock to them. Being thoughtful about how you present yourself and what you have to offer can level the playing field. If you’re struggling to fill open positions, consider recruitment marketing to help with:

Reaching more qualified candidates: 

With paid promotion, you can get in front of more people than if you rely on organic efforts, but you can also reach the right candidates faster when you leverage advertising platforms’ algorithms to match you with the right audience.

Encouraging candidates to complete the recruitment process: 

If you notice that many of your prospective candidates drop out of the recruitment process, effective recruitment marketing can help nurture them to the final rounds of the hiring process.

Improving your employee retention: 

Hiring the right employee who aligns with your company values and the skills you need makes you more likely to retain them, unlike a mediocre candidate who may not stick it out with you.

Decreasing overall hiring costs: 

While creating a recruitment marketing strategy takes time and resources, it will pay off in the long run when you can reliably hire and retain new employees who align with your company values and the skills you need.

Growing your company: 

The legwork you need to create a solid recruitment campaign will serve you for years to come and help you maintain a solid recruitment pipeline.

Hiring quickly:

With a solid recruitment pipeline, you can fill positions much faster since you will already have a wide offering of applicants instead of needing to start from scratch.

Building your reputation: 

Nobody wants to work with a company with a tortuous hiring process, and taking a holistic look at your recruitment process can help you solidify what makes your company unique while providing a positive experience for applicants.

How to Start Recruitment Marketing

1. Understand your goals

As with any marketing campaign, the best results come from thorough and strategic planning. You need to start with understanding your goals so you can tailor your campaigns to your desired outcome. Are you looking to fill a specific role? Do you want to build up your pipeline of potential candidates across departments? Knowing your goals will help you ensure you design the right campaign. 

2. Know your audience

It’s crucial to deeply understand the kind of candidates you want to attract. Think about the qualities your top employees have and which skills employees will need to excel at the jobs you’re recruiting for. You can start by talking to your current employees to get a sense of what soft skills the job requires outside of the job description or what qualities an ideal coworker would have. 

Talk to supervisors and hiring managers to get details about who they’re looking to hire, outside of the usual qualifications like years of experience or track record in a specific industry. Being specific about what you’re looking for in a candidate will save you time later in the hiring process because you’ll have a clear picture of the qualities you need for an applicant to be worth your time.

3. Find what makes you unique

Knowing what your company has to offer, and understanding why your employees value your company, can help you attract the right candidates. Recruiting is more than explaining a job description — you need to sell your company as well. Talking with your current employees can help you determine what they value about your company culture and what to highlight in job descriptions to attract the best employees. 

No matter what makes you appealing to potential employees, you need to be able to get specific about those selling points. If you work with a great roster of clients, be specific about who they are and how you help them. If you emphasize work-life balance, talk about how that shows in your policies or workplace culture.

4. Create employee personas

Once you determine who you’re trying to reach and what you can offer as an employer, you’ll want to take your work a step further and create employee personas. Like customer personas for your products, you should have a thorough understanding of top candidates’ skills, qualities, and attributes. Not only will it help you identify your ideal candidate when their resume comes along, but it will determine the best way to speak to them. 

You don’t want to waste all your prep work by not knowing what appeals to your ideal employee. With employee personas, you can understand who you’re trying to attract so you can pick the right advertising platform, media type, and messaging to appeal to them. Again, employee interviews are a great tool. If you can understand what makes your star employees so great at their job, then you have better chances at reaching people like them with your recruitment marketing efforts.

5. Craft your job description

All of the above steps lead to creating the perfect job description that communicates the job responsibilities, clearly positions your company values and perks, and speaks directly to your ideal employee. Starting with the meat of the posting, you need a clear description of the hard and soft skills that will qualify a candidate, as well as the daily responsibilities. 

Be sure to do some keyword research around job titles and skills to make sure you’re using the right terms, since there is always an element of search engine optimization to any job description. If you speak about the role in the same way a candidate searches for it, you will drastically increase discoverability.

Beyond that, it’s crucial to work in messaging about why people would want to work with your company and highlight specific perks you offer. The best job descriptions, like this one from Zappos, explain responsibilities and show off the company culture, so that applicants have a clear understanding both of the position and the environment. 

