This is due to the fact that consumer habits have changed significantly in recent years. If you cannot keep up with the growth of digital competences of your target group, a problem will arise. Your customers – both a large proportion of the current ones and a large number of potential new ones – are already online. If you do not wait for them there, when the moment comes when they will start looking for services or products offered by your company, they will turn to the better digitally exposed competition.

Internet marketing, especially if your company has not carried out such activities before (or has conducted them to a minimal extent), is an activity that requires a large dose of knowledge at the very beginning. Moreover, to say that later the necessity to broaden marketing horizons grows exponentially would be a delicate hyperbole at best. It is also worth remembering that while some of the elements that make up the digital image of a brand can be done for free or with a low effort and budget, costs will increase as they develop.

How to start internet marketing? Which tools to use? Which are essential at the beginning and which can be postponed when the brand grows digitally?

SEO

Virtually every brand should have its own website. Thanks to this, you can provide customers with basic information about your services / products and, above all, let them find you. A well-made website will allow you to make the right first impression and provide the necessary contact details. The website should be readable, aesthetic, fast and adapted to User Experience standards (more about UX later in the text).

However, in order for the website to be properly visible, it is important to properly approach its positioning. When a user enters a phrase that interests him / her, it returns a list of several dozen or several hundred thousand results in a specific order. It is not accidental, and the constantly evolving Google algorithm is responsible for it. However, you can live in harmony with it and use good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices from the very beginning.

The SEO of websites and online stores can be divided into two categories. The first is changes that we can make on the website itself – sometimes the whole process is called on-site SEO, i.e. SEO performed directly on the website. They mainly include the creation and optimization of content in such a way that it is “easy to digest” both for the user and for the search engine bot who will regularly visit and analyze the website.

It also means that the content is saturated with keywords for which we want to position the page – they should appear in several places in the text (possibly also in the headings), but you should not overdo them with excessive, unnatural intensity, because this will reduce the readability and quality of the text itself. To gain space for content that does not overwhelm with quantity (no one likes to read a wall of text), you should think about starting a company blog. This will allow not only to increase the amount of content, but also to present the brand as it deserves – i.e. as an expert in a given industry. In addition to substantive articles on a given branch of the market, the blog is a great place to present employees, current achievements and corporate culture – so that customers can also see the “human face” of the company.

On-site SEO also focuses on the technical refinement of the website:
– improving its loading time (the vast majority of users will resign from visiting if the page loading takes more than a few seconds) – this can be achieved, among others, by image compression, code minification, transfer to a faster server, etc .;
– adaptation to display on screens of different resolutions (most of the internet traffic takes place via smartphones, which requires the use of other solutions than in the case of typical desktop versions – users of desktop and laptop computers, however, cannot be forgotten, there are also tablets);
– SSL certificate installation – it ensures encrypted communication between the website visitor and the server and is taken into account by Google bots;
– And many other aspects.

The second, no less important part of SEO is getting links leading to a given website, which is referred to by the term off-site SEO. It is they who signal to the network bot that, according to the social proof of rightness, the website is probably valuable and it is possible to raise its position in the search results. The key, however, is not to “hack” the right number of links from random pages – in SEO, the number must go hand in hand with quality. Tools such as Senuto or Ahrefs help in analyzing the link profile.

At the initial stage, the key information about SEO is the fact that SEO is a long-term process. Achieving satisfactory results is not possible in a week, month, and often even a year – it requires creating a plan and its proper implementation, adapting to the current algorithm updates and continuous training. What’s worse, once the results are achieved, it is easy to lose, for example, due to an ill-considered website update, which, for example, will cause problems with indexing individual subpages.

SEO audit

If you already have a website, it is worth checking carefully how it is doing in the search engine and what can be done to improve its positioning status. We are talking about performing an SEO audit, thanks to which you can check both the elements that can be improved on the site itself (on-site SEO) and the link profile (off-site SEO). On the web you can find many sites – both free and paid – with which you will automatically collect basic information on this topic. At Paraphrase Online com, we also prepared the possibility of conducting such a quick audit. The Google PageSpeed Insights tool, which checks the speed of operation and other basic elements that make up the “performance” of the website, may also be useful.

As a collection of general information, automatic SEO auditors and similar scripts are the first base for further actions. They only take into account the very basic factors influencing the position of the website, so if you think about SEO “seriously”, a professional audit by a specialist will be necessary. Multifaceted analysis allows you to develop a detailed SEO strategy, which in the vast majority of cases (except for extremely niche market sectors) is necessary to bring the website to meaningful results.

Google My Business

When a potential customer enters a company name, a section with details about the specific company often appears on the right next to the search results. Setting up such a business card is free, so you can display the most important data – phone number, address, opening hours or photos of the registered office. Thanks to this, the user has access to basic data without the need to search further, and you can make the right first impression. We write in detail about the GMF in a separate article on our blog.

Social Media

Social media is the modern equivalent of city centers. Depending on the current status of a given portal, they can be bustling (like Instagram or TikTok) or abandoned (like MySpace used to be). There is no doubt, however, that the presence in social media will be useful for most brands – they are perfect platforms for quick contact with the client – not only announcements “I am a given brand”, but also “maybe it’s worth establishing a dialogue?”.

The first question to be answered when considering setting up a brand account on social media is “which website is your target audience on?”. Each website is characterized by a slightly different user profile – due to the skillfully built up position of Facebook over the years, theoretically, you will find all age groups there, but Instagram and TikTok reach younger users better. Each platform has its own code – IG is an image-based platform, TikTok is mainly short videos, Twitter is primarily based on 280-character text messages.

Think about which website your brand fits best. A dynamic brand aimed at teenagers, with skilful profile management, will be great on TikTok, while in the case of care products for seniors, the presence there will probably end up in business terms as a waste of time and resources.

There are many brands in social media. This is a huge overload of information for the user. Due to this accumulation in social media, the company should stand out – not use a clichéd, boring narrative. You have a split second to catch the eye of a potential customer – don’t waste it on overproducing clichés.

It is worth knowing that the era of organic reach (that is, achieved without the support of paid ads) is gone forever. Your fanpage on Facebook will not be displayed to all users who once clicked “I like it” and they hope that it will allow them to update about new posts. Social networks are increasingly monetizing their activities and focus on presenting paid ads. For this reason, bearing in mind your presence in social media, it is worth allocating part of the budget, for example Facebook Ads – it is a waste of time for content creators to see the posts by a dozen or several dozen people.

Google Ads is a powerful advertising system that allows you to reach millions of potential customers.

The Google Ads ecosystem allows, among other things, to show ads:
– In search results – above and below organic results. This placement guarantees adequate exposure of the advertisement and is usually associated with clicks. An advertisement placed especially at the very top of SERPs, although marked appropriately, is sometimes confused with a traditionally positioned page.
– On YouTube – the largest video content portal in the world is also an excellent advertising platform. You can place ads before, during and after your videos (in the form of videos), as well as text overlays, product overlays. The system also allows the use of several other formats (e.g. at the top of the column with suggestions for other movies to watch).
– On millions of portals associated with the Google Display Network partner network. Thanks to this, you can display ads on many lifestyle, news or journalistic websites – the network brings together both small blogs run by hobbyists and the largest wide-range horizontal portals in the world. Furthermore, your ads may be shown to specific users – those who, for example, have previously visited your website or expressed interest in similar products. This is a great way to remind customers about yourself.
– In Discovery Ads – a graphic and video format based not on the sent ready materials, but on a set of elements that, based on self-learning algorithms, the system dynamically mixes, thanks to which it selects a creation that will generate the best results in a given place and under given conditions. Discovery Ads appear on Discover tabs, Gmail (“Offers” and “Communities” tabs) and YouTube (“Watch Later” panel and the platform’s home page).
– In Google Shopping – In the “shopping” tab of the search results page, there is a product price comparison platform. In addition, you can also advertise specific articles there over the “normal” results. What’s more, product ads can also appear in traditional SERPs – when a user enters a phrase in Google that suggests a product (for example, a drone or a thermal mug), Google Ads may display an ad for your product with an image, name, price and, of course, a link to the store’s website.
– And this is only a part of the possibilities of Google Ads!

