The Ultimate Guide To Google AdWords Campaign Management

“No plan survives contact with the enemy” – Helmuth von Moltke

Moltke, a German military strategist, was of course referring to battle plans, but the same is true with Google AdWords campaigns. The best planned ad campaign will not survive contact with your competitors…

In other words, planning and setting up your AdWords campaign is only half the battle. The other half is optimizing your campaign once it's live. Even the best, most perfectly set up campaign will ultimately fail if it's not managed properly.

What does it mean to optimize your campaign?

Once a Google AdWords campaign is live, then there will be 3 core areas that must be continually monitored and improved. These 3 areas, which we refer to as the “3 Ingredients,” are where virtually all of your testing and optimization efforts should be focused.

Ingredient #1. Ad Targeting

If your ads are not targeting your ideal customers then your campaign doesn't have a shot at success. During the initial campaign setup, you found all the relevant keywords you think your ideal customers are searching, but you never know for sure until your ads go live.

In addition to keywords, other targeting factors include geographic location, device, and time of day. All of these factors must be analyzed to determine the ideal targeting for your campaign.

Ingredient #2. Ad Copy

Assuming your ads are targeting the right audience, then the next critical factor is your ad copy. Again, a lot of work goes into ad copywriting before your ads go live, but there's a good chance the first drafts of your ads will not survive long. You'll need to continually test new ad copy to determine what works best for your ideal customers.

Ingredient #3. Landing Pages

Once a prospective customer clicks on your ad, then it's up to your landing page to convert the website visitor into a lead or sale. It's important to note that the landing page performance depends greatly on the targeting and ad copy discussed above.

These are numbered in order on purpose. A perfectly designed landing page will fail miserably if you're not using the right ad targeting and ad copy. Focus on your targeting, then your ad copy, and then make sure your landing page is congruent.

Within each of these 3 ingredients there are dozens of elements that can be enhanced through testing, which can maximize the performance and ROI of an AdWords campaign.

And the key to success is to make sure that you're following a checklist. It's like cooking using one of those recipe and instruction cards from Blue Apron. On the card you see all the key ingredients and a step-by-step process for how you'll carefully mix those ingredients to create a delicious meal. I'm sure you know what happens if you're not an experienced chef and you try to wing it while cooking. Well, the same is true with AdWords.

Now, let's dive into each ingredient to take a closer look at what needs to be done…

Ingredient 1. Optimize Your Ad Targeting

Ad targeting sounds simple, but there are actually a lot of factors at play. Here are the 3 key areas you need to consider when optimizing your ad targeting:

1. Keywords


2. Bids


3. Campaign targeting

As we go through these 3 areas, we want to find opportunities to cut out anything that is not working and is wasting your advertising budget. At the same time, we want to find opportunities to reallocate the budget that was being wasted to the targeting that is performing well.

By simultaneously cutting out what's not working and investing more in what's working, you'll see rapid improvements in campaign performance.

Keyword Optimization

One of the most critical targeting factors in a search campaign is your keyword selection. Assuming you launched your ads with keywords your ideal customer is likely to search, then you should have a head start on the optimization process.

However, it's impossible to know every single keyword variation that is going to perform well and many of the keywords that looked great on paper will simply underperform for whatever reason.

Don't get frustrated if your initial keyword list is not profitable right out the gate! Most keyword lists require a lot of TLC to find the best phrases for your business.

In this section, I'll walk through several tactics you can use to fine tune your keyword list once the ads are live.

The first is called pruning…

Keyword Pruning

The goal of pruning is to delete keyword phrases that are irrelevant or are generating clicks, but not conversions.

You can find this information by going to your AdWords account, clicking on the 'Keywords' tab and then clicking on the “Search terms” subtab. This report shows you the exact keyword phrase that was searched when your ad was displayed. Sort by Clicks to see which keyword phrases have a history of clicks but no conversions.

To start pruning, focus on the keywords that are not relevant to your products or services. For example, if you only sell women's shoes, exclude any keywords that include “men's” in the phrase. The key benefit here is that pruning costly but non-productive keywords will save money, which can be re-allocated to keywords that are generating conversions.

Next, we can prune by using negative keywords.

Negative keywords can be added to your campaign or ad group to prevent your ads from being shown for specific searches. This will effectively narrow the audience that sees and clicks on your ads to the prospective customers that are most likely to call your business, visit your location and/or make a purchase.

Here's an example of how designating negative keywords can help a plumbing business…

Let's say the business is using “plumber in NYC” as a phrase match keyword in a campaign designed to attract new customers. This company's ads could be displayed when people enter search terms like “jobs for a plumber in NYC”. In this situation, when a person clicks on the ad, the money spent for the click is wasted because the searcher is looking to get hired, not to hire a plumber. By adding “jobs” as a negative keyword, the plumbing company would avoid wasted clicks by preventing the ads from being displayed for searches that include that term.

Negative keywords can be selected for either the campaign or the ad group level. The plumbing company mentioned above could list “jobs” as a negative keyword at the campaign level, meaning that none of the ads would be displayed for searches that include the term.

At the ad group level, listing negative keywords can sharpen the targeting of each ad. For example, an HVAC company that offers heating and air conditioning services could designate “heating” as a negative keyword for its air conditioning ads and exclude “air conditioning” in its heating ads. That way the ads in each ad group can be 100% relevant based on the searched keyword.

Next, let's prune by Quality Score.

Google will rate each of your keywords using a Quality Score based on the expected clickthrough rate, the relevance of the ad and the behavior of visitors when they arrive at the landing page. These scores range from 10 (the highest score) down to the lowest rating of 1. High Quality Scores can give your ads better positioning at lower costs-per-click.

To find the Quality Scores for your keywords/ads, click the 'Keywords' tab. You can then click the white speech bubble next to each keyword to find the Quality Score.

To get started, I recommend you remove all keywords with Quality Scores of 3 or lower. These keywords will drag down the Quality Scores of other keywords in your ad group. In other words, a few bad apples will rot the entire basket! If you don't want to remove them completely, then I recommend you create a new campaign where you continue to test these low quality score keywords without “rotting” your other campaign.

Next, work to improve the scores of the keywords ranked between 4 and 6. In the same place you found your Quality Score, Google provides evaluations of the clickthrough rate, ad relevance and the landing page experience. The evaluation on each ad can point to weaknesses that, when fixed, can improve each Quality Score.

