Many businesses want to tell a more compelling and impactful story that will result in greater business and revenue. In a recent analysis of our digital ads data, we at Squadhelp.com, a world-leading naming platform, came away with a greatly improved brand story, at least for many of our website visitors. Here’s what happened:
We began by looking at our search marketing customer journey: Starting with the keywords that our customer was searching for before coming to our website, we continued onto the dedicated series of Squadhelp landing pages, and finally moved to the cross-channel remarketing sequence — built to bring visitors back to our site to convert them into repeat buyers.
What our Google Ads data analysis told us
We began our analysis by carefully examining our Google ads data from a landing page perspective. Since our ads keywords are well mapped to our landing page, we could easily understand what the customers coming to each page were interested in.
One of the major findings from this activity was that the pages and interests that aligned most closely with the story we were telling in remarketing had the best RoAS (Return on Ad Spend). As a performance marketing organization, we hold this to be our most important indication of marketing sense.
To illustrate this better, let’s look at our top performing page which is the Names for Sale page:
People who are searching Google for keywords such as Premium Domains and Brand Names for Sale are directed to this page. This page clearly shows premium domains and brand names for sale so visitors see exactly what they are looking for. These are considered significant discovery (product search) features.
As visitors go through the flow, they will come across a few social proof sections as well (e.g. customer ratings) and a purchase process that is clearly explained since it’s not everyday that people buy a name on the Internet.
The process feels spotless so far.
A customer journey that tells a seamless story from start to end can have an impact on your return on ad investment and your overall business success. Click To Tweet
Matching the Ads data to our storytelling
Let’s dig deeper and take a look at our remarketing sequence next. It is based heavily on displaying our collections of premium names and brand names for sale.
For example, we have an ad that uses AI to pull some of our popular names and showcase them to our website visitors. It also contains a proof section that imparts credibility to Squadhelp. It reads, “recognized as one of the most innovative companies by Inc. magazine.” As visitors move through the examples, they’ll see Squadhelp’s collections of one-word names and .io names. We also have several other popular collections in our remarketing process as demonstrated below.
In this flow, you can see that the story lines up. Users come in looking for premium domains or brand names for sale, and they are shown Squadhelp’s strong collection of names for sale in an appealing way, with many search and discovery features. Through remarketing we continue to showcase our unique sets of names and many of our most popular ones. It’s a simple but effective story!
And this consistent story from landing page to remarketing resulted in a positive marketing outcome. So far so good right? Well, not until we delved into a different flow.
Our search marketing efforts to sell ourselves as a Naming Agency were not leading to a strong RoAS. This was despite the fact we are indeed the next generation Naming Agency, and many of our clients are switching from agencies to us.
When the story does not align with the data
Let’s take a closer look: Here is our Naming Agency focused page, which is our landing page for people searching keywords such as “Name Agency” and “Company Name Consultant”. The moment you see the landing page, you can tell that the story is a bit too generic. But the true problem is that we were using the same remarketing sequence described above, even for visitors looking for an agency. So after they visited our site, instead of proving to them that we were the agency-style solution they needed, we told the story that we have amazing collections of premium domains. As you can see, this is where the story alignment breaks down.
Even with having a client list of multiple Fortune 500 companies, a team of fully-trained naming consultants, and an agency style naming solution that covers everything from brainstorming, working sessions, name ideas generator, audience name testing, and trademark support — we do not make this story clear through our remarketing. Instead, we tell the story that we have powerful collections of names for sale — which works well for our other sequence but hurts our results because the story does not match the intent of the visitor.
To solve this gap, we had to ask ourselves what an agency remarketing story looks like. We have developed a few variations to find a suitable answer to this question. But we know that a great way to think about storytelling in digital marketing is to look at the stories we tell in sales situations. We are also confident that when clients know about our advanced smart-tech driven process, our past successes, and our a-to-z solution, they often will work with us.
Even with having a client list of multiple Fortune 500 companies, a team of fully-trained naming consultants, and an agency style naming solution that covers everything from brainstorming, working sessions, name ideas generator, audience name testing, and trademark support — we do not make this story clear through our remarketing.
Summing it up
Finally, this is the takeaway we want to leave you with: A customer journey that tells a seamless story from start to end can have an impact on your return on ad investment and your overall business success. We saw it in our data, and we know that many other businesses can benefit from this type of analysis as well.
So if you’re using search marketing, take a look at your landing page data. And don’t underestimate the importance of telling a great story when working to improve the performance of your worst landing pages and customer journeys!