What else is worth knowing about Google Ads? Out of reach, the system is distinguished by enormous targeting possibilities. Unlike, for example, a TV advertisement, we have the option of precisely specifying to whom the message is to be displayed, which prevents the budget from being wasted. The platform also enables dynamic adjustment of the target group based on the collected data, thanks to which it can rotate ads in real time to people who, according to the system, have the best prognosis for conversion. Supportive solutions such as POCM are also available, which adapt the data 24/7 thanks to self-learning algorithms.

Related to this is the fact that in order to take full advantage of Google Ads, the system must have “what” to collect data on, which is why it is a solution that requires a financial contribution.

How to start internet marketing?

The channels presented above are a good start for a brand that wants to start online marketing in its company. Of course, this is only the tip – digital marketing offers basically endless possibilities. The key is to choose the right channels – so that communication is consistent and results grow.

Google Data Studio – an aesthetic way of presenting data

The Google Data Studio tool appeared in 2016 and quickly gained a lot of positive feedback, especially among analysts. It is free and, moreover, easy to use due to the transparent panel that appears after logging in. An additional convenience here is a short introduction in the form of a tutorial. With the help of Google Data Studio, you can collect all important data in one place, presenting it in an aesthetic and accessible way.

The tool provides access to ready-made report templates that can be modified in terms of background, font, colors of individual elements or dashboard dimensions. After a style is defined, all subsequent data sets will be automatically adjusted to it. If needed, you can use options such as inserting images from Google Drive or a computer, and even using text boxes, shapes, graphics, and other objects.

Google Data Studio allows you to create reports based on various databases. They can come from, among others with:
– Google Sheets,
– Google Ads,
– Google Analytics,
– YouTube statistics,
– Google Search Console,
– Facebook Ads,
– Ahrefs.

A significant advantage of the tool is that more than one person may be involved in creating a report. In addition, adjusting the appearance of reports to the company’s needs is not a problem.

Google Lens – innovative image search

Even though the Google Lens tool appeared in 2017, it is still gaining in popularity and is being discovered by an increasing number of users. It is an advanced application that allows you to recognize objects in photos and obtain various information about them. On some phones, the Google Lens is available immediately, for others, it is enough to download it from the App Store or the Play Store. The technology of scanning and interpreting images is constantly being improved, which enables it to be used in many situations.

The tool allows, among others to quickly translate the text (however, it is still not possible to paraphrase the text), to check the appearance of dishes from the restaurant menu or to identify specific plant species. All you need to do is point the phone with the application turned on at the selected object to obtain the necessary information. The Google lens is useful both in everyday life and at work, in many industries. It has long been said that visual search is the future of e-commerce. After scanning a specific item, you can quickly get a list of similar products ready for purchase. Perhaps in the future, image scanning will completely or almost completely replace text search. That is why it is worth optimizing marketing activities in this respect already, remembering, among others, about detailed metadata or the appropriate size of graphic elements on the website.

Performance Planner – easier optimization of campaign costs

Tools from Google such as Performance Planner will be useful primarily to people who create advertising spending plans. Thanks to them, they gain many new opportunities, including:
– viewing the results by adjusting the campaign settings,
– access to forecasts for conducted campaigns,
– budget management.

Performance Planner is usually updated every 24 hours and can handle up to billions of queries. This guarantees access to accurate forecasts. The tool takes into account important aspects such as landing page, seasonality and competition. It significantly facilitates the preparation of advertising spending plans, but not only. The Performance Planner is also useful for assessing how your changes to your campaign will affect its overall performance and key metrics. Thanks to it, you can receive suggestions on how to optimize the selected strategy without the need to increase the budget. The tool is available through Shopping, Local, Search, Display, and App campaigns.

The Performance Planner tells advertisers what bids and budget to set to maximize the data they choose for their campaigns. By using it, you can save a lot of time that would have to be spent on analyzing expenses yourself. The tool gives you access to several practical functions, and one of the most important is the summary chart. It is dynamic and at the same time transparent, reading information from it is not a problem. The comparative table of before and after data, in which key items are broken down into existing and planned, is also rated well. Performance Planner allows you to check many scenarios before choosing the most appropriate one.

Google Tools for Internet Businesses

Many small and medium-sized enterprises are already active both offline and online. Google decided to make it easier for such companies to develop and introduced two new, free tools: Grow My Store and Local Search Navigator. Their premiere in our country took place in September 2021.

Grow My Store was launched in several countries in 2019. It is a very useful tool with which sellers can improve the quality of their online customer service. It tests the website, taking into account over 20 indicators, measures, inter alia, mobile friendliness and loading speed, in addition, it checks the HTTPS protocol. Any retailer can take advantage of Grow My Store, whether online or offline only. It gives you access to information and tips on how to improve your website’s visibility in the search engine and increase traffic. All this is based on suggestions tailored to the needs of customers. The insights were gathered during research conducted by Google in collaboration with Ipsos MORI and Kantar TNS. Tips deal with aspects that play a significant role in shopping, including personalization and page performance.

The second tool, the Local Search Navigator, also helps companies reach a wider audience and increase profits. It tells you what to do to stand out on the Internet. The Navigator provides entrepreneurs with personalized tips based on a thorough analysis of their business profile on Google. It also suggests what data should be improved and what new information to enter. One of the greatest advantages of the tool is its intuitive operation. It is enough to enter the name of the company and after a few minutes you will see if it is visible enough on the web. The Local Search Navigator allows you to refine your Google My Business profile to attract potential customers to your offer. By using it, you can also make sure that you have entered all the necessary information to facilitate communication, making an appointment or performing another activity.

Less known tools from Google that are useful not only in marketing

One of the tools that undoubtedly deserves attention is Google PageSpeed Insights. It allows you to check how fast the website loads on computers and smartphones. The categorization of user experiences is presented in three categories, namely: Good, Needs Improvement, and Poor. This data is based on Chrome User Experience Report information. The tool also makes suggestions on how you can improve your site to reduce its load time. They are useful because page loading speed is currently one of the most important factors influencing the Google ranking.

It is also worth paying attention to the Public Data Explorer. It is used to view and visualize large data sets that may relate to many different areas, e.g. fuel prices, demographic indicators. The tool allows you to navigate between different views, share results, and compare individual information. Although Explorer was introduced in 2010, many people are still unaware of its existence.

There are also a few other tools that are not popular, but can be useful not only at work, but also in everyday life. This, for example:
– Google Keep – an application for taking notes, also works on phones. You can add photos, letters, and drawings to your notes, and copy them to Google Docs and share with others. The tool allows you to mark your notes with different colors and labels to keep everything in order.
– Arts & Culture – online service and smartphone application from the Google Cultural Institute. The tool allows you to search and admire the greatest works of art from dozens of countries without leaving your home. It is also a source of valuable knowledge. Arts & Culture has a lot of interesting features, such as spherical films, virtual tours of museums or turning your own photos into works of art.
– Google Flights – online flight booking tool. At the same time, it is a server that allows you to search for connections via external providers. To find your flight ticket, simply specify the type of flight ticket (e.g. one-way) and fill in other important information, including the place of departure and destination. In Google Flights, it is possible to use an interactive calendar as well as a price chart, which allows you to easily find the best offer for you.

Google is not only a search engine, although it is the basis of this company. Currently, many people cannot imagine everyday functioning without the tools they offer, because they often prove to be helpful not only at work, but also outside of it. Since many are available for free, you won’t have to pay extra for using them.

Regardless of what form of marketing activities you are interested in, cooperation with an agency or a freelancer usually starts with a brief. This is how SEM, SEO, digital, video, social media and even PR agencies work.

Marketing brief – definition

There is no one fixed form of how such a document should look. Most often, a marketing brief takes the form of a text document (doc / pdf), but it can also be a power point presentation or even a video recording (although it is a rather unpopular form). It is crucial that the brief contains all the necessary information about the planned activities / campaigns and the terms of cooperation.

Why make a marketing brief?

If we were to shorten the answer to this question to one sentence, it should be written that the brief is there to enable the achievement of the assumed goals. In marketing, almost nothing is binary. There are many different ways to approach the same topic or problem, and it is rarely the case that only one solution is correct.

The advertising brief allows the agency with which you may be cooperating to better understand what exactly you expect, what is your goal and what are the conditions for future cooperation (therefore the brief should contain, among others, information on the planned budget and scope of activities).

Let us take an example. You run an online store and your goal is to have more customers. There are many different ways to achieve this goal, from SEO to social media advertising to affiliate marketing. Will only one solution be right? Of course not! But maybe you, as the principal, have some requirements in this regard. For example, you may want to limit yourself to a performance marketing solution. This is the key information for the agency cooperating with you! Therefore, it should be included in the brief.