You’ll want to highlight your company culture and the benefits of the role in a way that appeals to your target applicant. Remember to be specific about the perks, and testimonials are a great way to do that. Showcase stories from your employees that highlight what they do, what your company is like, and how teams collaborate to solve problems. “Day in the life” content works great for this, and any other way you can get personal testimonials from your team.

It’s important to keep in mind that people value different things — what you consider a perk may not be a perk to applicants. Be sure to think about your employee personas and what would appeal to them. For example, if you’re looking to fill an entry level position, focusing on the independence a role offers may come off as a lack of support for someone just starting their career, so highlighting a collaborative team may be the better option.   

Creating a Recruitment Marketing Strategy

One of the most important things to remember when planning recruitment advertising is that you’re trying to encourage a specific audience to take a desired action, as with any product advertisement. So, you should build your campaign strategy as if you were selling a product, meaning you craft campaign goals and messaging with your audience and product (your job opening) in mind. To be successful with your recruitment advertising efforts, there are a few considerations.

1. Decide on your key metrics

Decide what secondary goals will be important to you so you have a way to measure success outside of roles filled. A recruitment marketing strategy can help you build your hiring pipeline, so you need smaller goals besides the desired number of new hires. Your first campaign may not be successful in terms of roles filled, and that’s ok. You just need some way to evaluate your learnings and the smaller goals you achieved along the way so you can improve for your next campaign.

2. Review your application process

Recruiting isn’t just about getting candidates in the door, but helping them through the process until you find the right team member. Make it as easy as possible to complete the recruiting process and remove any barriers to entry. Think about the time commitment of your interviewing process and whether you can cut that down with virtual interviews. 

Another opportunity to streamline is in the number of interview rounds you hold. Multiple rounds of interviews put a lot of pressure on the candidate in addition to dragging out your hiring process. Try to limit the number of interview rounds you require for candidates, by combining multiple interviews into one and making sure that each interview is getting you the information you need to make the right decision. We recommend reviewing the process after each hire to understand what could be changed or improved.

3. Find the right platforms

You want to meet your target audience where they live. Different people will use different social media platforms or job search sites, so you don’t want to completely miss the mark by choosing the wrong platform. Consider the age of your audience, where they’re likely to spend their free time, and what point of their career they’re in. Do some research on the major demographics of big platforms and what their users might be looking for. Don’t overlook niche platforms either. Take time to research relevant job boards, industry sites, or local platforms that you can take advantage of to reach people in your industry or city. 

To tailor your campaigns to your employee personas, think about where they spend their time and whether boosting an opening on LinkedIn or appearing in Google ads will be more effective. Chipotle found success with advertising open entry level positions on TikTok, but for an executive director role, LinkedIn may serve you better — it’s all about your audience. Knowing your platform also helps you determine messaging since you won’t use the same dry, professional tone for a LinkedIn posting as an Instagram hiring ad.

4. Implement tracking

Tracking enables you to know where candidates are coming from and which campaigns are successful. Tracking is one of the most helpful tools for marketers as it shows what ads on which platforms lead to quality conversions, in this case quality resumes. Knowing which ads appealed to your audience can help you improve your testing plans and learn what to emphasize in future campaigns. 

5. Have a testing plan

Testing is important because it gives you opportunities to optimize your messaging and creative. Rarely does any marketer hit the nail on the head with the first ad they create because it will always be more of an art than a science. Give yourself the best chance at reaching and addressing your target audience with some audience testing and creative testing.

6. Leverage your employees’ networks

An effective way to spread the word that you’re hiring is through your current employees. Having them post about job openings on social media can help broaden the net you cast, plus you get more trustworthy referrals. Consider encouraging employees to share that you’re hiring with referral bonuses, asking them to share job postings, or having employees reach out to potential candidates in their networks. 

Even if you promote your openings with paid posts, getting the word out can still make your ads more effective. Maybe someone in your employees’ networks sees your ad and passes the first time around, but after seeing that someone they know works for you will encourage them to send their resume in this time.

