Google Ads, Content Strategy & SEO for Lead Generation & Retention (Review)
Week 7 of a 12 Week Series on Growth Marketing
Each week for 12 weeks, I am writing about what I am learning through the Growth Marketing Mini-Degree from the CXL Institute. This week, I worked through three courses in Module 5: Google Ads, Content Strategy for Lead Generation, and Retention: the most underrated growth channel.
Google Ads
This course dove into an intermediate approach to setting up a Google Ads account, including how to create ad groups, build campaigns, and create different channels. In addition, creating effective ads for your business also means being able to accurately track ROI and attribution.
Campaigns are what house the ad groups, keywords, and any ads that are live. If you want to change things like the budget, the ad type, goals, or where you want the ad to run, you change them at the campaign level. At the Ad Group level, each Ad Group has a theme which contains the audience targeting, keywords, and ads themselves.
Another helpful concept in this course is called smoke testing. When creating an ad, creating multiple Calls To Action are a great way to gauge what messages are resonating most authentically with your audience. A popular method for testing the best ideas is known as smoke testing. If you haven’t finished a product yet but would like to gauge the temperature in the market, smoke testing can help you get to the answer faster and, depending on the results, can help you either catalyze or cut a project earlier in the process. In other words, this is done to gather if there is interest in the first place.
Content Strategy for Lead Generation
One of the most interesting statistics I did not previously know until this course is that 1% of the internet makes the internet. That means that 1% of people are creating, and 99% are consuming the internet. That is crazy!
Search optimization means combining authority with relevance. People are already searching for what you do, you just have to be building authority in your niche to start building awareness, so they will find relevance in our message. How do we go about that? Creating content that is concise, well-formatted, and tells a story. The more time spent on the page, the higher in search rankings you crawl.
How do we create great content? Writing really great copy can be simpler than you think. In general, PHDs prefer to read at an 8th grade level. Why is this? We are naturally skimmers. Skimming the copy for what seems relevant to us is something we do for efficiency. With that in mind, using language in our content that is easily digest-able is more effective than trying to sound clever and reflects your desire to meet your customer where they are at on their journey. The best content is original in its research, from a unique perspective or authority, and is relevant to the user when they encounter it.
When it comes to formatting, it’s not the best content that wins, it’s the best formatted content that wins. A few things we can do to slow the reader down but also keep them flowing through the content is by using triggers and hooks. Additionally, white space on the page offers a place for their eye to rest and is aesthetically pleasing. Use white space more often!
For every creator, we come to a point where we have to either sacrifice quality for quantity, and vice versa. How do we solve that quantity/ quality tension? It’s more effective to create more content, but on the same vein, bloggers are creating content less often as a trend. Why is this? While algorithms favor more consistent and frequent uploads, the time it takes to create a post has gone up significantly throughout the years. This is most likely due to production value seeping up, including things like post-production (editing) and pre-production prep. But, overall as a rule, you’re far better with less content. 100 great posts is better than 1000 good ones.
Lead Generation, and Retention
“Retention is greater an acquisition.” Why is this? Customer retention costs up to seven times less than customer acquisition. Focusing on customer retention increases efficiency, while nurturing the relationships you already have. The course also talks about how we can engage in clients who haven’t reached out in a while, and why it’s important to treat them differently than active customers.
How do we optimize retention? Instead of the more traditional methods like A/B testing, we rely more on customer interviews or surveys; metrics that help us understand how the customer is currently interacting with our product and how they feel about it. We can also segment customers into groups that are similar in order to message them in a way that personal to their journey. Personalizing the experience to where they are on the journey helps them achieve the full benefits of your product, while you are becoming more efficient and retaining happy customers long-term.
One of the most useful concepts I found in this course was something called The Hype Cycle. The Hype Cycle (shown above) is a timeline of the customer’s journey when they interact with a brand over time. There is a predictable and natural rise and fall of expectation and emotion when we “buy in” to a brand.
When someone first discovers us, it could be really exciting and new, and once reality sets in, there is often times a drop in emotions and we must anticipate for, followed by a rise again due to “realizing the value” and then it slowly falls into a plateau, where the user is encouraged to regularly interact with the product. Vulnerable parts in the customer journey are at the 1 week mark (where the most drop-off occurs) but the most significant reason we may lose a customer is ultimately due to lack to usage. This means that having the customer form a bond with your product is essential to keeping them active and engaged! The bottom line is that the best brands are good at getting their customers to form “habits” with their products. The example of the meditation app Calm is a great one because they regularly encourages their users (in the form of notifications, email, etc.) to go back to the app and meditate daily. And it works!
Slowing the curve longterm and retaining customers as opposed to more aggressive customer acquisition can be a key to more long term stability!
See you next week!