On the other hand, the brief is an extremely helpful document for you as well. It helps to focus on a new marketing project and rethink it thoroughly. It may turn out that in the brief, the agency will ask you for information that you did not even take into account (e.g. actions taken by competitors or previous marketing campaigns). Then it is definitely worth sitting down on this topic calmly and collecting more data. It often turns out that you gain a completely new view of your project and you may want to make some changes before sending an inquiry to the agency.

What should an advertising brief contain?

The brief actually consists of a list of questions prepared by the agency and the answers given by the potential client. We can distinguish 6 most important elements of each professional marketing brief. The general assumption is that the more information there is in the brief, the better. Here’s what to pay attention to:

Information about your company

The market context is crucial here. What industry and model does the company operate in, who its recipients are, what its products / services look like, who is the competition, in which countries it operates, how many employees it has, how it stands out on the market, why customers use its services, etc.

Information about your products / services

In the previous point, we were moving on a higher level of generality. Time to get down to the details. What products do you offer? How many are there? How do they stand out? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What do customers praise and complain about? What opinions / reviews does your product collect? Has it undergone any changes recently? How do you promote it? What does the sale look like?

Information about customers

You may have heard the concept of persona. This is a fictional character that has the most important characteristics of your customers. It can be said that this is such a model client created for the needs of marketing activities. In the description of the persona, it is good to include as many elements as possible that may be important for the campaign. Personas most often have a profession, a favorite way of spending time, everyday problems and challenges they have to face, a specific income and education, and sometimes even interests. The persona must be as specific as possible, but you cannot overdo it. Determining what such a persona eats for breakfast in most cases does not make much sense.

Information on the planned marketing campaign

What is the project about, what do you want to achieve, what activities you have taken so far, what marketing problems / challenges your company is facing, what the campaign is to be based on, what channels and solutions you expect, etc.

Budget and project duration

The agency needs to know how much money you have for all of this. Completely different tools will be in motion with a budget of $ 10,000, and completely different with a budget of $ 100,000. Accurate information on the subject of the budget allows for better planning of activities and their intensity. The duration of the project is also of great importance. Again, a campaign with a $ 100,000 budget for two months will be different to a campaign that is scheduled to run for a year with that budget.

The purpose of the campaign

It’s just tempting to write “more sales”, because that’s the ultimate goal of any business. But on the other hand, many marketing campaigns have different, or at least more specific, goals. This could be, for example:
– reaching a new group of recipients,
– building an image / recognition in a new communication channel,
– market education about a new solution / product,
– entering the foreign market,
– building and strengthening a specific image that the company wants to achieve.

That sounds a bit different, doesn’t it? Defining a goal is extremely important because it determines how the results will be measured. If your goal is to reach a new group of recipients, the measure of success will be the increased number of orders from people / companies meeting the given criteria.

The expected results and the way they are measured are also important. Firstly, the result must result directly from the set goal, and secondly, it must be adjusted to the expected activities. You cannot measure strictly image-related activities with the use of measures used in performance marketing.

In marketing, the term KPI (key performance indicator) is often used, i.e. key performance indicators. Such a KPI can be, for example, a certain number of new customers over a specified period, or a lower cost of acquiring a new customer.

Communication method and additional guidelines

This is a key issue in the case of large, international companies that have specific guidelines on how their brand and products are to be presented: in what context, in what channels, in what form. If your company has any requirements that are absolutely necessary, regardless of what will be done, be sure to mention it in your brief. These requirements most often relate to the presentation and use of a logo or a specific color, but it can really be any element.

The most common mistakes when creating a brief

Errors in creating a marketing brief happen quite often and usually result from a misunderstanding of the purpose of this document. What should you avoid when working on your brief?

Too little time spent creating a brief: let’s be honest, marketers are busy and often have little time for additional explanations, especially when something is obvious to them. However, spending extra time will translate directly into the quality of the proposal you receive, and then the campaign.

Too many threads / goals: the assumption should be: one brief, one campaign, one goal. If you overwhelm the agency with several different goals (not yet having much in common) and hundreds of ideas about what to do, there is no chance of successful cooperation. You must make the assumption that the brief is supposed to relate to one topic. If you want to achieve several different goals, or run several different campaigns, make several different briefs.

Performing agency work: by writing a brief, you become a patient and your agency becomes a doctor. The patient doesn’t tell the doctor how to treat, right? Likewise, you, as a customer, should not unnecessarily impose specific solutions that may not fit your problem at all. Give your agency scope for action and listen carefully to what it has to say.

Lack of accurate data: if the collection and analysis of marketing data in your company is limp, it may turn out that creating a brief is bordering on a miracle. In this case, go back to point zero and start by organizing your data. Both sides will benefit from this. Only with hard data in hand, you can proceed to constructing a campaign idea.

Too generic: if you answer “women aged 20-60” when asked about the target group, it is a bit too little. Then you need to consider, perhaps together with the agency, how you can specify the information they need to prepare a campaign proposal.

Every company, regardless of the industry, assortment and number of employees, has at least one common element. It is the customer who is the main component of the company’s financial success. No wonder you strive for his interest every day! It is an extreme offer that meets expectations, looking for the most satisfactory solutions, hundreds of e-mails and hours of telephone calls … A person can get tired just reading, let alone talking about action!

However, when the transaction is finalized or a positive opinion is received – fanfares resound in the ears, and the corks pop out of the champagne bottles by themselves. Could the celebration be performed more often? Yes it can. What to do to make it happen? Know who the recipients of your products or services are. Personalize messages and advertising messages, and then collect information on why customers decide or NOT to use your suggestions. On this basis, you can build really solid foundations for sales and image!

Worth remembering … If you want the best tips on how to refine your offer or service, ask your customers for advice. Nobody will be a more valuable signpost for you!

Buyer Persona – definition

If you want to be effective in a business environment, you need to be familiar with maps. And if you don’t have them – invest in creating them. One of the first materials enabling efficient navigation through company processes will be the definition of your client’s profile.

Who is the Buyer Persona?

This is a fictional person who personifies the typical audience of your content. The features included are determined on the basis of the analysis of demographic and geographic data, monitoring of online behavior, information obtained through surveys and direct interviews. It is taking a closer look at all the behaviors and purchasing decisions of our customers in order to divide them into stages of the entire decision-making process.

Buyer Personas are not the same as the Ideal Customer profiles, but they do use this useful information base. It supplements it with additional data:
– Recipient’s expectations and selection criteria.
– Problems encountered on the purchasing path.
– Benefits will receive.
– The shopping paths he follows before he makes a decision.

Buyer Personas are not customers either. For now, these are people interested in your offer. To convince them to accept it, we need to clarify the habits, needs and values that determine their positive purchasing decision. It is worth mentioning here that the phrase “by them” may not be right at all!

Very often, people considering the purchase of a good, the price of which will significantly reduce the budget (company or home) and affect the daily functioning, ask a loved one for advice. Or they depend on the approval of the supervisor. So we are dealing with a so-called purchasing committee. Creating a navigation map and clarifying the Buyer Personas will allow us to develop communication and a list of arguments that will be key at the last stage, i.e. closing the transaction.

As we read on the Prowly websites, when creating a purchasing persona, it is necessary to establish:
– What is the most important from the point of view of our recipient.
– What motivates him to make a decision.
– What do they want to achieve by deciding on our product or service.
– What can be a barrier to the relationship with the brand.
– What criteria are taken into account when making binding instructions.

This will allow us to better meet the expectations and respond with a personalized offer to the needs of a potential customer. Sounds like more than half the battle!

When creating a Buyer Personas, do not focus on the division into segments (taking demographic data as a distinguishing feature), but on how and why the customer buys a specific product. A common mistake that people make is over-focusing on who the audience is. However, it must not be forgotten that it is also about why he chooses us.

How many person do you need to clarify the purchasing process? There is no clear answer to this question. However, it is worth considering whether you will have the processing capacity to implement separate marketing strategies for several separate people. That’s quite a hint, isn’t it?

In addition, there is a doubt as to whether each market segment really needs to be distinguished. It may turn out that recipients from different segments have the same purchasing habits or motivations when making decisions. Then you don’t have to treat them separately.