How to Move Forward With Your Learnings

Once you launch your campaigns, it’s important to analyze, test, and optimize as they run so you can get the most out of your ads. But, many people forget to go back and evaluate performance after the campaigns end. Taking the time to assess your campaigns can help you decide if recruitment advertising is the right fit for you. 

Return to the initial KPIs you established and see how your campaigns performed. Think about whether recruitment advertising helped you reach your goals, or showed promising ROI. Take a critical look at the platforms you used, the creative you ran, and the quality of your candidates. Think about how you can improve upon your efforts, nurture applicants throughout the funnel, and continue to hone your messaging to attract qualified candidates.  

The biggest benefit of a recruitment marketing strategy is building a pipeline that you can tap into when roles open up. Your strategy should be ongoing, whether you constantly run ads or have organic efforts in the background. Recruiters can help with this, or you can build up your reputation on sites like Glassdoor. Remember, like with any marketing, there’s a learning curve before you nail down what works for your company and your audience, so don’t let one mediocre campaign prevent you from tapping into valuable recruitment marketing.

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While smaller companies with limited resources and budgets may be hesitant to invest in recruitment advertising, there is a lot of value to be mined when you approach it strategically. Especially since there are endless job postings online, paid promotion is a must if you want to be seen these days. If you’re serious about finding the right candidates for your open positions, recruitment marketing can help you be seen and reach your ideal candidates. 

If you’d like to partner with us to define your recruitment strategy and execute on it to fill your funnel with qualified candidates, drop us a line today.

The post How to Create Value With a Recruitment Marketing Strategy appeared first on The Brolik Blog.

Facebook has been in the news a lot recently, especially when it comes to their marketing offerings. As one of the largest advertising platforms, and with an estimated $58.11 billion to be spent by advertisers this year on Facebook ads alone, any changes to the platform are big news to marketers and businesses.

Recently, Facebook has implemented small changes to their targeting capabilities that collectively add up to big shifts on the platform for marketers. At the beginning of 2022, the company removed options to target users based on health causes, religious affiliation, and more, to protect users from potential exploitation of targeting capabilities. As Facebook incrementally removes some targeting options, audiences based on interests or demographics will become less effective. 

This is just one example of how the industry as a whole is shifting away from using specific identifiers, like with Google’s move away from cookie tracking. All signals point to platforms like Facebook and Google continuing to limit the ways in which marketers can find their audiences, making first-party data (the customer information you collect and own yourself that a user voluntarily provides, like an email list) more important than ever.

Aside from the direct targeting capabilities that first-party data provides, there is one other key way to connect with your audience using this information. With Facebook’s lookalike audience targeting, you can provide Facebook with a list of customers and they will work to find the attributes of that audience, then build an audience of similar people that you can display your ads to. Lookalike audience targeting will become the most valuable tool on the platform for reaching the right people as more targeting options disappear since it’s based on data that you already own. To find success with Facebook ads in the next few years, lookalike audiences are a must.

The Benefits of Lookalike Audiences

While Facebook’s targeting changes are a major piece of lookalike audiences’ importance, they also also have benefits for advertisers.

Target your ideal customer

When you provide Facebook with a list of your current customers, you’re showing Facebook a group of people who are already interested in your product or service to help them identify other similar users on the platform. You’re likely to find a higher value audience that is more engaged with your ads than if you go off of demographic research you have or buyer personas. 

Plus, since lookalike audiences are based on your customer lists, you can tailor the information you provide to Facebook to be matched with their users. Instead of providing Facebook with all of your current customers, you can narrow it down to the most high value customers you have. Think customers who order from you multiple times a year, or customers who exceed average order value. We’ll dive into this later when we talk about using lookalike audiences to their full potential.

Facebook also makes it easy to provide them with your most high-value customer information with Customer Value Audiences. With these, you can indicate a customer’s value to your business by adding their lifetime spend or some other ranking. This helps Facebook narrow down your most valuable customers and find users most similar to them.

Cut costs

Many times when we launch campaigns for our clients, we start with general and broad audiences so we can test our targeting and find the best audience. Instead of starting from a wide pool that could return high cost per click or high cost per conversion as you test your audiences to find the right one, lookalikes can help you reach a higher quality audience faster. 