For example, if ad relevance is below average, you may be able to improve the Quality Score by adding the keyword that has been targeted in the ad copy to the headline of the ad. If the landing page is rated at below average, it's probably because visitors are bouncing off shortly after they arrive. This would suggest that the landing page content needs to be tightened up around the targeted keyword in the ad.

Next, it's time to prune by cost per conversion.

Some of your ads may be converting, but at a cost that makes each sale unprofitable. If you know your customer lifetime value, then you know how much you can invest to get a new customer and still make a profit. If you didn't set those benchmarks earlier, do it now!

The cost per conversion for your keywords will be automatically tracked if you set up AdWords conversion tracking. If you did not set up conversion tracking, then pause your ads and set that up immediately. Without tracking in place you're flying blind and won't be able to complete this critical optimization step.

When you find unprofitable keywords, then try lowering the bids to get the keyword profitable. If that doesn't work, then you may need to pause the keyword altogether. If the keyword is generating a lot of conversions, then you'll want to test the keyword again after you've gone through the other steps to optimize your ads and landing pages.

OK, that's enough pruning… Now it's time to go fishing!

Fishing for Keywords

The goal of fishing is to find additional keywords that either look promising or are already converting, but you're not yet specifically targeting the search phrase.

Like pruning, fishing starts with the Search terms report. Sort by conversions and review the search phrases to find new keyword opportunities to add to your existing ad groups (if they are relevant) or create new ad groups for these keywords.

This leads to another important optimization tactic…

Replanting Keywords

Replanting is the process of moving your best performing keywords from a campaign that contains lower performing and unproven keywords, to a completely separate campaign that contains only high performing keywords. Separating your keywords this way delivers the following advantages:

1. More control of your budget. When all of your keywords are in one campaign, you can't easily focus your ad spend to the best performing keywords. By creating a separate campaign for your top performers, you can allocate more money to the keywords that are converting and limit your exposure on the poor performing keywords.


2. More accurate reporting. When your top performing keywords are in one campaign, then it's easier to spot trends (up or down) when reviewing campaign level stats. If all your keywords are in one campaign, then the low performing keywords will skew your campaign level reports and make them less useful for spotting trends.


3. Higher Quality Scores – As mentioned above, poor performing, low Quality Score keywords will drag down the Quality Scores of other keywords in the same campaign. Plus, when you isolate your top performing keywords and optimize your ads and landing pages for them, then you'll further improve your Quality Scores.

Also, consider replanting keywords based on geographic targeting or day-parting. For example, setting up separate campaigns for different states may make sense if certain ads work better in one state than another.

Or, if you find that a keyword converts on weekdays, but doesn't convert very well on weekends, then you could set up separate weekday and weekend campaigns. Again, this would give you more control over your budget, improve your reporting, and lead to higher Quality Scores.

Now it's time to switch gears and focus on your bids…

Bid Optimization

The main objective of bid optimization is to determine the keyword level bids that will result in the most profitable conversions for each keyword.

Therefore, to bid effectively, you must have conversion tracking set up in your AdWords account so that you're measuring conversions at the keyword level. Do that now if it's not already set up and then come back once you start to see conversions in AdWords.

Warning: This will require some basic math. If you hate math and numbers scare you, then don't panic. I promise to keep this simple.

Here's an overview of what we're going to do:

1. Determine how much you can profitably pay for a conversion. This depends on your business, your customer lifetime value, and exactly what you're calling a conversion (e-commerce sale, demo request, phone call, etc.).


2. Measure the conversion rate for each keyword using AdWords conversion tracking.


3. Determine your maximum cost per click, which is the maximum you can pay for a keyword.

Here's an example of how this works…

Let's say you have determined that you can afford to pay $100 for a conversion. Let's also say that you have a keyword that has a 2% conversion rate. To find your maximum cost per click, you can simply multiply the conversion rate by how much you can afford to pay. In our example, we would multiply 2% by $100 to get $2.

That means we can profitably pay up to $2 for this keyword.

Note that this calculation needs to be done separately for each keyword because your keywords will likely have different conversion rates. For more advanced marketers you may recognize the fact that the lifetime value may vary per keyword and that's true. For more advanced bid optimization you should use the different conversion rates and different maximum amounts you can afford to pay for each keyword.

If you are just getting started with AdWords and don't have conversion data, my suggestion is to prune your keywords down to a core group and then bid as aggressively as you can within your budget. Being aggressive with your bids will put your ads in prime position to get more clicks and give you a better chance to start collecting conversion data.

As the conversion data starts to build, you can start replanting the performing keywords in a single campaign and dedicate most of your budget there. The balance of your advertising budget can be allocated to run tests on low-converting and unproven keywords in a separate campaign.

Finally, we need to review your campaign targeting…

Campaign Targeting

So far we have focused on keyword selection, keyword organization, and bids. Now it's time to look at your campaign performance per device, geographic area, and time of day.

Device Targeting

Ad performance will likely vary substantially depending on which device the prospective customer is using. For example, mobile device traffic generally has lower conversion rates than desktop traffic. So if you're reviewing data that is aggregating both devices, you're not getting the full picture.

It's very possible that your campaign is performing well for desktops, but very poorly for mobile devices. Overall that could mean your campaign is unprofitable, but if you cut out the mobile targeting, then it could instantly be profitable!

To review your overall campaign performance by device, go to Settings > Devices as shown below.

That report will give you a high level view of your campaign performance by device. Plus, on this page you can adjust your mobile device bid from -100% (negative 100% turns off mobile targeting) all the way up to +300% (increase your mobile bid by 300% of your desktop bid).

Now, if you notice an issue with a device, you'll need to dig in deeper at the keyword level. To do this, go to the Keywords tab and then click on the Segment button and select Device.

As you can see, this report will show you how each keyword is performing per device so you can see exactly what's going on. If you find that all keywords are simply not performing for mobile devices, then turn off your mobile targeting. If you find that some keywords do perform well, then replant them into another campaign that targets mobile and turn off mobile targeting in the existing campaign.

Geographic Targeting

To review your campaign performance by geographic location, go to the Dimensions tab, then click the View button and select “Geographic.” Then click on the Columns button to add or remove columns in the report. You can drill down from countries to individual zip codes, depending on how specific you need or want to get.