Good to know… It may turn out that your product or service reaches a very wide group. Then you will probably need to create several Buyer Personas. However, do not try to be for everyone – otherwise you may end up counterproductive. So just “change to small”.

Answer before your client asks

We already know who the Buyer Persona is. Now it is worth considering why its definition is so important from the company’s perspective. You can finally assume that traders know the recipient of your products perfectly and have all the available knowledge about this species. You don’t have to be wrong, however… as a rule, people like to take shortcuts.

In sales practice, this means that we operate quite schematically and often make assumptions. After gaining some experience, we fall into a routine and without proper polish, we resort to pigeonholing, judging by previous experience and closing to feedback. And the texts “it does not work with us”, “it is impossible with this client” or “our product is just too expensive”?

Regardless of the market in which you operate, you probably know these slogans of the sales team by heart. However, it does not have to be that way. Just start asking questions. In-depth and allowing the client to obtain information on why they became interested in your offer and why they ultimately (did not) use it. Especially since I have a certain information gap at the very beginning …

According to Paraphrase Online research, a salesperson gets to know the customer when he is already at an advanced stage of the purchasing process. We can talk about a decision made in 57%! Nay. According to Paraphrase Online, the customer can independently complete the shopping path up to 90%!

Before he comes to you with an inquiry, he will first ask for “Uncle Google” instructions. He will collect initial information himself and based on it he will form opinions. What will the network learn about you and your company? It is worth having control over it. But that’s a topic for another article.

How does the Buyer Persona fit into this? It is helpful in supplementing the knowledge about nearly half of our client’s decision-making process. By analyzing the information collected during the interview or in the survey, we will find out how “your story” began, what barriers the client encountered on his path, how he assessed the offer and what criteria he took into account.

What and how to ask in order to collect valuable material?

First of all, bet on relational honesty. Ask directly and don’t be afraid to “go deeper into the topic”. What do you need to know?

– What are your client’s priorities. So what he will definitely not give up, and where there is an area for possible negotiations.
– What is the biggest problem on the way to achieving business goals? Thanks to this, you will be able to refine your offer to make it the best recipe for corporate problems.
– How they have already tried to deal with the problematic issue. And where they were looking for help then.
– Why they decided to test a given solution.

The role of a trader is to enter the recipient’s world. The signposts on this path will be questions that will help to make key decisions. You don’t have to conduct an extensive interview with each client. Experts cited by the Buypersona.pl portal suggest that even 8 half-hour talks are enough to collect substantively valuable material.

How else can you collect data, if not by means of an interview and a survey? There are many tools. Below are some of them:

– Social media – it’s a real bottomless bag when it comes to basic information about the recipients of your content and the users of the services you offer. By analyzing your profiles on SM, you will easily find out what the demographic profile of your client is (his gender, origin, interests). In addition, you will “get” news about what he is interested in and when he is active. Thanks to this, you will plan your post publication hours well. Follow the comments below and learn from your ratings!
– Google Analytics – this tool will work well for practically every analysis. This is valuable information about the sources of website traffic and customer behavior. You will also find out if they browse your website mainly on computers or on mobile devices. This can make a big difference to the type of ad campaigns you’ll invest more money in.
– Google My Business card – the opinions that go there may turn out to be a real mine of knowledge and signposts on the way to improving your business.
– Information from sellers or customer service offices – Your sales representatives and customer service employees are the first front line on the company-customer line. They know your recipient’s profile really well. Sometimes even too good! When collecting information from them, however, remember that people like to take shortcuts, they often generalize and generalize. When creating a Buyer Person, you must rely primarily on data, which you can possibly enrich with a comment from a trader and an ideal customer profile.
– Ethnographic research – is an in-depth analysis and description of the group’s behavior in its natural environment. Don’t worry, you don’t have to do them personally (as a company) – you can just outsource them.
– Focus groups – small but representing the target market. They are representatives of the environment to which you want to direct or direct your offer.

Opinions and information collected in this way are a solid foundation for proper communication and clarification of the offer. This, in turn, may translate into facilitating the work of salespeople and significantly affect the growth of sales bars. And the customer will be satisfied. Everyone wins.

Buyer Persona: Importance for content, PR and… trader!

As we have established, building a purchasing persona is very important for the optimal use of your sales potential. This is the foundation for creating communication, more advanced PR, promotional and marketing activities, and ending with clarifying the offer.

The aforementioned personalizing the message and improving the product or service at the dictation of customers is not everything. It is also good to raise the issue of the sales funnel. Careful and thoughtful segmentation of its individual stages allows taking actions aimed at increasing the chances of a positive transaction closing. Not only that – thanks to funnels, we can forecast income and set the budget on this basis.

Having knowledge of the barriers to contact with the brand faced by a potential customer and what stops their purchasing impulses, we can act accordingly. By using the human element – in short … a trader or the magic of machine operation (for example, automatic sending of e-mails with an offer or reminder about discounts).

Buyer Persona also improves the flow of information between departments. Why? Because we create it based on cool calculation and in-depth data analysis. Dressing them in the form of a fictional client makes it easier to transfer numbers to the real world, better understand the needs and “getting into the shoes” of our recipient. On this basis, we create guidelines for individual departments and narrow the scope of their activities to specific stages of the funnel. So we simply standardize the client’s vision and define the form of communication with him.

What else do we gain?
– Reduction of advertising spending – we know what message will interest our recipient and what channels we have to use to reach them. We can let go of the rest and use the saved funds for the next campaign.
– Image consistency – by introducing a new product, we can quickly verify whether the form of its presentation (in terms of graphics and words) meets the expectations of the recipients.
– Hints about new products – we get the knowledge what our customers need, what we should enrich our offer, and what we simply give up in the world.

Buyers Persona – how to create? Good advice always included!

A. First the content, then the form – the graphic design is important, but the DATA is a solid foundation and foundation. Their proper sourcing and analysis will allow you to understand your client. His needs, purchasing barriers and motivators that influence the purchasing decision.
B. The Buyer Persona grows with the business – the customer model is not created once and for all. Remember that the company is evolving, therefore its recipient naturally also changes. From time to time, make an “x-ray” and check whether the proposed product or service still meets his expectations. Thanks to this, you will never miss the moment of transformation of your client, and, consequently, overshooting the form of the message. It could cost you a lot – literally.
C. Let go of your gut feelings – your visions may be different than what you actually are. Generalizations and stereotyping distort the facts. Pause galloping fantasy horses – rely on reliable data.

Buyer Persona Institute – methodology of influencing the decisions of B2B customers

Adele Revell made the creation of persona a subject of her professional activity. Their fruit is the Buyer Persona Institute (www.buyerpersona.com), which covers the entire methodology of proper persona building, adjusting the product and marketing techniques to the real needs of the recipients of our content.

Ravella suggests that only qualitative interviews with clients (current and potential), careful questioning and, above all, the ability to LISTEN, allow for drawing far-reaching conclusions that translate into a precise sales process. Techniques for conducting a conversation and obtaining information as well as real listening to customer needs are also described in her book “Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer’s Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business”. Thanks to this reading, we will learn, among other things:
– How to collect and analyze data.
– Build 3D profiles of real customers.
– How to classify needs.
– How to save (time and money) when creating a Buyer Personas.

The Buyer Personas concept presented by the author of the book is based on 5 pillars of the purchasing experience. They are:
A. An impulse to act – that is, an attempt to find an answer to the question of what happened that made the client consider purchasing a given product or service.
B. Expected results – what are the effects of the investment? What did the client want to get by choosing your offer? This knowledge allows you to build a message on the basis of individual benefits for the client. It then becomes a ready-made recipe for his specific pain. If you don’t do your homework at this stage, you’ll always only talk about the overall benefits, and that has far less driving power!
C. Decision barriers – based on the customer’s attitudes (for example, his trust in opinions about your product that he found online) or factors inside the organization (for example, the supervisor’s lack of consent to continue negotiations).
D. Decision criteria – important when building communication. Knowing them, you will point out the advantages of the product in your content, the most important from the customer’s perspective.
E. Purchase path – steps taken by the recipient during the entire journey after the offer. From getting to know it, to the purchase decision (positive or negative), including the situational context. At this stage you will find out who and to what extent is involved in making the final disposition.