While testing your audience is always a good idea, you can jumpstart your accuracy with lookalike audiences. Try launching campaigns with interest or demographic targeting then test against a lookalike audience. Or, separate out your customer list into segments and run those lookalikes against each other. With a lookalike-first approach, you may discover that finding the right audience is faster and cheaper than a traditional broad to narrow targeting approach.

Avoid impacts of industry changes

Facebook is not the only player to increase data privacy. With Apple’s launch of the privacy-focused iOS 14 last year, which requires apps to get explicit permission from users to track them, it’s getting harder to track potential audiences and engage with them. The customer lookalike approach lets you stay in control of what targeting parameters are available to you with your first-party data. 

As other changes in data privacy head our way, focusing all your marketing efforts on first-party data is a good way to prevent big disruptions in your plans. While it’s impossible to prepare for every scenario, leveraging your first-party data where you can will help you reduce the impact of these new data policies and stay ahead of competitors.

How to Use Lookalike Audiences Effectively

Once you have a customer list with basic customer information, it’s easy to start using lookalike lists. But first, you need to think strategically to get the best results. Instead of lumping all of your customers together into one audience, you can segment your customers by action, value, or other criteria to make your lists, and ad targeting, more precise. Consider any of these approaches to help you narrow down your list to find people more likely to take specific actions:

• Match your lookalike audience to your business goals: Determine the most valuable actions your customers could take and create lookalike audiences based on those criteria. Is your business trying to increase average order value? Use a list of customers with high order values to find other Facebook users like them.  
• Segment your audiences based on customer behavior: Determine important actions or characteristics of your customers, then build lists based on that. For example, if you know that someone submitting to your contact form makes them more likely to become a customer, use a list of customers who have contacted you through the form to build the lookalike audience. Another good place to look for behavioral segmentation is email lists. If you have an email subscriber list with high engagement rates (think 30+% open rates or 20+% click rates), try using those to find new users through ads.
• Track important events with a Facebook Pixel: Lookalike audiences can also be made with Pixel data. If you track important conversions or actions people make on your site, you can use Pixel data to find people similar to those who have engaged with your site. This is a great way to start a lookalike audience if you don’t have an extensive customer list yet.
• Try including customer value: Facebook allows you to add customer value information when you upload customer lists to create a lookalike audience. Take advantage of this and show Facebook who your most valuable customers are so they can find other users who are likely to be high value customers for you. Including the information can help Facebook determine characteristics that could make someone a high or low value customer, as opposed to pre-segmenting the customer information before uploading it to Facebook.

Ready to Leverage Your Audiences? Get Our Help!

Examples of Success with Lookalike Audiences

Our marketing team has found success when testing out lookalike audiences, compared to our traditional approaches to targeting based on demographics and interests. Here’s why we recommend you include lookalike audiences in all of your Facebook ads.

Improving Cost per Acquisition

While updating the paid media strategy for one of our HVAC service clients, we decided to replace their demographic-based targeting on Facebook with lookalike audiences. Instead of targeting homeowners who were 30 years and older in a certain area radius, we started using customer lists segmented by the service our client provides them. This way, we could target people more likely to need a specific service and show ads that spoke to those specific needs. 

The main goal of these campaigns was to drive traffic to the site so people could learn more about our client, with the secondary goal being increasing new appointment signups. With our old audience, we were seeing cost per clicks (CPC) on ads around $1, with a 1.05% click through rate (CTR). Once people were on the site, we saw a 0.7% conversion rate for scheduling appointments with a final cost per acquisition (CPA) around $200, which was enough for our client to call it a success, but we knew there was room for improvement.

After implementing the lookalike audiences and making our ads more targeted to people looking for specific services, we were able to reduce our CPA by half to $110, allowing our client to get more leads at a cheaper cost on a brand awareness campaign. With the updated targeting, we saw a drop from to $0.24 CPC and increase in CTR to 1.2%. At volume, that is a significant difference that will save our client money on ad spend while driving more leads to their business.