Sort this report by cost to see where you're currently allocating your ad budget. Then sort by cost per conversion to see which locations are the most profitable and which are unprofitable.

Finally, go to Settings, then Locations to add or exclude locations from your campaigns.

Time Targeting (Dayparting)

Before we move on from targeting, it's important to review how your campaign is performing by time of day and day of week.

It's very likely that your campaign performs better during certain times of the day and certain days of the week. For example, a pizzeria would likely see more conversions during lunch and dinner hours than in the early morning. In this situation, the pizzeria could scale back bids when conversions are minimal and then bid more aggressively during lunch and dinner hours.

To report on performance by time, go to the Dimensions tab, then click the View button to select Time, and finally select time of Day of Week or Hour of Day.

If you find you need to adjust your bids based on the time of day or day of the week, then go to the Settings tab, then click Ad scheduling. From here you can set your ads to run during certain days or hours of the day and/or set bid modifiers to adjust your bids up or down.

Now that we've reviewed our targeting and we're confident our ads are showing when they are most likely to convert, it's time to change our focus to the ad copy…

Ingredient 2. Optimize Your Ad Copy

In this section I'm going to assume your ads are:

1. Organized into ad groups so that the ad copy matches all the keywords in the ad group


2. Targeting your ideal customers


3. Displaying when your ideal customers are most likely to convert

If you have not gone through the steps above, then stop, scroll up and complete “Ingredient 1”. The best ad copy in the world will fail if it's displayed to the wrong people at the wrong time!

OK, back to your ad copy…

In order to optimize your ad copy, you must test different ad variations to see what works best. This process is called split testing.

For example, if you want to test 2 ad variations, then you would show 50% of your audience variation A and the other 50% would see variation B. Over time, you would see which ad variation gets the higher click-through rate and which variation leads to more conversions.

So what should you test?

Here are the 5 ad components you need to focus on:

1. Offer


2. Headline


3. Description Lines


4. Display URL


5. Ad Extensions

The Offer

The offer you present in your ads is by far the most critical component. A weak offer compared to your competition is not going to drive much traffic and conversions because most people will click on the more compelling offer.

Don't make this more complicated than it needs to be. In my experience, many businesses do not have compelling offers and that is the #1 reason why the ads underperform.

Important Note: One of the biggest factors in your Quality Score is your click-through rate. That means, if your click-through rate is low versus your competition, then you're going to struggle to get a high Quality Score. That also means you'll need to bid and pay more for top placement. This is why your ad copy is so critical – Compelling ads lead to lower costs, more traffic, and more conversions!

If you're not sure what to offer, then start by reviewing your competitors who are already advertising on your target keywords. Remember, your prospects are going to see these ads and then make a decision to either click on your ad, or your competitor's' ads.

What could you offer that would stand out?

To get you started, here are 5 different types of offers that you could make:

1. Free Sample – Example of this type of offer is a free demo of your product or service. This allows prospective customers to give your product or service a try with no commitment. However, once people get moving in your direction, then you're more likely to continue that momentum through to a sale.


2. Special Discount – Everyone is familiar with discounts. The problem with competing on price is that there tends to always be another business that is willing to go just a little bit lower. So be careful if you choose to go down this path.


3. Strong Guarantee – A satisfaction or money back guarantee strengthens an offer by assuring customers that they will get what they expect from the product or service. Another term used in this type of offer is a “no-risk guarantee” that promises a refund if the customer isn't satisfied.


4. Free Gift With Purchase – Everyone loves free and your ads can stand out from the crowd if you offer something for free when new customers sign up.


5. Free Information – Giving free information can be effective, especially for complicated products or services. For example, an attorney that provides a free white paper on the essential aspects of estate planning could use the offer as a lead generator that brings in new clients.

Use the list above to brainstorm new offer ideas and then create new ads to test them out in your campaign.

The Headline

The headline of your ad is the first thing that prospective customers will read after searching in Google. There are two goals with your headline:

1. Match what your prospective customer is searching for. In other words, make sure your headline is 100% relevant.


2. Stand out from the competition.

To accomplish the first goal, you can add the core keyword in your ad group to the headline of your ad. This will tell Google that you're 100% relevant, which improves your Quality Score. Plus, prospective customers will know right away that your ad is relevant to their search query.

To accomplish the second goal, you must review the competitor ads. How can you write a unique headline that will still be 100% relevant? For example, test phrasing the headline as a promise and then create another version of the same headline as a question. That simple change could make a big difference in your ad click-through rate.

The Description Lines

Once you've caught your prospective customer's attention with the headline, then your description lines need to explain your offer and encourage clicking through to learn more.

One of the easiest tests to run is to flip your description lines to see if the order makes a significant difference. Next, test emphasizing different benefits of your offer to see which benefit resonates the most with your target audience.

Also, if appropriate, test qualifying language that ensures only qualified prospects click on your ad. For example, if you're a financial planner who only works with people of a certain net worth, then you can specify that amount in your ad. This tactic can reduce your click-through rate, but substantially increase your sales conversion rates.

The Display URL

The display URL displayed beneath the headline in your text ads, but it doesn't function as an active link.

Google requires that the root domain name be included in the display URL, but you have the flexibility to add a subdomain or subfolder to the domain displayed. This is a great place to reiterate your offer, specify your store/office location, or show a call to action.

Ad Extensions

Last but certainly not least are ad extensions. Google recently started including ad extensions as part of your Quality Score, which makes them even more important for the success of your campaign.

There are 5 main types of ad extensions that every business should set up:

1. Call extensions display either the phone number for your business or a forwarding number provided by Google. Using the forwarding number allows Google to track calls generated by your ads.


2. Location extensions link your ad to a Google My Business page where your address will be displayed.


3. Sitelinks extensions allow you to provide links to additional landing pages.


4. Callouts extensions are like bullet points where you can provide more information about your offer and your business in bullet point format.


5. Structured snippets extensions allow you to add a list of items to your ads. For example, if you sell certain brands then you could create a list of brands, or if you provide certain services then you could list those services.


6. Review extensions display third party endorsements. An example would be, “A+ accredited business by the Better Business Bureau”.

