Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Want to Improve Your Paid Ads? Get out of Your Ivory Castle!

Last blog post I argued that it was pretty hard to become a slave to data.  While I strongly believe that, I also believe that sometimes you have to put your analytical tools aside and get out into the real world.  Leave your ivory castle!

Paid advertising teams often are very analytical folks.  They speak in the language of CTRs (click through rates), CPAs (cost per acquisitions), view through conversions (conversions that came from folks who saw ads but didn't click on them), etc.  Many spend their days analyzing numbers, moving money across keywords, ads, campaigns, etc.  I too spend a tremendous amount of time looking at these metrics and often say that my job is akin to being a portfolio manager.  I look at numbers much of the day and move money around between projects to optimize our spend.

However, I feel strongly that marketing folks, and in particular paid advertising types, need to go out into the real world and mix it up with customers.  One of my favorite ways to do that is to go to tradeshows.  I try to go to roughly only show a month.  People (especially my wife) often ask me, "Why are you going to so many shows?  Don't you have people who can run the shows for you?"  Of course I have very competent team members who can run the shows.  However, I go to listen to our customers.

I go to the booth and ask questions.  I often don't do a lot of talking myself.  Here are some of the questions I ask:

To Existing Customers:
  • What do you like best about the product?
  • How did you find out about us?
  • What other solutions did you consider?
To Potential Customers:
  • What are the biggest challenges you face today?
  • What options are you considering to address those challenges?
  • How are you researching those options?
My favorite scenario is to have one or more existing customers in the booth try to sell some potential customers.  This happens a lot with TeamSnap because customers generally love the product and are pretty vocal about singing our praises.  I just sit back and listen to how the existing customers sell the potential customers.  They often can really crisply describe the benefits of the product.  Best of all, they use language that potential customers understand. They don't have the problem of being too close to the product.

During these types of interactions, I just sit there and take notes.  After the show I huddle with the folks working with me on our paid ad programs.  We almost always come up with new campaigns for AdWords, Facebook, etc.  As well, we typically come up with alternate versions of existing ads that more succinctly describe the product benefits.  These new campaigns and creatives generate lots of new analyses and learnings.

The more varied your customer base, the more you need to get out and meet folks.  TeamSnap is used in over 100 different sports.  As well, we have customers in 196 countries.  As such, there are a ton of ways customers use the product.  An adult hockey team in Vancouver has very different needs than say a youth travel soccer team in L.A. or a high school rugby club in London.   You cannot pick up those sort of differences from behind a desk - sometimes there is just no substitute for leaving the ivory tower.


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