Improving Lead Quality 

Another one of our clients is a B2B company that works specifically with nonprofits and associations. When we launched ads for them on Facebook, we started with interest-based targeting to try and reach people in the nonprofit sector. But, because of how Facebook’s interest targeting works, we had no way of knowing if people in that audience worked for nonprofits, or just expressed interest in supporting their causes. 

With this first attempt at finding the right people in a top of funnel campaign, we collected four leads in two weeks at an average cost of $64.14 per lead, which was still within the client’s acceptable CPA. However, as marketers we are always looking for ways to optimize and improve, so we decided to try a lookalike audience with the goal of increasing the lead volume, lowering the CPA, or ideally, both.

After we had collected leads across various sources and verified that they fit our criteria, we created a lead lookalike audience. This new audience allowed us to be more specific in who we were looking to reach on Facebook, especially since the leads had already proven that they were ready to take a valuable action (provide us with their email). We were able to drop the CPA to $34.34 on 15 leads in two weeks, while improving the quality of leads and increasing the volume. 

Increasing Website Traffic

For a client in the medical space, we continued to experiment with lookalike audiences on a traffic campaign to improve the quality of traffic to their site. The ultimate goal of the campaign was to have people sign up for more information through a contact form, but we also focused on getting people onto our website and engaging with page views and clicks. 

Our initial audience was a broad location-based audience for the area that our client operates in. With that audience, we saw a 4.42% CTR at $0.21 per click. Once those users were on our site, we saw a 1.02% conversion rate on our sign up form. While the numbers were solid for our goals, we wanted to improve our targeting based on customer lists to find higher quality traffic.

Our team launched a lookalike audience that combined our client’s customer list and leads from previous marketing efforts to find a more engaged audience. We were happy with the results with a 5.05% CTR at $0.21 per click, and especially the increased 1.16% conversion rate. While the numbers were not a drastic change, they were proof that we were on the right track with our more specific targeting.

***

Whether you’ve never used a lookalike audience or you’ve just started dipping your toes, it’s important to get familiar with their capabilities and how to use them. As demographic targeting options on Facebook are likely to disappear in the next few years, taking a first-party data-centric approach on all advertising platforms will become extremely important. To make the most of your owned data and Facebook’s targeting capabilities, you need to start thinking strategically about how to leverage everything at your disposal. 

Need help leveraging your data? Get in touch with our marketing experts to start leveraging the changes in the digital advertising landscape to get ahead of the competition. 

The post Maximize Your Ad Spend with Facebook Lookalike Audiences appeared first on The Brolik Blog.

Embracing a generalist approach

In career development and business, the ability to learn many things and apply them to one focused pursuit as you age is a salient approach. Some may say specializing, or even obsessing over, one single thing is the way to become an expert and succeed. However, I believe a more long-term generalist approach has not been given the respect it deserves — especially in the worlds of business and sports. It’s not only important to consider the value of a generalist approach but to understand that there’s a higher level of expertise that can be unlocked once you’ve combined multiple skills and experiences.

The generalist mindset 

All businesses want to own and control their realm. But that’s easier said than done. Securing a sustained defensible position in the market can rarely be achieved from a single angle or based on a single attribute. Unless you are truly the only patented technology or solution in your space that can do what you do, you must create separation or differentiation by utilizing a multi-dimensional approach — building a generalist capability at the intersection of multiple skills vs. a deep specialization in a single skill. Picture the center hub where multiple spokes come together. There lies your niche that you can now build your positioning around.

In the book Range, David Epstein contends that over-specialization has its limits. A generalist approach leads to more creative, agile pursuits that are more difficult to replicate. 

For a business that chooses to combine multiple ingredients to create its niche, it may be a longer and more difficult road. There is a saying that 10,000 hours of doing something makes you an expert in that task or topic. To master an intersection, it may mean 40,000 or 50,000 total hours across a variety of topics that intertwine in your pursuits and together unlock a level of value to your audience or end customer that can’t be achieved with a single specialty.