Below are examples of the extensions in Google's search results:

The more extensions that Google can use in the search results, the more real estate your ad will take up on the first page of Google. The bigger the ad, the more clicks you'll tend to get.

Of course, getting clicks on your ads is just the beginning of the process. Next, you have to convert the traffic into leads and sales with your landing page…

Ingredient 3. Optimize Your Landing Page

At this point, you have optimized your ad targeting and your ad copy to get prospective customers to your site with cost-effective clicks. But all that work will be nothing if your landing page is not set up and optimized to convert this traffic into leads and sales.

Important Note: Your website homepage should not be used as your landing page. This is because the typical homepage tends to be more general in terms of subject matter, often serving to introduce the business and its products/services. Each landing page needs to be tightly focused around the specific product/service and the offer promised in the ad.

What if you have multiple ads and multiple offers based on the optimization steps above?

You probably already know the answer, but you're hoping it's not true… Sorry, but that means you need to have multiple different landing pages that match those different ads and offers.

With advertising, congruence is absolutely critical. When your prospect customer clicks on your ad, then she expects to find exactly what your ad promised front and center at the top of the page (not buried down the page).

To ensure congruence, you need to match the headline on your landing page with the offer in the ad. That way it's 100% clear that the prospective customer is on the right page. Remember, it's easier to click the back button than it is to click around on a new site to find what you need.

So what makes a good landing page? Here is a checklist you can use to evaluate each key area of your landing pages:

1. The Headline – A compelling headline should be positioned at the top of the page that is 100% congruent with the ad that was clicked on. A quick tip to create congruent landing pages is to simply edit the headline and keep the rest of the page the same.


2. Benefit-Focused Content – The copy on the page should highlight the benefits of your product or service.


3. Your Unique Selling Proposition – Your USP explains what makes your product/service better than what your competitors are offering. In other words, why should anyone choose your business over your competitors?


4. Your Offer – Your landing page should expand on the offer promised in your ad copy.


5. Social Proof – Social proof is critical with digital marketing because most people are skeptical of unknown businesses online. The best way to build trust with prospective customers is to publish testimonials and case studies on your landing page.


6. Credibility indicators – This is yet another way to establish trust with your prospective customer. Examples include memberships with the Better Business Bureau and the local Chamber of Commerce.


7. Call to action – Make buying simple for customers with explicit directions and easy to find buttons to take the next step in the sales funnel.

To see this in action, below is an example of an ad and the corresponding landing page that matches the copy in the ad.

Once you've gone through the list above and incorporated each element, then it's time to test. Start by testing different headlines to see which message gets the highest conversion rates. Also, test the landing page layout to try to include your call to action at the top of the page before the visitor needs to scroll.

Remember, your campaign will likely need multiple landing pages and you'll need to optimize each one separately.

And Finally… Make Optimization a Habit.

As you can tell at this point, there will always be new opportunities to test in each key area of your AdWords campaign. AdWords optimization is not a one time event!

You need to make it a habit to continually test your targeting, your ad copy, and your landing pages if you want to maximize your return on investment.

About the Author: Phil Frost is Co-Founder of Main Street ROI, an online marketing, training, and coaching company based in New York City. Want more AdWords tips? Get your free copy of Phil's Ultimate Google AdWords Checklist.

How to Perfect Your Customer Journey Maps to Increase Conversions

Want more conversions?

Increase the quality of your consumer interactions.

Salesforce reports that “86% of senior-level marketers say that it's absolutely critical or very important to create a cohesive customer journey.”

To understand how your team interacts with every customer, it's vital that you design a customer journey map that highlights every part of the purchasing experience.

“Journey mapping is a holistic approach to understanding the flow of experiences a customer has with an organization; it uses pictures to represent a process that cannot be adequately captured with words,” writes Adam Toporek, author of Be Your Customer's Hero.

Let's explore how to earn more sales. It starts with your journey map.

What's the Purpose?

E-commerce businesses must be ready to adapt quickly to convert prospects. It's one of the few ways to stay competitive in the market.

CSO Insights found that “companies with 'dynamic, adaptable sales and marketing processes' reported an average of 10% more sales people on-quota compared to other companies.”

You can't box a sales transaction into a one-time occurrence. It involves more than just exchanging money for a product.

It's called the customer's journey for a reason. The cycle encompasses all the interactions and decisions leading up to the purchase and after the sale.

“Customer journey maps allow you to walk in your customers' shoes by traveling with them as they interact with your company. When based on sound research, they provide an accurate outside-in view, focusing on desired outcomes from the customer's perspective,” states Michael Hinshaw, CEO of McorpCX.

Decades ago, companies worried about gaining new customers. But today's business climate requires your SaaS to retain consumers. Therefore, nurturing the customer through the cycle holds greater purpose.

Identify the touch points where customers interact with your brand. Understand how each interaction affects one another. Develop a buyer journey map using the five W's: Who, Why, When, What, and Where.

Image Source

Learn where your team can fill in gaps and exploit opportunities to increase conversions. A customer journey map gives your team context.

For example, if a customer calls your phone support line and waits 12 minutes without receiving assistance, then how should your team respond to a not-so-nice email from the person?

Connect the dots in the customer experience. It will guide your business forward.

Infusing Data

Research shows that “74% of buyers choose the sales rep that was first to add value [and] insight.” Customers want to be educated, not sold.

And for your SaaS to offer value-added information, your team needs to focus on consumer data. You'll uncover what matters to your customer, when to give specific content, and how to present your content.

So, if data is an afterthought in your customer journey, it's time to rethink your strategy. Quantitative and qualitative data is a stepping stone to giving your customers value.

Dom Nicastro, staff reporter at CMSwire, suggests the following methods to collect data:

• In-person focus groups


• Online moderated forums


• In-depth, one-on-one phone interviews

As your team analyzes customer interaction data, you will master how to “accelerate customer acquisition, encourage repeat business, and improve customer loyalty.” This leads to adopting new product features, defining customer segments, and identifying churn signals.

Monitor how you acquire data. Ensure that it's accurate.

Paul Boag, author of Digital Adaptation, says, “Be careful to make clear what has research behind it and what does not. Making many decisions based on assumptions is dangerous. Once management sees the benefits of research, they will be willing to spend more time on it.”

Moreover, integrated customer journeys provide a competitive edge. Harvard Business Review cites Oakland-based Sungevity for their personalized digital customer journey. It helped the company's sales double to more than $65 million.