Buyer Persona – template from HubSpot

HubSpot can also prove to be another useful tool in the process of getting into the shoes of customers. Software dedicated to inbound marketing, sales and customer service, which has been taking the market by storm since 2006, offers the Make My Persona option. Buyer Persona Templates by HubSpot are free templates to build your marketing, sales, and customer service teams with a customer profile. The generator allows you to create professional and free buyer personas.

Using the Buyer Persona templates, HubSpot supports the creation of an ideal customer profile. This makes it easier for the team to personalize the collected data and save it in memory. It’s also valuable for organizing your flowchart.

Not all of them have to be your customers. You don’t even want everyone to be! To grow your business, you need to define your ideal target group and direct your personal message to it. Thanks to this, you will create more precise content that your recipient is looking for. In addition, you will facilitate the work of marketers and traders!

Buyer Personas – SUMMARY

We hope that the Buyer Personas issue has been described comprehensively by us. Due to the fact that the publication and the topic itself are quite extensive, at the end we will allow ourselves to rank the most important information.

The Buyer Persona is a fictional character embodying the characteristics of your ideal recipient. However, it should not be confused with the profile of the ideal client, which in this case is supplemented with data provided by an in-depth direct interview. Thanks to it, we gain additional knowledge about the expectations, problems, selection criteria, benefits, but also the entire purchasing path of our client. The one who decides to put the product into the virtual basket or gives it up at the very end. Feedback, which was a purchasing barrier, will allow us to refine the entire process and avoid failure in the future.

Remember! Nobody will tell you more about the pros and cons of your offer than the customer! For that to be the case, you must discard your beliefs and private opinions. Collect reliable data, ask questions, LISTEN (which is not always obvious) and properly interpret the collected material. Then everything will go smoothly.

The information you have will make your marketing and sales more effective. Communication will be personalized and dedicated to a specific group of recipients. You will provide them with valuable content that they are looking for and need. All kinds of blog entries, expert articles in the trade press, e-books or other videos. Still hot and served on a tray.

Not only that – you will be able to save a lot of money by investing them only in those channels that really ensure you reach your customers. Only create a publication schedule, strategy and… you can act. With panache and due daring. Good luck!

SEO – increases after a year

We started cooperation in the field of online store positioning in July 2020. The website visibility status at the start of our activities was as follows:
31 phrases in TOP3,
366 phrases in TOP10,
3027 phrases in TOP50.

What does it mean? The website has already developed visibility in organic results for several dozen phrases. Therefore, our task was to increase the volume and calorific value of traffic from organic search results. We started by optimizing the site so that it would meet the high requirements of search engine web robots. We worked on improving the page loading time and organizing the assortment in terms of belonging to specific categories.

The site was experiencing cannibalization of content, which means that it was having trouble displaying a specific URL in response to a query that contained a keyword. Effect? Jumping positions of monitored phrases. Therefore, one of the first things we did was organize the texts to get rid of this phenomenon. We also commissioned writing new content – approximately 160,000 characters optimized for SEO enriched the client’s website. At the same time, we took care of external linking, paying particular attention to the diversification of links, i.e. their diversification.

During the cooperation, the client decided to change the category structure and URLs, which entailed the need to implement redirects so as not to lose the results achieved. Nevertheless, after a year of work, the website shows increases in terms of both the number of phrases in top positions and website traffic. In July this year, the client’s website was visible on:
82 phrases in TOP3,
675 phrases in TOP10,
5435 phrases in TOP50.

In the case of phrases from the top three results, this represents an increase of 164.5%. As for website traffic, the change is also clearly visible – it increased by 103% compared to 2020

Google Ads – How the number and cost of conversions have changed

In Google Ads, we run various types of campaigns for the client. Search ads, dynamic search ads, Smart Shopping campaigns (PLA Smart), remarketing and Discovery format are launched. This combination, in the case of the discussed brand, gives the best results and allows you to observe constant increases – both in website traffic and revenues. Let’s take a look at how the overall results for all campaigns changed from January 2021 to July 2021.

In January, the total number of clicks on Google Ads ads was 15,000, while in July it was 35,917, indicating a significant increase in paid traffic. The mere increase in the number of users, however, does not prove the effectiveness of the campaigns carried out. The parameters that indicate this are the generated revenues, the increasing number of transactions or the cost of a single purchase. In January, thanks to the ongoing activities of Google Ads, 196 transactions were registered on the website, and the cost of one was around $ 65.42. In July, conversions were already 796, and the cost of a single conversion was close to $ 40.54.

This means an increase in the number of transactions by 306% with a simultaneous decrease in the cost of acquiring a customer by 38% over the last six months of the campaign.

Regular profits from the campaign at a satisfactory level allowed for a gradual increase in the Google Ads advertising budget. Over the indicated time frame, it increased from approximately $ 6,500 to $ 16,500, representing a 157% increase in ad run. At the same time, revenue increased from $ 40,000 to $ 197,500, or 392%. So the return on investment increased by 175%!

It is also worth mentioning here how important Google Ads are in relation to the total revenues of the website. In 2019, the revenue generated by Google advertising campaigns accounted for 26.7% of the website’s total revenue. In 2020, this share increased to 36.6%, while in 2021, considering the period from January to August, this value is 37.9%.

Facebook Ads – the beginnings of activities

Less than a month ago, the client also transferred advertising in social media under our wings – on Facebook and Instagram. At this point, we are at the stage of determining the operating strategy, testing various advertising formats and collecting data. All these activities are guided by one goal: generating sales equal to the level of Google Ads. The first ads are already on the web and are in great demand, bringing people involved to your site.

Do you have a mug at home with a dedication from a friend or a calendar with family photos? And can you imagine looking for a new car without configuring it on the manufacturer’s website, if only to check what are the options or what will be the price in the highest version? Exactly! In many industries, configurators are already standard, and they are just reaching others. And very good, because both sides can benefit from them – both the customers and the producers themselves.

Product customization is money

The relationship between personalization and money is best illustrated by these 3 simple equations:

MONEY = TIME
TIME = AUTOMATION
AUTOMATION = PERSONALIZATION

The most valuable currency today, both in life and in business, is time. We convert time into money and vice versa. Every opportunity to save time is a benefit for your company. One of the ways to introduce time savings is to automate processes in the enterprise. Automation in e-commerce is a set of various practices, from production itself, through shipping or handling. One of the possibilities is also the personalization of the product offer and sales, and thus we come to product configurators that provide both.

Think – too many options to choose from in the online store mean chaos in the customer’s mind and the time that he has to spend on browsing the entire product category, reading all descriptions. Nobody likes wasting time, and for many people, shopping is stressful in itself. This may result in lower conversions.

What if you could replace the difficult choice of many options with the configuration of a product tailored to your needs? Maybe it is worth having a tool in your business that will match the order items for the customer, will not make a mistake in calculations and will also tell you what is the inventory of the products?

This is a win-win situation and no one has to compromise.

What is the product configurator?

The configurator is an e-commerce tool that helps to sell non-standard products, i.e. those that the manufacturer prepares to order for a specific customer. It can be a personalized product, such as engraved jewelry or a printed cap, or a product consisting of many elements, such as a piece of furniture.

There are many benefits offered by configurators, but from the entrepreneur’s point of view, two are particularly important – saving and earning, and here we come back to the 3 equations above.

How do product configurators automate sales?

Sales automation through personalization is based on 3 pillars. If you only take care of one, the effects will not be big, but if you approach the matter as a whole – you will quickly feel an increase in work efficiency and a higher conversion.

A. pillar – Automation of communication
It takes place both at the stage preceding the purchase of the product and during the ordering process. Its task is to speed up the exchange of information and lead the customer to a purchase, and not tire him or you as a seller along the way. What does automation of communication give?

– 24h availability – The customer has access to the configurator as well as to the entire online store without interruption – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
– Help with ordering specialized goods, e.g. construction goods – the configurator automatically indicates the necessary components, asks about their dimensions, and also suggests what else is necessary to place a given order. In the case of technical or construction industries, the configurator replaces a qualified advisor and assists the customer during purchases.
– Less human errors – this benefit is especially visible in B2B businesses, e.g. in the construction or furniture industry, where the product consists of many elements and orders are placed by contractors on a regular basis. Until now, in these businesses there was no question of sales automation, and orders were accepted by traders. And as it happens very often, the so-called the human factor was doing its job – there were many very costly mistakes. The implementation of configurators in such companies saves a lot of money, thanks to the fact that the configurator “asks” customers for all the information needed to complete the order. This eliminates understatement, wrong measurements or mistakes. The human factor is also present in B2C online stores – there, thanks to the configuration, we avoid the stage of a long e-mail exchange between the customer and the service, and between the Service Department and, for example, a graphic designer. The configurator allows you to “click” the order yourself.
– Excluding mismatched elements – it is not easy to order an item that consists of many components. Remember to add them all to your basket and make sure they match. The configurator does this for the customer and does not allow you to order incompatible items. No more disappointment and no replacement costs.
– Visualization of the final product in real time – the configurator shows on an ongoing basis how the product changes as a result of adding new parameters. The customer knows exactly what they are ordering and what the goods will ultimately look like.

