The PPC Snobs Blog
Table of Contents
Google & BCG has this great free digital marketing maturity benchmark assessment tool. It looks at where an organization sits on the path to full, data-driven marketing. The assessment takes about an hour to complete, and offers both strategic and tactical recommendations to help your organization evolve its digital marketing maturity.
Tip: Your digital strategy should plan for the following:
(1) the capacity to measure results
(2) investment in tracking software
(3) an understanding of what and where to target
(4) creatives that explain your products/services and highlight your unique selling points
(5) automation of processes and functions, and
(6) clearly defined roles and project ownership within your organization.
A. Organizational
How does your organization’s decision making tree, departmental silos/structure, or usage/lack of expertise impact your organization’s ability to strategize and execute on key PPC tasks? Essentially, how do ensure that things get done faster and better?
- Who will take ownership of the PPC management? Who is responsible for budget decisions?
- What happens once a lead gets in touch with the business? Is the sales and onboarding process clearly outlined?
- What other functions of the business could PPC support (recruiting, support, etc..)?
- What expertise or technology is necessary to facilitate our internal systems and processes?
B. Measurement
Our organization’s capacity to track and analyze important performance and business metrics. The ability to understand the online and offline journey of each click is the basis for running successful PPC campaigns.
Our measurement strategy starts with how you’re able to track important metrics and business actions (i.e. users, clicks, conversions). Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) help us understand how our PPC campaigns drive key business outcomes. In simple terms: is our PPC working.
- What expertise, software and processes are required to collect key metrics about how our PPC is driving business outcomes?
- What key performance indicators (KPIs) will we use to track success?
- What will be our target KPIs? How ambitious is our target compared to our current baseline performance metrics?
C. Infrastructure
Infrastructure refers to our technology stack, account setup, and campaign architecture. We need to use 3rd party tools to measure and manage many of our processes. These will serve as the foundation for our PPC engine.
- Sign up for Google Tag Manager (free) and Google Analytics (free).
- Invest in a good CRM software (+$99/m). You’ll need this to manage your sales process.
- If calls are important to your business, invest in CallTrackingMetrics (+$99/m).
- Create (free) accounts on the major PPC networks: Google Ads, Facebook Ads and LinkedIn Ads.
D. Content
The ads, images, videos, webpages, emails, webinars, blogs, and/or any other form of content that you share…serves as the basis of your digital relationship with stakeholders. It’s often how they will create their first and most lasting impressions of you.
- Start writing headlines (30 characters) and descriptions (90 characters) for each of your products and services.
- Establish brand guidelines: primary color, secondary color, tertiary color, title font, body font, tone and language.
- Start designing corporate design assets, such as a logos, business cards, letterheads, and product/service guides.
- Invest in a decent website. The core pages should at least include: home, about, services, contact and blog.
E. Targeting
The who, what, where, when, why and how of targeting your audiences. Knowing the levers of targeting that move performance, and more importantly, ROI, is key to making your PPC engine sustainable in the long run.
- What PPC platforms and channels will you be using? Many begin with Google Ads and/or Facebook Ads.
- Decide on the keywords, audiences, hours and locations that you will be targeting with your PPC campaigns.
- Create audience profiles for subscribers, leads, opportunities, customers and evangelist. Start with basic info: job title, industry, business size, location, and needs.
F. Automation
Our capacity to leverage smart bidding and machine learning to deliver relevant and high value stakeholders is determined by our capacity to feed the PPC engine with critical information about our KPIs and audiences.
- Invest in software that easily integrates with the major PPC platforms. This will make automation easier.
- Use technology that can also facilitate value-based bidding, the highest stage of smart bidding. The setup and optimize modules cover this further.
- Seek to automate key functions and processes right from the planning stage: insights, targeting, bidding, reporting…these can all be automated.