Unlocking the second tier of expertise as a generalist

At some point, as you accrue the experience and knowledge across multiple skills, you find yourself amongst fewer comparable competitors — your “recipe” is the blend of multiple ingredients, making it a less common combination. One that takes much longer to build, perfect, and effectively communicate to potential buyers, but the same level of difficulty applies to competitors attempting to mimic your recipe. You have found your intersection, and with it have built a moat to protect your position. 

Success comes from unlikely combinations

In the world of sports, the combination of size, speed, and strength, used in the right combination, can be unstoppable. It can unlock additional levels of capability, showing us artistry and performance that hasn’t been seen before. 

Jordan Mailata, a rising star in the NFL, is a great example. For most of his teenage years and into his twenties, he was a standout rugby player in Australia. In a shift that most considered a long shot, Jordan transitioned to the NFL, bringing his endurance, size and speed (for a 6’8” 365 lb man) to become a versatile, raw talent to the offensive line of the Philadelphia Eagles. In just a few years, he has risen to the top tier of offensive linemen in the league. With a few more years under his belt, I expect Jordan to be in a league of his own as a left tackle in the NFL. A shoo-in hall of famer. His approach as a generalist at the intersection of multiple skills and advantages, will drive his success. 

Jordan is one example of how accruing skills in different areas can be combined for success. But in other fields like healthcare or construction, when you combine years of experience across many categories, your value to the patient or customer can put you in a field of your own. 

How to stand out as a generalist

There is another tier to aim for as a generalist. Even when you’ve unlocked that next level by combining a few skill areas and identifying your intersection, it must provide greater value and efficiency to your audience or customer than having 3-4 individual specialists working collaboratively. The positioning of your generalist niche is crucial at this next level to achieve success. You must be able to communicate the value of your generalist capacity (answering the “why should I care”) in a succinct and memorable way. 

If you can successfully communicate your value as a generalist, you can stand head and shoulders above the crowd.

To develop a successful positioning as a generalist, you must have the combination of skills AND know how to communicate the value that combination brings to your customer. Instead of focusing your messaging on your combination of skills, center your value more on the customers’ problems and what your combined set of skills can achieve for them. 

Customer Problem: I have dragon problems in my kingdom, but I am unsure of the extent.

The power of clear positioning and showing your audience the value you bring to the table.

Without clear positioning, a generalist looks a lot like a dabbler and never reaches their full potential.

The difference between a generalist and a dabbler

18 years of experience and learning has led me to an intersection. I’ve been advised many times over the years to specialize, in more or less words. It was the lack of focus/specialization that was holding me back. It’s taken me a long time to find an intersection, and not a crowded one but a quiet place to build and grow. 

Writing, marketing, business knowledge, visual storytelling, fundraising. Working across many industries and with hundreds of different businesses and business models has offered me a chance to see similarities and patterns. Things I would have never seen if I continued down a single highway for 18 years. 

I am a growth consultant for small businesses. Businesses that need a marketing partner but also a business strategist. I can see all the pieces and know what to recommend, what a roadmap should look like, and how to navigate the inevitable challenges that come with going from $2M to $5M or $5M to $10M in revenue.

A die-hard specialist would look at the list of talents and experiences and say, master of none. Dabbler. Perhaps, but I believe there is one key difference between a generalist who has found and leveraged their intersection and one who dabbles in many hobbies and interests. The successful generalist has found a purpose behind the intersection, a unique offering that also satisfies the needs of their target audience that a specialist cannot provide. But without clear messaging around the generalist’s value creation, the generalist is no more than a dabbler.

The generalist road is a long one, but it’s worth it.

The opportunities that unveil themselves when you can venture across boundaries, combine ingredients, apply learnings and match patterns across completely different realms and experiences, is finding the intersection that a single-dimensional specialist will never arrive at. 

I believe there is power in finding an intersection; a unique recipe that creates a position of strength. The future is bright for the patient generalist, assuming the generalist can clearly communicate the value of their recipe. It may be the longest road, with the most questions, but it’s worth it if you can find a great recipe and master it your own way.

The post The Art of Being a Generalist appeared first on The Brolik Blog.