B. pillar – Automation of the offer and orders
Automating the offer and order allows you to exit the “we always did it manually and it worked” mode. In the past, people only traveled on foot and somehow lived. And although we know the advantages of walking, cars make our lives much easier in everyday life. There are many examples of this type, and the conclusion is one – it is worth using technology that improves life and work. How do configurators accelerate the work of enterprises?

– Wholesale offer updates (photos, descriptions, parameters, price lists) – anyone who has ever had to manually update an offer with thousands of products knows what it entails. It’s a waste of time for the work that the algorithm can do.
– Taking care of availability – in large production companies it is impossible to track the inventory of all products without technology. The real-time configurators “communicate” with the warehouse and update the availability of components and goods. As a result, both the seller and the customer can be sure that the offer only shows available products, and the unavailable ones disappear from the page.
– Product price calculation – configurators calculate the individual product price on an ongoing basis based on component prices or more complex algorithms (e.g. counting volume, length, weight). In the case of B2B, it is also possible to calculate based on individual price lists per customer.

C. pillar – Automation of production and delivery
For the seller, this pillar is as important as the two previous ones, while for the customer it is the most visible part. Therefore, make sure that the customer’s contact with your store is pleasant, convenient and responsive to the needs. On the configurator side, automation means completing the elements needed to complete the order placed by the customer, and these are:

– Components of the configuration and their location in the warehouse – especially important for large production companies, e.g. furniture or construction.
– Generating previews / vectors and files, e.g. PDF for use in production – incredibly useful, but not so obvious functionality. Configurators allow you to generate and then send to the production department a file with the specification of the goods immediately after placing the order. This greatly speeds up the implementation of the entire process.
– Courier service and optimization of delivery costs – configurators also allow you to optimize transport costs, both for customers and for sellers. This is especially true for stores selling large or undersized products that are difficult to transport and therefore expensive.

In which industries is it worth personalizing products?

There are more and more businesses that have decided to introduce product configurators to their e-commerce. They are usually invested by retail stores (B2C) that hear and respond to their customers’ needs. Also, more and more B2B businesses are starting to notice both the demand for product personalization and the availability of technology.

Product configurators support especially those industries that produce goods to order, in accordance with his requirements, tastes or needs, e.g .:
– car,
– home & decor (e.g. blinds and shutters),
– food (e.g. chocolate, muesli),
– digital printing, gadgets,
– fashion (e.g. clothing, jewelry, watches, fashion accessories – handbags, phone cases),
– construction (e.g. gates and garage shelters, modular houses, windows and doors),
– furniture – furniture and interior design elements,
– photovoltaic.

Examples of earning / saving thanks to personalization in e-commerce

Fashion – shoes

Client
Creates a unique shoe pattern that it can identify with. The process of creating itself provides positive emotions – the client becomes a designer. He can see how the shoes change with the addition of new parameters. WOW effect guaranteed.

Producer
Thanks to the implementation of the configurator in its e-commerce, the manufacturer can communicate to customers the uniqueness of its offer (after all, not every shoe brand can boast the option of ordering shoes according to the customer’s design), and thus it is possible to increase prices. Customers are ready to pay more for brand emotions and a unique product.

Fashion – watch

Client
He expresses his individualism and designs a unique watch himself. Customers love personalized fashion accessories. This is one way to express your style and personality, and a higher price is often not an obstacle to buying.

Producer
There is no need to hire a graphic designer to visualize the client’s idea. Thanks to the configurator, the customer independently visualizes his project and then places an order. No unnecessary e-mail exchange, fast and in line with production possibilities.

Gifts – Chocolate Telegram

Client
The configurator manages the availability and stock of letters. The customer can see which letters he can use to create a chocolate message, so that there is no situation in which the customer places an order for an element that is not there. In addition, the configurator visualizes on an ongoing basis what the chocolate telegram looks like after each change.

Producer
Receives from the configurator a summary of all elements of the placed order at the current prices. The configurator also gives you the opportunity to “increase” sales, thanks to additional options, such as:
– offers customers personalization of the packaging by adding their own photo,
– suggests the content of telegrams for selected occasions, which can be ordered immediately or loaded and even modified – for many buyers such predefined content is a great facilitation and acceleration of placing an order.

Printing, prints, advertising gadgets

Client
He evaluates the final product on the visualization in real time and makes an informed purchase. Using the configurator eliminates the unnecessary disappointment of the customer after opening the package (“I did not know it would look like this …”)

Configurator
Automatically generates PDF files and sends them to be printed on the machine. Every minute you save on production is your profit.

Would you like to earn more with personalization?

The answer is obvious – everyone wants to earn more, and everyone who sells wants to develop it. Therefore, at the end, I propose a small test that will allow you to assess whether the product configurators will work for your company:
A. Have your customers ever asked about modifying your products? Maybe they wanted to change their dimensions a bit or add some element?
B. Or maybe you have always made products to order, but you accept them by phone or e-mail and thus waste a lot of time agreeing on details? Are there mistakes and customer dissatisfaction?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, it is a clear signal that either your customers expect personalized products or your business requires automation through configurators.

He can listen to natural language, respond to inquiries, independently, make decisions, stay awake around the clock. Replace a salesman, director, accountant and even a policeman. Artificial intelligence can be used on many levels. How to use it in practice?

How to explain to people who do not follow news from the world of technology on a regular basis the scale of progress made in the field of artificial intelligence?

Ignazio Zubek: Let’s start with the fact that the history of artificial intelligence is much longer than the last 5-6 years, during which we actually hear much more about its use. In the past, artificial intelligence has faced serious barriers. Only ten years ago, such a big barrier was the technological one, related to the limitation of the amount of data that can be processed. Machine learning models are as smart as the data we provide them, which affects the effectiveness of AI. What has happened in the last ten years is, above all, the dynamic growth of the available computing power. For example, GPU systems are used, which are commonly used in processing computer graphics, or, recently, for “mining” cryptocurrencies.

Therefore, artificial intelligence can do much more than just a few years ago?

Yes. Artificial intelligence can do more today, it is more accessible, more advanced. There are very large computational possibilities. Barriers related to the possibility of building deep neural networks or processing large amounts of data have largely disappeared. The largest neural networks learn data in terabytes. This is amazing progress.

Does artificial intelligence already resemble human?

We are at the moment when it can be described as getting “smarter”. He can imitate people better and better, he understands us more and more. But that doesn’t mean, of course, that we’re out there in science fiction scenarios. Artificial intelligence cannot answer every question. Only that does not mean that there has not been gigantic progress in this area. It’s worth checking out www.Paraphrase-Online.com, it’s a text paraphrase tool that works on the basis of artificial intelligence and it does it very well!

How to use artificial intelligence in practice?

The use of artificial intelligence is very wide. One of the essential aspects where it helps is communication. Research shows that consumers who use internet services often have a problem to find information on the website, product or answer to a question. Many customers choose services that allow you to quickly ask a question and get an answer just as quickly. Artificial intelligence is irreplaceable here.

Any examples?

For example, mobile applications in electronic banking or shopping applications. More and more banks and shops are choosing to use natural language recognition technology. This has its reasons. The number of functions and products that we can put “on top” in such a mobile application to make it friendly, in line with trends, is simply limited. Artificial intelligence in this case actually bypasses the barrier related to the graphical user interface.

And customers like talking to robots?

I think sometimes we don’t even realize now that somewhere when we connect with the support department, we are actually talking to an artificial mind. But even if the use of robots is not profound, but only serves to gather information quickly, that’s fine too. It helps entrepreneurs, employees and clients. And, importantly, it is available 24 hours a day. Whoever uses the services of banks, telecommunications and energy companies has repeatedly found out about the convenience of this round-the-clock readiness.

