Renaissance Man (n): a person with many talents or areas of knowledge.
Among every agency PPC team, you’ll find a host of renaissance men and women who’ve acquired a quite extensive realm of practical knowledge through daily interactions with the clients they represent. Due to the nature of our work – diving into the gory financial details of our clients in order to prove the ultimate worth of our activities – PPC teams are often challenged to learn a wide variety of client-side specifics in the process.
This stuff has a way of amazing even the most seasoned PPC marketer. Take, for example, some of the industry insights our very own Adept PPC department has learned while working with our various clients:
- Did you know that certain states are MUCH more likely to order cookies on-line than others? That’s right – cookies are best thought of as a regional product online, even when you’re ordering a cookie bouquet.
- Our friendly neighbors “up north” mandate winter tires on all vehicles. As such, winter tire sales are a HUGE industry in Canada. That’s important information for a tire manufacturer to know.
- “Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy” is a) a real thing, and b) searched way more often than you’d believe.
- Seemingly, the number of t-shirt manufacturers far outnumber the number of potential customers. To break into the market, a solid strategic plan is absolutely necessary.
- Hospitals have power backups for their power backups. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that no one wants a hospital to lose power in a time of need. But, this knowledge could enhance a marketing plan for a generator manufacturer.
- There are some industries – and some clients that we have worked with – who have products that carry up to a 500% margin at all times. 500%!!!
Varied details like the ones above serve to educate and inform PPC strategy and execution. Here’s how our PPC team might use the insights gathered above to inform targeting and build a strategy:
- We may bid more aggressively for users in states that carry a higher propensity to purchase cookies online, meaning that we’d expect to see higher conversion rates on our marketing dollars.
- For the tire manufacturer, we may tailor an ad campaign to the Canadian consumer – highlighting the right product and the right call to action at the right time.
- Knowing that “Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy” is a substantial need for our audience, we can create a webpage uniquely suited to this searcher. That knowledge will inform how we mold the page copy, organize the layout, and engage the audience (which is an older age group in this case).
- Over the past few years, we have seen quite the evolution of geographic targeting. Now, you can target right down to the zip code, municipality, voting district, and so forth. Full size hospitals, we’ve found, are fairly easy to market uniquely with a specific product – like power backups – to potential consumers.
- Despite the huge product margin – if a product doesn’t sell very frequently, bidding on terms can quickly become a game of marketing arbitrage. The smart question in this case is to ask: “What’s the maximum amount that we can spend to accumulate one sale, while keeping the client in the black?”
This is where the renaissance element really comes into play. From a skill-set perspective, a PPC marketer has to be prepared to crunch numbers on a large scale, evaluate statistical relevance of data points, write page content, help design little digital billboards (banner ads), write ad copy, and present it all to clients – and do it all before lunch. We’re pretty Adept (yup – pun intended) at being versed in lots of crafts and topics as we work with such a diverse client base – from dentists to engine machinists.
The PPC team really gets all the good stuff. It can sometimes be pretty humbling to sit back and think about all the things you touch and impact on a daily basis in any career, but we know that PPC isn’t the only career where this happens – lots of jobs require an in-depth knowledge of interesting and surprising data and facts. So, now it’s your turn to share.
What’s an interesting thing that you’ve learned about your industry through your daily work? Let us know in the comments!