Paid advertising will be more aggressive than usual this festive season, with online shoppers increasing due to the pandemic. To capitalise on this there are ways that Organic activity can compliment paid activity in the run up to Christmas. This article gives 10 quick things marketers can do in one week to help boost paid advertising (and Organic).
Paid advertising is changing its narrative
With the cases of coronavirus increasing and the nation at the time of writing this article still in a second national lockdown, digital marketing strategies are going to be even more aggressive over the holiday period as people rely on the digital world for their purchase needs.
It is clear just from our social media feeds that people are embracing seasonal cheer earlier than usual 37% of consumers have experimented with new brandsand according to eBay’s’ Christmas spend trend report research conducted in June 2020, 51% of consumers will also be putting more thought into their gifts.
Paid search is still a key digital marketing tool for consumers, and one that can be used by brands to significantly increase growth in the short term but, it costs money to get a share of advertising space that, if not optimised sufficiently, can put you into a negative ROI.
With the current mind set of consumers, digital marketing strategies in paid advertising will be;
- More aggressive in spend
- Targeting Christmas shoppers now
- Opting for a family orientated and thoughtful tone of voice/ imagery
- Selling a traditional Christmas experience
- Value oriented, if you are not the cheapest, what else do you bring to the table?
- Pushing offers and bundles more aggressively
As search engines add more features to the SERPs (search engine results page), namely Google, organic results continue to be pushed out of the users eyeline. Click through rates for top positions are reducing and zero-click searches are becoming more common.
Graph: https://www.advancedwebranking.com/ctrstudy/
With an expected increase in paid advertising aggression due to even more online shoppers, you need to be realistic about performance from top ranking, broad terms. Organic will still be your bread and butter but your focus needs to be on maximising paid advertising for the highly competitive transactional terms as well as targeting more niche/ FAQ terms from an organic angle.
People are doing more research, exploring more brands, and putting more effort into finding the best value. Organic is ideal to reach people at the top of the funnel (researching) phase, increasing the likelihood they will come back to your website when they are ready to buy.
10 Organic Tactics You Can Do This Week to Compliment Your Paid Digital Marketing Strategies
1. Answer Chat log questions before they are asked
If you do not have a chat bot, get one now. They are a fantastic source of qualitative information that all channels can use to understand your audience.
Many people use chat bots when they are frustrated with the website or they cannot find the information they are looking for. Download your chat logs and look for patterns in frequent questions or statements made.
Do you need to highlight your delivery service on product pages to increase conversion rates? Or there is a page you can create and optimise that the Paid teams can then send traffic to.
2. Review products for people who are researching
Especially in the lead up to Christmas, reviews are increasingly important as consumers do more research. Studies previously stated highlighted how users are open to trying different brands and putting more thought into gifts. If you are an ecommerce store that sells products from varied brands, create blog posts that compare products in 2020 with pros and cons.
This will increase your organic visibility by targeting people are researching. These readers will see your brand and increase the likelihood of clicking your paid links because you are a familiar brand and showed unbiased expertise creating trust and confidence.
3. Remarket your blog posts and articles
Add remarketing onto all your blog posts and articles, this includes content created from chat bots and reviewing products.
Be comprehensive in your content to improve your organic ranking to generate traffic which can then add retargeting when these same users are further down the buying funnel. This is when people use more transactional terms which will be dominated by PPC whether in the SERPs (search engine results pages) or display advertising (on other websites).
4. Post blog posts on social platforms
You should be creating high quality and intriguing content that answers users’ questions or get users asking more questions (that you answer).
Increase engagement by posting your current most successful posts/articles onto your social media platforms. This will increase awareness and engagement from social media but in turn, if you are remarketing, that is even more traffic you can remarket through PPC as you already know people want this content.
5. Index new categories
There may be opportunities where you can create new categories to target a more niche variation of a product range.
There are several ways to find niche product ranges that people are searching:
- Search queries in your Google Analytics (or other analytics) account
- Google Search Console (or other webmaster tool) performance report
- Keyword gap analysis, comparing your categories to your competitors
- Keyword research using Google keyword ad planner
If there is a lot of demand for a niche subcategory, these users are further down the funnel closer to a conversion. Create, optimise, and index this category to not only rank higher for more relevant terms but, this will be another page that PPC and Paid Social channels can send traffic to with a higher chance of conversion.
6. Create locally targeted areas for brick & mortar store
If you are a local business with brick & mortar stores, you need to have pages dedicated to each store. Ensure all copy is unique and the pages are useful to the user i.e. contact details, images, maps, testimonials/reviews, to avoid a penalty.
This means geographically targeted paid channels can send users to a more locally relevant page and use this traffic to segment their campaigns by location interest.
7. Optimise your Google My Business and other directories
Compliment your local SEO efforts further by optimising your Google My Business account and directories.
You can use a tool with an API such as Uberall to ensure all contact details across the web such as Facebook and Yelp are consistent. This tool also allows you to upload imagery and logos.
Making sure your imagery is solid, fresh, and professional. This will improve performance in Google My Business and directories. Your social media channels can use these images for each of your location accounts to increase the quality of your account and, the impression your account makes on a curious – needs convincing user.
Your PPC channel can also use these high-quality images for their display advertising to increase engagement.
8. Reduce image file sizes
Optimising your page speed will not only improve rankings but, will improve conversions across all channels.
Page speed improvements is a project in itself, but optimising images is one of the quicker fixes that you may be able to do to give yourself more of an edge in the run up to Christmas.
Especially on ecommerce sites where you need a lot of images, images are a major factor in negatively impacting page speed.
There are many ways to optimise images from saving with next gen file formatting to serving the correct size per device.
The quickest win would be to compress the images which will reduce the file size. If you have 1000’s of images, this is not so quick if done manually, so we’d recommend using a script to compress all your images in bulk and then bulk uploading your images to replace the current ones on your website.
This will require development resources to take a job that will suck weeks of your time into a few hours/days.
When saving your new Christmas imagery, make sure you are compressing for web view, the image is at the right size for delivery and you include Christmas related terms in your alt-text. This will have a bonus benefit of driving more organic traffic through image search as people look for inspiration.
9. On Page Optimisation – Quality Score
On page optimisation in organic refers to hitting the main ranking points of a page to target a relevant key term. The fundamental areas to optimise on a webpage are;
- The meta title including the key term
- Including a h1 on the page with the key term
- Images using alt text that mention the key term
- Using sub-headings to answer related questions/segment your content
- Comprehensive content that fulfils user intent
Optimising webpages to follow Googles organic guidelines will improve your PPC quality. Increasing the quality score will increase the relevancy of your web page for the queries you want to target increasing chances of ranking highly in Paid Search.
10. Experiment with meta data and tone of voice
The most important feature of online shopping for consumers is convenience.
Ensure that the copy your website is focusing on experiences, problem solving and convenience for your audience. Selling the product is only half the job, you need to sell their experience such as keeping hold of a traditional Christmas in these unprecedented times and, live up to what you say to increase retention and lifetime value.
This tone of voice and message needs to be echoed across all channels in all ads, profile accounts and your organic meta data.
Find out what is most important to your audience and focus on that in your copy. Product specifications are important but it is not what is going to make an impression when people are comparing brands.
Experiment with different copy and learn what works.
Paid advertising and organic strategies when in harmony can lead to much greater insights into your consumers mind set and behaviour. This data helps you personalise the customer journey targeting your consumers wants and needs.
If you need experts to help you grow your Organic, PPC or Paid Social channel, talk with us today and tell us about your problems and goals, and we will tell you how we can help.