The Power Of AI!
Almost every business wants to increase their conversion campaigns, and c'mon, why wouldn't you want to? But, if you're struggling to find a way to get this done, turn your attention towards creating awesome landing pages and leveraging the power of AI (oh, and partnering with a top-notch software company, like Unbounce).
Want to learn more? We got you covered. In fact, we sat down with a B2B marketing professional, who specializes in tech, to get all the deets. In this blog, Hollywood Branded shares how to increase your conversion campaigns from the expertise of Meg Sakakibara, who is the Vice President of Marketing at Unbounce.
A Little More About Meg
Meg is the Vice President of Marketing at Unbounce, a platform that helps brands increase their conversion campaigns through landing pages and leveraging the power of AI.With their conversion intelligence software, Unbounce has helped over 70,000 brands and powered over 1.5 billion conversions. Meg has been a B2B marketing professional in the technology community for 14 years, spanning both enterprise software and SMB SaaS. She is passionate about all things marketing—both traditional and digital.
Interview Transcript Highlights
Question: How did you get started in this industry, and just in general of all things digital tech?
Answer: Actually, I started off early in my career in tech by coincidence. When I was a student, I always imagined myself going into tourism with these idea of travel and going to all these different countries and writing about other countries, but I kind of stumbled into tech early, and thank goodness I did because what a cool industry it is. I realized very early on that tech is just the bleeding edge of marketing, and it's just this place that you get to experience, like all the latest and greatest of marketing innovation and tools and technology and trends and kind of like leading everybody else in what to expect for marketing. So, it's just been such a fun place to be.
I started off in enterprise, like you said, in my intro. And then, about halfway through my career, I've now moved over to the SMB space. So, I've kind of had both sides of the coin and really like feeding the pipeline for sales. And then, like a multi-year sales cycle to SMB and having like a very low barrier to entry and marketing really is the sales engine and it's all self-serve and more about brand. So, it's been a really fun journey and lots of learnings along that road.
Question: Well, along the way, obviously, Unbounce came about. And softwares born that would help people on their digital journey with getting better engagement conversions and just like basically feeding leads in, so that there could be results. What are some of the best ways that people can make sure when they're creating digital marketing campaigns that they actually are finding success?
Answer: Yeah. Great question. There's so many things people should be doing. I think as an SMB, sometimes it's difficult to do all of the things because we're competing against these massive companies that have hundreds, sometimes thousands of marketers at their disposal to be able to do this. But really it all comes down to really thinking about your data and looking at your funnel. And I think it's just like this core fundamental of understanding where your traffic is coming from, your conversion rates from one place to the next, whether that's impressions at the very, very top or right from traffic, whatever conversion means for you. And looking for those big opportunities to really fine tune where the biggest gaps are.
Once you can actually see some of that really basic data, it becomes very clear where you should focus your time. And that really allows you to be more data-driven, more efficient. And that's what Unbounce is all about. I'm just really trying to help you understand like, who's your best customer? Where you should focus your energy? What is going to convert the best? How can we surface some of those insights or make recommendations that you can send out the best planning page or the best pre click experience, help write the best copy for that particular audience, help create new variants that are going to attract different types of audiences for you about how can we leverage and lean on the data and the insights to really make sure that we're being most effective with that precious, precious time that we have as marketers in the day to day.
Question: So there is a lot of data that's out there? And it's really easy as a digital marketer to start going down a deep windy path of trying to go into the warm hole to figure it all out. What are the basics that really matter? What should people be paying attention to?
Answer: Yeah. Great question. I think the first thing is you just need to even understand what a conversion is for your business, because it's going to be different for everyone's business. For some people that's an actual sale....Others might even just be like a click through depending on what you're trying to achieve with a particular campaign. So, just getting really clear of what your goal is to begin with. And then, working it back from there, I think is really important when you're thinking about ultimately like your revenue conversion and how much effort or money you should be investing to collect that conversion. It's also really important to understand what your lifetime value is or like how much is your customer actually going to end up paying you on average.