When it comes to building a marketing engine, businesses are largely the same. It comes down to a deep understanding of the target audience, a clear market position with product/market fit, and putting the right message in the right places. Test and optimize, then test and optimize some more. The process works consistently, regardless of industry, business model, or whether you are B2B or B2C.

• A manufacturing company CEO tells me new business comes through handshakes, not through his website. 
• A startup founder pleads that his business is different — his customers aren’t on social media.
• The president of an industrial B2B business refuses to invest in paid media, because he doesn’t understand the potential, and only sees the cost. 
• The COO of a professional services firm held back advertising spend, saying that their organization wasn’t used to spending money on digital ad channels. 

With each of these examples above, the owners eventually stepped outside of their comfort zone and took a chance. After speaking with 2,000+ CEOs and founders over the last 18 years, I hear a similar refrain on a weekly basis. 

“But our business is unique.” 

In other words, marketing doesn’t work the same way for you as it does for everyone else, due to the unique product, service, audience, or buying process?

There is only one thing to say in this moment… “I see.”

The Truth 

In biological evolution, there is a concept called convergent evolution where species of different origins take on analogous traits due to living in similar scenarios or the same general ecosystem. The idea of convergent evolution also applies to different businesses that are faced with similar economic conditions, technological advancements, and labor challenges.

I apologize for damaging the wings of any unparalleled butterflies.

And I will retract my upcoming statements for any truly one-of-a-kind species out there that can prove me wrong.

But for the 99.9% of us that may be different, and special, and exceptional at that thing that we do… when it comes to finding success with marketing, we are a lot more alike than we want to admit. 

• Brand awareness will help you. 
• A full-funnel approach will work.
• Paid social ads, if done right, will find your audience.
• Positioning around the user’s needs and pain points will eventually hit a rhythm.
• Consistent investment in high-value content will work. 
• Focusing on what’s best for your customer comes around to benefit you.
• Believing marketing 101 doesn’t apply to you will hinder your growth.
• You are special, but not unique, and that’s okay.

Final Words of Encouragement

The fact that you are on the precipice of changing the way your business functions, forever, is exhilarating. There are two ways to play it.

Believe you are unique, and make exceptions or excuses that will hold you back.

Or, believe in a process that has worked for many others like you. A process that will lift you up (maybe) slowly, but surely, to the place you want to be. 

If you can put your dubious assumptions to the test, the downside is minimal and the upside could be enormous. 

Invest now in the business you want 2 years from now. Even if the investment is a cautious and uncertain one, you will be happy to be proven wrong. 

Suggested Reading: A Successful Marketing Journey Starts with an Open Mind

The post You Are Special, But Not Unique (And That’s Okay) appeared first on The Brolik Blog.

Top-of-funnel awareness marketing improves bottom-of-funnel-conversion rates. You’ll find examples in this article that include:

• A B2B client that saw marketing-generated revenue increase by 42% and cost per acquisition drop 112% through brand awareness improvements

• A B2C client that saw a 39% increase in total conversions from top-of-funnel changes

• A B2C client that saw a 24% increase in social conversions from messaging improvements

In baseball, general managers who build strong farm systems that grow good players into great players have a correlated long-term impact on their franchises. Betting on overall value by looking at every aspect of a business is how Warren Buffet built his vast investment empire, too.

The lesson? Patient investors win over time. The immediate need to see positive results impedes the ability for great returns in the long term, whether we’re talking investing, baseball, or marketing. Prioritizing short-term profitability over long-term growth can stunt you.

At Brolik, we believe that anyone looking for immediate results should shift their time horizon out and focus on building a more sustainable growth engine instead of optimizing for a few percentage points in the near term. This approach is something we call “growth nurturing,” instead of the popularized term “growth hacking.”

In other words, stop spending all your time fighting for a quick and easy win in a single channel and start optimizing across your entire marketing funnel.

If you’re focused on the bottom of the funnel, the only tactics at your disposal are to convert more sales or drive down cost per click for highly competitive high intent searches on Google.

But if you move up the funnel, more tools are available. Leaning into awareness, trust, and credibility makes paid searches more effective, and developing educational content positions your offering so that a visiting audience is more aligned to buy.