Gather data to learn more about your customers' behaviors. Analytics is necessary for understanding the customer's journey.

The Blueprint

Despite the effectiveness of customer journey mapping, only 34% of companies have undertaken the process. It's an opportunity for your SaaS to take advantage of the benefits.

The value of mapping includes recognizing functional silos, identifying growth factors, and establishing development priorities. If you don't know how your customers flow through the sales cycle, it's harder to serve their needs.

The customer journey map doesn't have to be elaborate. Initially, forgoing specific data may be an option for your company. Here's a recommendation from Forbes contributor Micah Solomon:

“Your customer journey map needs to be, or at least needs to start out its life being, independent from all considerations of internal processes and departments, because your customer will never have precisely the same viewpoint as the viewpoint you have internally, nor fully match up to the inevitably awkward divisions of task in your organization.”

And every journey map isn't the same. Maps can vary based on the industry, customer base, or management style. Several types exist, including business to business and tactical.

Image Source

But all journey maps should serve the same purpose: Illustrate how the customer engages with you brand.

It shouldn't be rooted in what your business thinks. Your team needs to document real experiences.

“Actionable journey maps clearly identify both positive and negative customer emotions throughout their journey and put them in context of customer behaviors, goals, and expectations. Businesses use their data to identify opportunity areas and to assess the impact of current and future CX/UX investments,” writes Kathleen Hoski and Phil Goddard of TandemSeven.

Build your plan to gain deeper insights to earn more conversions.

Facing the Challenges

Consider your journey map a living document that will continue to evolve. Get ready to add, subtract, and maybe even multiply your blueprint.

In this digital age, customers are becoming more sophisticated. Their interests pinpoint to niche markets. And their problems need customized solutions.

The key is to anticipate change. Recreating a linear path of the customer experience is only a waste of time, because we know customers take many routes to complete a sale. That involves research, justification, and cost analysis.

Your team also should aim to build ongoing trust with your customers. CMO Council's Content ROI Center reports that no more than 9% of B2B buyers fully trust vendor content.

“They trust information that comes from people they trust: friends, family and network connections. You can't be everyone's friend, but you can stay in contact with a vast number of potential buyers on a regular basis thanks to social selling and automation,” says Daniel Ku, content marketing manager at Sales for Life.

And lastly, possess a full perspective of the customer. Avoid making one-sided decisions.

“Disparate systems and questionable data inhibit marketers from knowing and understanding who their customers are every time they engage. Without the single customer view, marketers face huge barriers from the very start,” says Bruce Swann, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Adobe Campaign.

Challenges will arise. Prepare accordingly.

Start Mapping

Every SaaS team needs a path to sales. Build customer journey maps to facilitate the buying process.

Learn how your SaaS is currently engaging with customers. Use data to pinpoint unknown consumer behaviors. And develop a blueprint that illustrates your buyers' needs.

Map out the customer journey. Increase conversions.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

3 Ways Automated Lead Nurturing Can Supercharge The Sales Cycle

So you've launched an inbound campaign and started to attract good leads. That's great, but it's just the start. Now you have to keep those leads happy, while gently leading them through the buyer's journey to sales-ready qualification. If your sales cycle is a long one that's not always easy.

Sending leads inappropriate content and interrupting them with unsolicited sales calls is increasingly ineffective. Instead, to increase close rates, avoid wasted sales time and reduce the sales cycle, leads should be nurtured with appropriate content to ensure they understand the value of your solution before sales teams contact them.

Many marketers may think they already run effective lead nurture campaigns. But using automated lead nurture as part of an inbound campaign ensures all leads get quick responses and are automatically sent the right content for them. No lead is forgotten and no content wasted.

Challenges of Long Sales Cycles

According to Gleanster Research, 50% of qualified leads aren't ready to buy. They might be open to education, and delighted that you can identify their pain points. But actually signing up for your solution? They're not there yet, and may not be for a while, depending on the length of your sales cycle.

That means sectors with long sales cycles, such as the SaaS and software industries, which have an average cycle of 3-18 months (and there's some suggestion that B2B sales cycles are getting longer across the board), face huge challenges in keeping leads interested and moving them smoothly through the sales funnel.

They might lack appropriate content to last the length of the sales cycle, or simply fail to notice leads wandering off the path. Equally, they might bore leads with repeat content, or lose them in bottlenecks.

The upshot can be lost leads and a lot of wasted effort by both marketers and sales teams. The wrong content discourages leads from moving along the sales path. Sales teams engage with leads at inopportune moments, wasting everybody's time.

Automated lead nurturing tackles these challenges.

What is Automated Lead Nurturing?

We know that lead nurturing works. A DemandGen report finds that nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads.

But traditionally, nurture is labor intensive. The average buyer's journey is complex, and the content that helps move them through the sales funnel from awareness (of a problem), to consideration (of solutions), to decision (of what solution to buy) needs to be expertly honed and perfectly timed.

Random one-off emails to your database won't cut it in a competitive world, especially during a long sales cycle. Talking up the detailed benefits of your solution to someone who is only vaguely aware of a problem is pointless at best. By the same token, emailing simplified educational material to a highly educated lead desperately seeking a solution is potentially counterproductive.

Automating lead nurturing, on the other hand, allows for the systematic tracking of lead engagements with your content and site, and accurate pinpointing of that lead's stage in the sales cycle. That means you can drip feed appropriate content at the right time – leads are never forgotten and opportunities never missed.

Forrester Research finds that companies who excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost. Automated lead nurturing, done properly, is the gold standard in its field.

The 3 Pillars of Automated Lead Nurturing

Many marketers already automate some of the nurturing process, but it is the combination of three key points that make automated lead nurturing especially powerful.

• Nurturing. You likely do this already and send your leads content, from blog posts to infographics to case studies. But according to Pardot's State of Demand Generation study, 77% of buyers want different content at each stage of their research. Targeting your content formats and focusing on the lead's buyer's journey stage is vital, and creating automated email workflows makes the process easier.


• Segmentation. When leads interact with your content, tracking their responses in detail allows for segmentation. Leads are divided into appropriate contact lists, likely by niche or pain point. Without an automated workflow, the next round of emails would be adjusted manually. But with an automated process, emails can be drip-fed to designated contact lists, delivering relevant information at the right time.


