Part One:
Part Two
The video on Hyper Responsive Pay Per Click Search Marketing generated a number of questions I’d like to address here in 3 broad categories:
FOCUS: Should you focus on hyper-responsive searchers and customer to the exclusion of all others?
SAMPLING: How do you go about defining your research populations in order to study hyper-responsive searchers and customers?
BACK ENDS: Is it possible to take advantage of hyper-responsive ppc knowledge without a fully developed back end product/service system?
Let’s take these one at a time, starting with FOCUS.
First of all, my apologies if I led any of you to believe you should ONLY focus on hyper-responsive customers and actively repel all others. A more accurate statement would be “Thoroughly understand and target the hyper-responsive ppc searcher AND seek to understand the process by which those who are less responsive can be nurtured to become hyper-responsive”.
Some of you were concerned that by focusing your efforts on less responsive consumers, you’d be seriously reducing profits. Although it’s possible, in practice I’ve found this is unlikely to happen.
Here’s why.
The hyper-responsive searcher at one time WAS a less responsive searcher. They evolved, through their experience and frustrations in your market, to know the market better than all the other consumers. They’ve usually gone through the trials and tribulations of purchasing from your competitors, experienced benefits and problems with them, and can report back to you what would be better.
When you solve these problems (and learn to convey this in your marketing materials), you actually wind up attracting MORE of the less responsive customers. You’ll get more thoroughly thought through arguments, more solid ideas for establishing real points of difference, and more convincing ways of distinguishing yourself to THE WHOLE MARKET.
As long as you DO research the process and history of their evolution into hyper-responsive ppc searchers and customers in your market.
Moving on to Sampling.
This is perhaps a more sophisticated concern, so please don’t worry if it doesn’t fully make sense to you yet. But some people were concerned I was recommending ONLY sampling from hyper-responsive keywords and customers.
I ALWAYS recommend constructing your sample to mimic, to the greatest extent possible, the real-world marketing avenues available to you. For PPC marketers this means sampling ALL the people coming through your PPC traffic streams. Offline it means sampling ALL the people responding to display ads, classifieds, postcards, etc.
However, there are ways to identify, from within the people who respond to your ads regardless of source, WHO the most hyper-responsive people are and what they want. You will also find that the PERCENTAGE of hyper-responsive people differs from keyword to keyword, newspaper to newspaper, or direct mail list to direct mail list.
There are many ways to identify potentially hyper-responsive people, so for the sake of illustration, let’s just take ONE, which is the length of their response to a survey, or to an open ended question on your opt in form.
People responding to a survey are likely to leave longer answers if (a) they’re not finding answers and solutions to their needs elsewhere in the marketplace, (b) they’re passionately interested in the topic and hoping for a human, custom tailored response; (c) they’re itching for someone to listen to them talk about their experience in the market.
Long story short, one indication of hyper-responsivity is length of response to open ended questions, wherever you may have them in your process.
Now, if you track where people came from, and look at the PERCENTAGE of people who leave responses more than 100 characters in length, for example, you’ll find differing percentages from keyword group to keyword group, newspaper to newspaper, etc.
You do three things with this information.
First of all, you zero in on those responses and see if you can address them in your Adwords ads, your landing pages, and your sales funnels.
Second, you see if the hyper-responsive needs differ by traffic source (keyword group to keyword group, specific lists, display ads, etc)
Last, you examine the differing percentages of hyper-responsives (defined in this example as people who leave 100 characters or more in your open ended fields) ACROSS keyword groups. Now you can put more emphasis on the keyword groups which have the most hyper-responsives by volume! (Note: the best metric here is percentage hyper-responsive x group volume, since it takes both responsivity and “bang for the buck” volume into account)
Specific to pay per click search marketing, you can estimate your cost per hyper-responsive acquisition because you know (a) what your cost per click is; (b) what your opt in rate is; and (c) what percent of opt ins, on a given keyword group, meet your hyper-responsive criteria. (Just do the math)
Now, there was ALSO a question about FINDING HYPER-RESPONSIVES IN YOUR EXISTING LISTS. But the answer is essentially the same. If you’ve got an existing list and you can continually go back to it, then you want to identify the hyper-responsive needs within it, and see what they can teach you about marketing to the whole list.
Of course you can’t link them directly to a keyword group (unless you saved that information when they came into your funnel … most people don’t, though it’s easy and valuable to do), but you CAN link them to something even more valuable … purchase data! (Prospects vs. customers, dollar volume, recency of purchase, frequency of purchase, etc)
I’ll be posting a LOT more about research methods to leverage hyper-responsive ppc searchers later this month!
The last question has to do with BACK END MARKETING, … or how can you capitalize on knowledge of what hyper-responsives want if you don’t have a back end? (Kind of a scary image, don’t you think?) I’ve got a few answers:
- You can use the language and concerns of hyper-responsives to attempt to bump up your CTR in Adwords, drop your CPC and cost per conversion
- You can use the same language to pre-sell the hyper-responsives on your opt in process or your front end sales
- You can match hyper-responsive needs with pre-existing products and offers in your market on an affiliate or JV basis, using the language to pre-sell the prospects and customers
- You can use what you’ve learned to DEVELOP back end products which match their needs exactly, because ultimately (as Tyson Fitzgerald suggests), you’re going to need a set of back ends in order to fully capitalize on hyper-responsives as you attract more and more of them into your funnel.
Hope the video helps explain more … I WANT YOUR COMMENT AND QUESTIONS PLEASE!
Glenn 🙂