And what does the Grossberg Group offer its customers in this respect?

We provide solutions that allow you to build a “tailor-made” robot, tailored to your needs as much as possible. Our software allows you to build – whether on your own or with our help – a bot that, firstly, implements a client-defined scenario of activities and secondly, they understand the consumer’s intentions, thanks to the natural language we use when we write or speak.

Tell me more about this technology.

Our tools are based on natural language. So I can write a sentence like “I would like to send a transfer”. And using the Natural Language Processing procedures as one of the artificial intelligence techniques, the bot will recognize individual parts of speech, sentences to catch what may be the object of interest, i.e. making a transfer.

Artificial intelligence can not only listen and understand, but most of all analyze. So it can become the guardian of our interests. How?

Tools created by Grossberg Group that use artificial intelligence are actually great at detecting threats. They can detect unknown patterns in behavior. This is the case for detecting card, payment and invoice fraud. It is about situations in which we receive different invoices that really relate to one product, service, aspect. Without our solutions, there is a risk of paying such an invoice twice. Ordinary systems don’t recognize this.

And here lies the greatest strength of artificial intelligence. It replaces the human.

Of course. After all, there are companies where one employee processes several hundred payments a day. It would be difficult for him to “manually” verify such cases.

What else can your tools detect?

In a very large foreign enterprise, we detected wages paid to employees who had not been employed there for a long time. Artificial intelligence can also work great inside the company. In our experience, similar problems have been exacerbated by the pandemic. The issue of holidays, benefits, subsidies. There are many irregularities here that our artificial intelligence can detect.

Is artificial intelligence a good worker?

Dreamed! Artificial intelligence ensures high availability. He doesn’t have to take time off, take coffee breaks, or go into quarantine. It allows you to personalize your communication. And depending on what we know about the client, the more effectively we can communicate with him, because the needs will differ. Artificial intelligence can learn all this: what my client is interested in, what he watched. Our tools can not only suggest what decisions to make, but also make them on their own. Send a dedicated offer, propose a product, a discount. The greatest value of artificial intelligence comes from the fact that it can act alone, work for us.

Are there any areas where artificial intelligence should be used with caution?

Ethical issues are very important. AI tools used in medicine are not yet perfect enough to be used without human supervision. Artificial intelligence makes decisions based on data, and a data error can be dangerous in this case. The same goes for the judiciary, insurance, all social matters. Artificial intelligence, even with good intentions, can be misused. For example, due to incorrect or incomplete data.

The Grossberg Group acts ethically in this respect. How?

The responsibility of companies like ours is that customers have the opportunity to see how this AI works, what exactly it does with the data, and how it uses it. A comprehensive system built on artificial intelligence must provide the ability to verify that everything is functioning properly.

The shoe store from the example discussed entrusted us with its Google Ads campaigns and website positioning and has been with us for almost half a year – from December 2020. During the last months we have been working intensively, optimizing ads on Google, introducing changes on the website beneficial from the SEO point of view and expanding the profile links. The results of our specialists’ work are impressive. Let us briefly discuss the last 3 months of campaigning – here the changes take place so quickly that you can focus on a shorter period – and just over 5 months of positioning.

Google Ads – How did the results improve in 3 months?

What can be achieved in Google Ads for three months? With our specialists – a lot. We managed to significantly increase the interest in the client’s ads, which translated into an increase in the number of clicks on the ad by over 300%! However, these are not empty, meaningless clicks – three months of regularly conducted optimization activities allowed to increase the number of conversions fourfold.

Increase by 332.99%
Despite the fact that the interest in the offer increased significantly and the client decided to entrust us with an additional advertising budget, the conversion cost did not increase, on the contrary – it fell by as much as 25%. This means that the fee for achieving the set advertising target has decreased by a quarter. This is an excellent result when the budget is significantly increased in a short time.

A decrease of 25.86%
The client’s decision to increase advertising spending has opened up new optimization opportunities for us – it is no secret that the larger the budget, the more data for self-learning advertising algorithms. Since campaigns have been running for several months, we already had a lot of information about them, which we used to get even more from the ads. The man-machine duo played in perfect harmony, and this allowed us to increase our campaign revenue by over $ 200,000 (an increase of 328.94%).

Return on investment

Optimizing ads resulted in an increase in ROAS, i.e. the return on investment in campaigns. Three months ago, for every dollar spent on advertising, a customer made about $ 7.50 in revenue. Now every dollar brings him $ 8.50, but we are still fighting for even better results.

SEO results after six months of operation

We started in SEO almost from scratch. When the client entrusted us with taking care of the website, he didn’t have any TOP3 or TOP10 phrases, and there were just over 50 phrases in the TOP50. His site’s visibility was very low compared to competitors’ sites. So we conducted a detailed audit and identified the biggest errors on the website and areas with unused SEO potential. We took up purely technical corrections, selecting the best key phrases and improving the link profile.

Positioning is a marathon, not a sprint, and it will be a while before we achieve the goals we set together with the client. After less than six months of activities, we are happy to see the first effects of our work. The client has the first phrase in TOP3, and we managed to enter 150 phrases into the TOP10, which is a great result in such a competitive industry.

The spectacular increase is also visible in the TOP50 – here we already have over 3,000 phrases. This means that their number has increased sixty-fold since December 2020.

Of course, each customer is a story, and it is not possible to guarantee identical results for every brand in the industry. The return on advertising and the increase in visibility due to positioning are a component of various factors. They are influenced by the age and history of the domain, budget for advertising campaigns, the number of changes to the website and many, many other aspects. One thing is certain, however – the combination of customer knowledge about their products or services with our knowledge of online marketing can bring great results – that’s why successful cooperation is the basis of every success.

Social media is not homogeneous – although their core remains similar, individual websites use slightly different solutions, have a different user interface, focus on different customer groups and approach data management differently. However, you can find many common features and basic principles that should guide a social media specialist in carrying out his work. These are the foundations that may seem obvious to an experienced marketer, but – as practice shows – in surprisingly many cases they are neglected.

Don’t lie

Almost everyone uses social media – we will see the entire cross-section of society there. Generation Z has naturally come to the digital voice in recent years, growing up in constant contact with computers, smartphones and the Internet. This means that the new generation can – in general – verify data better. People “born with a smartphone in their hand” are much more efficient than previous years of using long tail keyword searches and controlling the accuracy of your message. It was required by their constant presence on the Internet – the constant bombardment with messages naturally made it necessary to filter them.

What does this mean for the marketer? It is more and more likely that the average social media user will say “check” and do a decent research on the product and the entire brand. Only transparency in communication will guarantee that it will not end in a crisis. Basing your offers and image on half-truths today is more risky than ever, and sooner or later marketing manipulations usually turn against dishonest scammers.

Don’t limit yourself to one medium

Does your brand only have a website and Facebook profile? It may not be enough. Diversification of traffic sources has even become a necessity. Your profile on a given portal may disappear in a fraction of a second, for example due to an algorithm error – of course, you will probably regain access to your account, but it may take some time. In such a situation, each day cuts you off from the sales channel, which is in fact irreplaceable. If you don’t separate your traffic sources, you are completely dependent on one of them. Only a skillful combination of SEO, Google Ads and marketing on various social networks will bring meaningful results.

Match the message to the platform

Each social media has its own rules – it results from both the technicalities and the general target group of a given portal. There are of course some universal guidelines, but each portal is a kind of a separate world with a separate communication code. Twitter doesn’t post long elaborations, TikTok is ruled by video – of course you can fight it and go against the tide on a given platform, but most likely it will just end up with very poor results. Use especially the technical guidelines of a given portal, for example, choose the size and format of graphics carefully for the platform.

Don’t count on organic

You refresh your Facebook feed, and after pressing F5 you see completely different posts than a second ago. You set Facebook as the “show newest” user and a moment later you see again what the algorithm has chosen for you. Big data rules social media – organic reach is successively decreasing, and portals find new ways to monetize users’ activities every day.

Although it is less and less frequent, many social media specialists still believe that it is better to publish, for example, 4 or 5 sales posts a week, instead of one, but “burnt” with a decent campaign, significantly increasing the reach and click-throughs. Overproduction of content on social media disturbs rather than helps, and by engaging the time of graphic designers and copywriters, such an approach can actually increase the financial and time cost, rather than optimize it.