• Grading. Marketing automation lets you pinpoint exactly where a lead is in the sales cycle, so your contact lists – and the content sent to them – is constantly refined and updated. Contact lists can be divided and subdivided again, targeting content with pinpoint accuracy. Grading leads based on their interactions with all marketing efforts allows you to move them smoothly through the sales funnel. When they reach a designated threshold (based on a points total) suggesting sales-ready status then – and only then – are they passed to sales.

3 Ways Automated Lead Nurturing Supercharges Your Sales Cycle

At its simplest, automating the sales process means being able to track and use a lot more data than would otherwise be possible and use that information to more accurately segment and target leads, speeding their path through the sales funnel.

More specifically:

• Your sales team doesn't waste time educating leads about your product and service. A fine-tuned nurturing machine means leads are informed already, and won't have been passed to sales if they haven't been nurtured through to the decision stage.


• At the outset, automated lead nurturing takes time to set up. You need to create relevant content to support your segmented workflows, set contact frequencies and make sure you have a lead grading system to move leads from one stage in the process to another. But once your campaign is established, it will continue to work for you, and give your marketing and sales teams time for other tasks.


• Automation means bottlenecks are quickly identified and easily rectified. Automatic reporting can show where in the funnel leads are getting stuck, and it allows you to develop your content accordingly. In a nutshell, content is continually honed to address sales barriers and smooth the path to purchase.

If you haven't automated your lead nurturing process there's every chance your sales team is wasting time on leads that aren't sales ready, while irritating potential customers with mistimed and irrelevant contact.

Automated nurturing gently leads your targets through the sales funnel, breaking down barriers to sales with timely, appropriate content. The result? Your sales team spends far more time on sales-ready leads, supercharging your sales cycle.

About the Author: Alex is Director of Strategic Internet Consulting, a London-based inbound marketing agency with a raft of major public and private sector clients. Alex helps businesses large and small generate qualified leads via inbound marketing and sales, social media and open source web development. He tweets at @StrategicIntC.

Why Your Marketing Planning Process Is A Mess (And How To Fix It)

If you're part of a marketing team, you know that trying to wrangle all of your projects can be about as frustrating as playing dodgeball blindfolded. Your landing pages need updating, your content calendar is behind schedule (again), and you've been trying to launch that new product video since the Dark Ages. Oh, and sales needs more leads. Yesterday.

Why is it so tough to get a handle on everything? That's where Scrum comes in.

In this post, I'm going to show how Scrum can help you transform your marketing processes from a quagmire of frustration into a streamlined bastion of ingenuity that would make even MacGyver proud.

What the heck is Scrum?

Scrum is a rugby term that refers to a closely-knit huddle of burly men who are bludgeoning each other for possession of a leather-covered ball. Scrum is also a learning-based project-management approach. It helps teams focus on priorities while remaining responsive to new circumstances. While it's commonly used in software development, you can apply it to any discipline. Especially marketing.

Don't worry, Scrum for marketing is slightly less brutal.

You can read entire books about Scrum, but there are two principles that I want to outline here:

Principle #1 – Responsiveness

Traditional project management says that you should plan every detail of an initiative ahead of time. Once the planning phase is complete, your team simply executes against the plan. Simple, right? Sure – except real life isn't like that. And those plans you worked so hard on can suddenly become obsolete.

Scrum eschews that approach. Instead of spec-ing out your new website in minute detail in advance, you'll break a project into smaller chunks – tweaking your plans at each stop along the way. This is why Scrum is called an agile approach. Sanity is now within reach!

Principle #2 – Constant improvement

Wouldn't it be great if your team got better every week? With Scrum, your team regularly and intentionally improves its processes. You'll be like HAL 9000 from Space Odyssey: 2000 – you'll use what you learn to get smarter and will soon want to take over the world (except unlike HAL, you'll use your powers for good).

Scrum even helps you measure your output to see how much you're improving, which I'll show you how to do in a bit.

Key Terms of Scrum

There are key concepts of scrum that you should be familiar with first:

• Backlog – a list of things your team wants to get done at some point


• Sprint – a period for working on selected projects (and only those projects). Typically 1-2 weeks.


• Daily Stand-up – a brief daily huddle where your team checks project status


• Retrospective – a review period at the end of each sprint


• Product Owner – the person who decides what's added to the Backlog and each Sprint


• Scrum Master – the person responsible for enforcing your team's Scrum processes

Scrum in 30 Seconds

Here's a 30-second overview of how to use Scrum:

• Build a backlog of every marketing idea sitting in that geeky brain of yours.


• Create a sprint plan of the projects you want to complete by the end of your first sprint.


• Conduct daily stand-ups to share project status and resolve roadblocks.


• Hold the Retrospective to identify process improvements for the next sprint.


• Incorporate your improvements into the next sprint. Revel in the glory as your team levels up.

Applying Scrum to Marketing

Great, so what do these principles look like in practice? Keep reading for a step-by-step breakdown of how to get started.

The Backlog – Because Even Ironman Needs Help

Just like Ironman needs Jarvis to keep track of everything, you need a repository for all those amazing ideas swimming around your head. Enter the backlog.

(Image Source) Even the best superheroes (like your marketing team) need tools to help manage information.

There's just one maxim you need to know about the backlog: an unkempt backlog is worse than no backlog. If you don't nurture your backlog, it will soon turn into an overgrown, abandoned parking lot of ideas that would look right at home in a post-apocalyptic zombie movie.

Get a handle on your backlog with these steps:

• Label each idea with an estimate of how much value it will add to your company. We use game changer, improvement, and nice to have.


• Add another label that indicates of how much effort might be required. We put everything into three buckets: epic, project, and task.


• With those labels, it's easy to see which projects will add the most value to your company and take the least amount of time. Tip from Mr. Obvious: do those first.


• Cap the number of items allowed in the backlog. This will help keep things from getting out of hand. We limit ours to about 40.


• Finally, don't allow just any idea in the backlog. Some projects should never be done. The Product Owner should lead the decision for what should be included.

To give you a sense of how this looks for a marketing team, here are a few items from our own backlog:

To keep everything tidy, segment your backlog into these three sections:

• New Additions To Review – anyone can add ideas here. But they aren't added to the proper backlog before they're vetted.