And that can be a tricky number to get depending on your business. Sometimes it's super easy. You have one price point and they generally stay for X amount of months, or they pay you once and that's it. But sometimes it can be really complicated if you have like a repetitive payment, like a SaaS or something like that in multiple payment plans and different bundles and all these things. But if you can get a clear LTV, then you'll be able to work back to a cost of acquisition. And then, that will give you a better sense of like how much should I be bidding on paid or how many hours should I spend on that blog post or whatever it is. Because then you'll know like, "Okay, I'm comfortable spending $100 or $5,000 or $10,000 or $100,000 to collect that one lead or that one sale." We can get down to that, that's like the fundamentals of marketing to get you started. And just like, how much are you willing to push towards effort and dollars towards getting that one conversion...
Question: And do you think that there's a budget that you have to start out with for plan paid digital media or boosting or anything along those lines? Or is there a test budget that people should generally be working with?
Answer: Yeah, there's definitely test budgets. I'm no PPC expert, but I know that there's lots of programs when you're first getting started that like Google will even give you free dollars just to try and get going. It really depends on your niche too and like what your business is about. So, some companies are going to have like really specific keywords. And they're going to be really cheap because there's very little competition within that and maybe it's really long tail keywords or very region specific. So, you'll be able to play really easily with paid ads and things like that.
Others are going to be really competitive if you're going for like marketing software or copywriting or something really broad and generic, then there's going to be a lot of competition for those words. And it's going to get start getting very spendy very quickly. So it kind of depends on like what your company is and how can you carve out that differentiated statement. What are the keywords in there? Making sure that there's some search around that and then going and bidding. But there's always ways to play in the different platforms and the different channels to get started. Whether you go straight for like Google Ads or you start from Facebook advertising or Instagram advertising, et cetera. There's lots of fun and creative ways that you can get started with paid ads.
Question: What are some of the mistakes people make along the way? Like where do you see people just go wrong?
Answer: I think one of the biggest things that I have observed in my career is there are just an infinite amount of channels and tactics and it can feel like you need to do all of it, and it can be really overwhelming. A lot of companies only have one marketer or a very small team of marketers, and you can't do everything. But it feels like you're constantly like [inaudible 00:21:38] duck with their little legs paddling under the water. You're very calm on the surface, but there's so much going on as a marketer and it can be a lot.
And I think the mistake there is trying to do it all. And it kind of comes back to one of your first questions there, really looking at the data, understanding your funnel, and looking for the biggest opportunities, and doing those things really well. Focus your time and energy on those areas. Look for the opportunities to do some conversionary optimization versus just like, "What's the next campaign? What's the next campaign?" And just being on this cycle of like pushing it out, pushing it out, pushing it out whenever...
We obviously launch a lot of campaigns at Unbounce still. But you tend to see a spike where it's like, "Okay, I'm going to launch new lead gen piece and you see this spike of traffic, and then it dies and it goes back down to nothing. We are very, very small. And so, that so much energy to create that piece and there's value in doing it. But if you're a team of one, you really need to ask yourself like, Where's the best return on my investment?" And a lot of times it is those evergreen campaigns versus these like spiky promotional campaigns or like this one-off content piece.
So, how can you look at how are people moving through? Can you adjust your pricing page or your home page or your landing page? Is it just like a slight tweak that would increase your conversion rates throughout the checkout from like 3% to 4%? Or that tiny little move can make such a huge impact on the bottom line. So really looking and embracing a culture of experimentation versus like net new all the time. It's very exhausting to do that. There are lots of gains within the system that you've already built up in that foundation and in that house that you're building.
Check Out The Podcast!
Meg has so much great information from her experience in marketing and tech. Check out the podcast below to learn more about increasing your conversion campaigns!
Every week we have a marketing professional on our show to share their tips, tricks and lessons learned from their professional experience. Check out some of our other podcast blogs from earlier this year:
- Creating A Content Marketing Strategy
- Podcast Marketing 101
- The Importance Of Audience Research
- Creating And Selling An Awesome Online Course
- The Power Of Journalism In Branded Content
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