Don’t look at the number of likes

The number of likes really matters little. Of course, a large number in the profile adds to a certain digital prestige, which is important for potential collaboration with other brands and overall brand perception on the Web, but usually the impact of this factor is horribly overestimated.

Facebook is slowly withdrawing from showing this value on fan pages, which means that the exposure of the number of “likes” decreases (the number of followers of a given page remains public, however). Algorithms reduce the reach of posts – organic traffic in social media experiences difficult moments without any prospects for improvement. Your posts won’t be shown to all subscribers without your ad investment.

It can be assumed that if the fanpage was set up a few years ago, a certain number of users no longer use a Facebook account. These dead souls are of no value to the marketer – an inactive user is not a potential customer.

The same is true when we decide to buy followers – apart from ethical issues, it will not actually help us sell the product in any way. Fake accounts “clog up” the space to display our posts and advertisements that could be used for marketing purposes. The fake account will not buy your product, which will burn through your advertising budget. It is also prestigiously a complete shot in the foot – the flood of likes from suspicious-looking foreign accounts will light a red lamp for anyone with anything to do with social media marketing.

Use Stories

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even recently LinkedIn – all these portals strongly focus on fleeting content in the form of reports. Social media posts have always been characterized by a lot of flyby, and the Stories format makes the shelf life of a message shorter than ever.

However, the data show that a skilfully prepared relationship can bring great reach and sales effects. In order to conduct effective marketing in social media, you cannot afford to disregard this format.

React quickly and use RTM

It is not only about responding to customer questions instantly, although this is of course also a very important aspect of social media marketing.

Is the occasional post for Valentine’s Day, the football world cup or the presidential election real-time marketing? Theoretically yes, because it concerns current events, but usually such activities have zero marketing power. They are simply predictable – we have known the date of these events for a long time, we see news about it long before the actual event, so there is no chance for a surprise effect.

Good real-time marketing is based on spontaneity, instinct and quick reaction. When an internet buzz about a topic breaks out, it usually fades away after a few days. “Late” and “imitative” are two words that should definitely not be associated with real-time marketing. In many companies, this is of course due to the need to “pass” a given post through all levels and the acceptance of several people. Real-time marketing, however, requires overcoming the organizational power of inertia – in this case it is better to react as quickly as possible or not at all.

Lead magnet – what is it?

To explain what a lead magnet is, let’s first briefly discuss what a lead itself is. This is the name of a person or company that has somehow interacted with our website / profile on social media and left an e-mail address, telephone number or other personal data, with the help of which we can contact them and convince them to use our offers.

Internet users are usually very reluctant to share their data anywhere, and fewer and fewer things are able to encourage them to do so. They are inundated with requests to leave a contact, therefore, fearing spam, they are skeptical about each of them and carefully analyze whether it will be profitable for them in any way.

Such thinking of the users of the global network resulted in the creation of the concept of a lead magnet, i.e. simply a lead magnet. This strategy of acquiring contacts with potential customers is very simple – in exchange for contact details, we offer something for free that the recipient needs or at least that can be useful to him. It is a model of acquiring leads in which both parties stand in a winning position – the recipient gains an attractive gift, and your company – the person who may be interested in its offer.

How to make a lead magnet?

So the question is how to make a good lead magnet. As with most questions, there is no single right answer to this either. Audience groups differ from one another and have different needs, so it is natural that there is no one magnet that will attract everyone. However, it is very important that the lead magnet meets several basic conditions, i.e. it should be:

Related to the industry
It is known that if we run a dentist’s office, we will not give potential customers a gift in the form of a guide for farmers applying for a subsidy. Lead magnet should be related to the area in which we operate.

Beneficial for the recipient
The gift must be attractive enough for the recipient to consider that it is worth providing contact details in return for it. It should solve a problem or increase the comfort of his work, in other words, be useful to him.

Simple to use
For example, if we want to provide the recipient with access to the tool, it will only work as a lead magnet if the tool is as intuitive as possible. When the user has to spend time reading the manual or painstakingly learn the operation himself, he loses interest.

Easily accessible
Few of your potential customers will be interested in a lead magnet if you need to email a company to get it, for example. It will simply cost them too much effort. The gift should be easy to download – for example by clicking the appropriate button on the landing page.

Original
We will not attract people with a gift that is easy to get even without leaving contact details. So a lead magnet in the form of an article about makeup trends will not work, because there are plenty of such materials on the Internet. Only something that will interest the recipient and will be unique will be a magnet.

Lead magnet – examples

Creating a lead magnet may be more or less time-consuming. Often, however, gifts that work are easy for an industry expert to make and don’t take hours to make. Here are some examples of lead magnets that are a great help for many companies in collecting contacts for potential customers.

Educational lead magnets

Gifts that convey valuable, proven knowledge on a topic are highly appreciated by Internet users. Such lead magnets can take many forms. A simple and effective gift is, for example, an infographic, i.e. a material explaining an issue in a visually friendly way. In this way, the hairdressing salon can show, for example, how to create an effective hairstyle in just a few steps; yoga studio – explain a short sequence of exercises for the spine; tire dealer – show how to check tread wear. It is true that you can find such information on the web, but if we explain it clearly, illustrating with appropriate graphics, we will gain material that Internet users will be happy to read.

More complicated, longer topics can be presented in the form of a webinar or a tutorial. A specialist can include a lot of information in an accessible form, providing examples from his experience and worked out tricks helpful for the client. Of course, he will not reveal all his secrets, but he will reveal the secret, which will make him an expert in the eyes of the recipients, who is worth returning to for paid materials or services. Following the industries selected for the article: a hair stylist can talk about his ways to nourish hair damaged by bleaching, a yoga instructor – about the specificity of a given type of yoga, and a tire seller with strengths and weaknesses of various tire manufacturers.

Free e-books and guides are also very popular among Internet users. Such materials do not have to be several hundred pages long – several dozen or even a dozen are enough. They should be nicely prepared, enriched with graphics or charts, made available for download on a specially prepared landing page. What materials can be created here? For example, our hairdresser could make a Korean hair care guide, a yoga instructor – a guide for beginner practitioners, and a salesperson – a comparison of different tire models.

Ready to download

Not only education works in the form of lead magnets, but also providing potential clients with materials that they can use in their daily work brings significant profits. Here, for example, a calendar is a popular gift. It does not have to be handed out on paper, a printable PDF or desktop wallpaper is enough. Of course, such a calendar must be adapted to the needs of the target group and stand out among the standard versions available on various websites. If the calendar is to be useful for the teacher, it should contain information about the beginning of summer holidays, the end of the semester, exam dates, etc. dates of settlements, submission of documents, etc.

Another gadget useful for recipients will be a planner or a replenishment schedule. Such a tool allows you to clearly plan your daily duties, and if it is well designed, it is not only functional, but also a nice addition to the office.

Checklists are also interesting prefabs that can be used as lead magnet. It can be a cheat sheet to talk to a potential client, a list of things to check before buying a car, or a list of things to do before accepting it. It is also worth playing these materials graphically, focusing on transparency.

Tools that make your work easier

Very often, an element that attracts potential customers is also a free template to download. We are talking about various patterns, not only graphic ones. Depending on the industry, it may be a template for a diploma, official letter, or a household budget planning sheet. Many people cannot or do not have time to create them on their own, so they willingly use ready-made products prepared by companies.

An example of a lead magnet are also various web applications and online calculators. How to make such a lead magnet and use it? Suppose we run a DIY store. We can create a calculator, thanks to which our potential customers will calculate how much paint, cement or other material will be needed to perform the renovation. At the same time, however, the tool will be free only for logged in users, i.e. those who left their data.

Demo versions and discounts

We can also collect leads by offering customers special opportunities that are financially profitable. It certainly includes demo versions of programs and tools, free access to a chapter in the case of books, or access to one lesson when we sell courses. Lead magnets good for many industries that offer services are free quotes and consultations or free audits.

In addition, it is also worth thinking about discounts for people who subscribe to the newsletter, set up an account in the system or simply leave their e-mail address.

Lead magnet – a technique for acquiring contacts for any business

When it comes to lead magnet, there can be many more examples – the more original and interesting the content, the greater the chance that it will help in building a contact base. However, it is worth remembering that the key issue should be the usefulness of the materials for a given group of recipients. So before we decide to invest time and money in creating such a magnet, it is necessary to analyze the needs of the recipients and examine what similar content is already available on the web.