• Active – anything we're actively working on (surprise).


• Backlog – all the vetted ideas live here, like eager puppies waiting for adoption.

Now that you've got your backlog defined, roll up your sleeves, take a swig of coffee and build your first sprint plan…

The Sprint Plan – One Leg of An Epic Journey

Think about a sprint like planning for an epic journey across Middle Earth. It would be silly to plan every stop in advance. There are too many unknowns that could impede your progress: orcs, elves, and even giant talking trees.

Instead, you'll focus on just the first day. If you're departing from the Shire, you might target Bree as your destination. All you worry about on day one is getting to Bree. You can map out stops for second- and third-breakfast, debate over which type of beer you're going to drink at day's end, and even estimate your arrival time pretty accurately.

The following day you'll focus the next destination, and things can progress smoothly from there (at least until the Eye of Sauron notices you).

OK… each leg of your journey? That's what each of your sprints is like.

(Image Source) Little known fact: Bilbo Baggins is Middle Earth's top expert on landing page optimization.

To build your sprint plan, you focus on a select group of projects – not everything in your backlog. Here's how to get started:

• Identify a project in the backlog that adds a high level value for a relatively low amount of effort.


• Define the scope of the project. Ambiguously defined projects are the enemy of progress.


• Ask yourself, “can my team complete this project within one sprint?” If not, break down that project into smaller chunks.


• Estimate the effort required to complete that project. Scrum uses a concept called story points for this. The more effort required, the more points given. The first time you do this, your guesses are going to be off a bit. That's OK. You'll get more accurate over time. Nerd tip: use the Fibonacci sequence for story point values: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.


• Repeat steps 1-4 until your gut tells you that your team's at full capacity for the sprint. Or until your team starts yelling at you. Now that your sprint plan is full, any remaining projects in your backlog will have to wait until a future sprint.


• Assign an owner to each project in the sprint. The project owner keeps eyes on the project and makes sure it actually gets done. They may work on it directly and/or require help from others.


• Take a look at the projects assigned to each person. Does everyone have a roughly equal balance of work? Is anyone overburdened? If so, adjust the sprint plan accordingly.

There are two signs that you've done things correctly: everyone has a clear idea of what they'll be working on, and you've planned just enough work to keep everyone productive during the sprint.

What our sprint plan looks like about halfway through the week.

Here Are Some Things That Keep Us From Messing Up Too Often

Our first sprint plans were like slow jogs in untied shoes. Some 50 sprints later, we're like that guy who annoys his friends by telling them about every marathon he's run.

Here are some tweaks we've made along the way:

• Create a separate document for each sprint. Don't let one sprint plan merge into another, or you won't be able to measure anything.


• Break each sprint into stages. This will help you see which projects are crying themselves to sleep at night from lack of attention. Here are the stages we use:
  
  
  
  • To Do – everything goes here at the beginning of the sprint
  
  
  • Defined – once all sub-tasks are added
  
  
  • Create – someone is actively working on the project
  
  
  • Review – the project is mostly done, but needs someone else's eyes on it
  
  
  • Implement – hold on to your butts, this project is about to go live
  
  
  • Done – At the top of your lungs, shout “Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle station!” Or just mark the project as complete.
  
  
  
  


• Add an Impromptu tag to any projects that were added after the sprint begins.


• Try Waiting On [Name] tags. If your name is Biff and you see a bunch of Waiting On Biff tags, you're holding back the rest of the team!

(Image Source) When you get awesome at sprint planning, you get to wear sunglasses to work.

The Daily Standup – Team Cheer Required

This is your opportunity to get a status report from your team. Each person will share three things: what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today, and what they need from others to move forward. If there are any roadblocks, they're addressed here.

For example, let's say a blog post can't be published because the creative isn't ready. Instead of scrambling at the last minute, you'll have the chance to solve the problem ahead of time.

The daily standup is also a good time to bring up “impromptu” projects (unplanned work that needs to be added). Maybe you discovered an error in an email workflow that needs to be corrected ASAP. During the standup, you can raise this issue, identify someone to tackle it, and adjust the sprint plan accordingly.

Bonus: come up with a cheer your team can break on at the end of each sprint. Yes, the rest of your company will roll their eyes at you but that's half the fun.

The Retrospective – Hitting A New High Score

Remember assigning those story points to your projects at the beginning of the sprint? (Those were the estimates of how much work each project would take.) This is your chance to see how many points your team actually got done. Here's how:

1. Take a look at all your completed projects for the sprint.


2. Add up the story points for each. This is a rough estimate of how much you got done.


3. Repeat the process for three or four more sprints.


4. Take the average number of story points you complete. That's your baseline for how much work your team can handle each sprint.

With your baseline established, you'll easily be able to see when your team under- or over-performs. Which brings us to the real point of the retrospective: constant improvement. Here's how to lock it in.

(Image Source) Exactly how you'll feel (and look) when you lock in an improvement for your team.

First, ask each person on your team to share what went well during the sprint. Perhaps someone found a way to reduce the time needed to build a landing page by 20%. By sharing this knowledge with the team and making it part of everyday practice, you can lock in that improvement going forward.

Next, ask everyone to share what problems they encountered. This isn't a chance to blame others – it's an opportunity to find better ways of getting things done. Keep talking about the challenges you faced until you identify potential solutions.

Finally, add the implementation of those solutions to your next sprint. For example, maybe your marketing campaigns take forever to get completed because everything is done ad hoc. For the next sprint, add a project to create a clear campaign process for your team.

If you can come up with just one improvement per week, your team could make 50 process improvements in a year. And guess what? Those improvements will add up big time. Not only will you get more story points done, you'll progress from being Rocky the noob boxer to Rocky the Apollo Creed-decimating prize fighter.

Two Apps That Your Marketing Team Needs to Try

Asana – Unicorns Are Now On Your Team

While there's no “best” app for Scrum, we've found that Asana works really well for both managing the backlog and planning sprints. It allows us to keep everything in one place and it's great for handling sub-tasks.

Other tools to consider are Trello, Basecamp, and even Google Docs. Heck, some teams even use a whiteboard and sticky notes.

Bonus reason for using Asana: rainbow-generating unicorns that fly across the screen when you complete a project. Does your current project management software provide unicorns? I didn't think so.