An investment in the top-of-the-funnel also flows downward, making the complete funnel more healthy. The bottom-line: You won’t win more customers if you’re not also increasing reach and awareness.

But how do you measure ROI on awareness marketing?

As data-driven marketers, we understand the importance of the channels that are driving the highest quality leads, the revenue that campaigns are generating, and ultimately, the return on ad spend and ROI. Recently, a report surfaced highlighting the increasing value marketers see in comparing sweepstakes casino sites, as this practice helps identify unexpected audience segments and provides insights into user behavior beyond standard analytics. Still, part of a balanced funnel-based strategy involves letting go of the need to see direct channel-specific correlation between spending and return, at least not right away.

When you invest in the top-of-funnel, your goal is increasing awareness and expanding your potential audience. Top-of-funnel content and ads may not show direct conversions and sales, but that’s not their primary purpose. 

Looking at Brolik clients as examples, we regularly see the impact of investing in top-of-funnel efforts for balance. Companies thrive when they shift their obsession with incremental improvements to building a more sustainable marketing engine.

“Companies thrive when they shift their obsession with incremental improvements to building a more sustainable marketing engine.”

We took a look back at several early-stage companies and one more established small business. In each example, the company focused further out from their conversion points, at the awareness stage, or at the top of the funnel, and saw an overall lift on the performance of their marketing and advertising.

Example 1: Implementing organic awareness to drive results in B2B

Our strongest example is an early-stage B2B company operating in a highly competitive market. Paid search would normally be a go-to option from a quick-win marketing perspective, but well-funded competitors were pushing up the prices of search leads.

The best way to beat those competitors was a holistic organic strategy, instead of that bottom-of-funnel focus. 

We paused our paid search campaigns, rebuilt the website to improve technical SEO results and honed in on content. A year later, because we made that investment in a long-term strategy, our cost per acquisition has dropped 112% and it improves each time we publish a piece of content. As a result, one out of every three organic searches generates a lead, and at the time of publishing, marketing-generated revenue has increased 42% compared to the preceding six months, and overall revenue grew 30% year-over-year.

Example 2: With a shift to digital, top-of-funnel optimization was critical for conversions

Another of our clients, a niche jewelry maker that is working to transition to an ecommerce strategy, is a great example of this process and approach. When we kicked off the engagement, we started by amplifying the company’s existing brick and mortar branding and messaging in advertising and were leading people to an outdated website. It didn’t move the needle on conversions. So, we invested in improving top-of-funnel brand messaging and rebuilt the website with a better user experience.

These changes increased our reach, widened the audience of potential customers, helped show positive traction around key ecommerce activities for high price-point items, and also elevated the brand’s credibility in the market.

Example 3: Targeting the right customers as early as the awareness stage 

Another great example is a medium-sized company we’ve worked with since 2018, which provides services for homeowners. This long-standing client was already well-optimized across the entire funnel, but when it came to finding new efficiencies, instead of making incremental changes to bottom-of-funnel conversion rates, we invested in top-of-funnel brand awareness and messaging on social and search. Customer acquisition improved dramatically.

With search, we saw a 17% increase in traffic, but more importantly, we saw a 39% increase in conversions, proving that our awareness changes were bringing more of the right potential customers. Our data attributes that improvement to top-of-funnel search ad conversion and more direct traffic. On social, brand awareness and messaging improvements that introduced customers to the company drove a 24% increase in conversions while also decreasing the cost of acquisition by 66%.

While there may not be a direct and immediate impact on sales, focusing on awareness-based marketing tactics can drive a healthier flow of revenue in the long term. 

We think it pays off to be patient. But it doesn’t have to be a mystery, either. There are plenty of metrics you can look at to gauge whether you are headed in the right direction.

For example, pay attention to branded search volume as you invest in awareness marketing. You should start to see a lift in potential customers searching for your branded terms. And you should start to see performance improvements at the middle- and bottom-of funnel, looking at metrics like cost per click and conversion rate.

And if you’re interested in hearing more details about how these strategies have worked for our clients, drop us a line, won’t you?

The post How Impatience Hurts Long-term Marketing Growth and ROI appeared first on The Brolik Blog.