Slack – Your Life Is Now Complete

Slack isn't just another glorified messaging program – it's so good that you may be tempted to name your first child after it. We use Slack's channels feature to help us sort through messages. For each project in a sprint, we create a new Slack channel. Any messages related to that project go there. When the project is complete, we archive the channel and never have to see it again.

One of our Slack channels for the marketing team. Here we're planning content for a new product demo video for one of our programs.

But Read This Before You Start

Scrum isn't a panacea. In fact, it will probably be pretty messy when you start. But if you put in the effort, you'll see your team grow like the Hulk (minus the rage, purple pants are optional). Not only will your team produce more, but they'll enjoy their jobs more. Better planning = less stress = happier people.

So if you decide to try Scrum with your marketing team, stick with it for at least a month before you decide if it's right for you. And make sure to get your team on board first. I suggest having everyone on your team read Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work In Half The Time by Jeff Sutherland and J.J. Sutherland before you begin.

Already use Scrum with your marketing team? If so, I'd love to hear how it works for you. If you have any tips to share, please add them in the comments below!

About the Author: John Rougeux is Co-founder and CMO at Lexington, KY-based Causely. His company helps businesses and organizations generate referrals by supporting world-class charities through its Sweat Angels, Check-In Angels, and Reach programs. Chat with John on Twitter at @johnrougeux.

Why the Traditional Marketing Funnel is Sabotaging Your Conversion Rate

The sales funnel. It all seems so smooth and simple, doesn't it? Lots of prospects come in through the top, only to move in various, predictable stages like “Awareness” and “Discovery” only to come out the bottom as loyal, committed customers.

Except the reality of today's sales and customer experience process is anything like that.

Things like brand advocacy, social media, and even our own experiences have changed the way we market to others. Why then should we stay stuck in this rigid, old funnel structure?

We shouldn't – and today's article will show you why.

According to the Harvard Business Review, there are a myriad of ways that people learn of and interact with a product. There are even times when customers don't come through the top of the funnel, but rather somewhere in the middle.

A typical marketing funnel starts with more customers in the “Awareness” stage and ends with fewer in the “Retention” phaseLet's say you were in the market for a new pair of running shoes. A friend recommends a specific brand and links to them on Facebook. On their page you can see user comments and testimonials as well as active discussions. You've just completely passed the Awareness and Discovery parts of the funnel and moved on to Engagement and likely even Purchase – because a recommendation from someone you trust is that valuable to you.

On your way to purchase these shoes, the company recommends some specialized insoles to help cushion your feet. Great idea. Now you've instantly moved from consideration to purchase. It's also possible that you could go back and forth between funnel stages while you evaluate different products or brands.

And with networks like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest always available at the tap of a button, the traditional sales funnel we all know and refer to ends up looking more like a pretzel, with twists, turns and overlaps at every corner.

Users will often double-back on their decisions, or switch between two points instantly

Moving the Focus from Transaction to Relationship

According to Antonio Lucio, Chief Brand Officer at Visa, the end goal is to shift priority from the transaction to the customer relationship. To that end, Visa has created the “Customer Experience Journey” which looks at the process from transactions being a part of the customer relationship rather than the customer relationship being viewed purely in terms of transactions.

He gives the example of a family planning a trip from the U.S. to Mexico. Visa has mapped out the whole experience:

• Family gets ideas on where to go from TripAdvisor


• Family gathers suggestions from friends on Facebook


• Family decides to get cash from an ATM to pay for their cab


• Family pays for their hotel via their Visa credit card


• Family shares photos of trip with friends back home via Instagram

You may see this list and think “Well, Visa is part of only one of these options” – which is true when you're looking at each one as a transaction.

But step back a moment and look at the bigger picture. Every one of these points is conducive to building and nurturing the relationship with the customer. The transaction itself is just a small piece of the puzzle and not the end goal. According to Lucio, “[w]hen you change from decision to engagement, you change the entire model.”

So What Does This Have to Do With Conversion Rate?

Here again, if you're looking at the funnel purely from a revenue point of view, or spending too much time focusing on transactions, the customer experience gets lost in the shuffle. It becomes too much of a focus to think only of the numbers and not of the people driving them. If you zero in on numbers alone, you miss out on so much more. Just look at brands like Tesla Motors on Facebook. Do you think there are nearly 1.5 million Tesla owners?

Tesla Motors has nearly 1.5 million followers – not all of them customersNot yet – but these people admire what the company has been able to build and the values they stand for. All of those things feed back into the brand itself and create the customer experience. Even digital products and services like SaaS and mobile apps can benefit from this adjusted funnel. As the Harvard article explains, with traditional funnels, marketing is a separate entity. With SaaS and other platforms, the marketing and the service go hand in hand.

Marketing with SaaS

The Salesforce AppExchange, for instance, doesn't just look at the process as “how do we market this?” but rather, “how do we add value to this so that the things we recommend market for us?” Many of the apps profiled here weren't made by Salesforce, but Salesforce and the apps it works with form a kind of symbiotic relationship where both parties win.

Not all apps featured on the AppExchange were built by Salesforce, but all of them use it to enable their own customer experience journeysAnother example is Google. What started out as solely a search engine has branched out to become a search engine, email service, word processor, storage service and countless other services, all entwined under a single brand umbrella. Every service plays well with other services – making it faster and easier for us to create, communicate and share. And our brains thrive on faster and easier.

Sure, there are other search engines out there, even other companies that have just as much influence as Google. But they don't integrate in a way that makes our experience faster, easier or better. When was the last time you found exactly what you needed within seconds, using Bing?

The Bottom Line on Funnels and Conversion Rates

As the Harvard article says, the traditional funnel isn't going away anytime soon. There are still products and services out there that gain new customers this way. But to overlay and apply that to our more open, two-way communication world is just trying to fit a round peg in a square hole. It's not flexible, not adaptive, and just doesn't work – leading to poor experiences for everyone.

When you look at marketing as the multi-faceted beast it is, you'll be able to create your own funnel “roadmap” that incorporates all the steps you need to engage and empower your customers in a way where everyone wins.

What are your thoughts? Have you thrown out the traditional funnel in favor of another sales model? Which one did you choose and how did it work for you? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.

About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today! Follow @sherice on Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ for more articles like this!