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4 tips to maximize your ad spend and protect the customer experience

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When an economic downturn strikes, what’s the first thing you do? 

Eliminate wasteful spending. 

As marketers, we know well that our budgets are the first to get cut. Marketing is notoriously undervalued, even though research shows that companies who didn’t cut their marketing spend during a recession actually bounced back more strongly than those who did.  

However, this doesn’t change the fact that we all have a target on our backs, no matter our talent or seniority. And now that we’ve officially entered a bear market, uncertainties will only continue to grow. Regardless of your budget or headcount, it’s essential now more than ever to ensure no ad dollar is wasted by optimizing the ad-to-website experience.

Here are four ways you can make the most of your marketing budget while driving meaningful results for your business.

1. Audit your ads

No matter how hard you work to maximize your marketing spend, there will always be at least one campaign or channel that just isn’t giving you the most bang for your buck. In fact, studies show that 26% of marketing budgets are wasted on ineffective channels and strategies. 

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While this is a common problem among marketers, you need to be particularly aggressive about maximizing ad spend in a period of economic uncertainty. Ensuring you’re not wasting a single ad dollar, impression or website visit should be your north star right now. In order to do this, you need to review your current advertising efforts to understand what’s working and what’s not.

As you review your ads, ask yourself these questions:

  • Targeting: Is everyone on your list the best fit for your brand or product, or can you narrow down your targeting further? It may cost more, but they’ll be higher quality and more likely to convert.
  • Engagement: What is your cost per click and cost per conversion? Which ads are driving the most engagement and which are driving the least? Are the most engaging ads also your biggest revenue generators? If not, go back and revisit your targeting.
  • Landing pages: Is there continuity from your ad to your landing page? Is the landing page static, or does it dynamically adjust based on the visitor or buyer segment? Beyond brand continuity, you’re also looking to deliver a seamless buyer experience.
  • Channels: What is your spend and ROI for each channel? Which channels are driving the most conversions and which are driving the least? Are you hitting the benchmarks for those channels for your industry? If you don’t know what the benchmark is, ask your rep—they all have baseline benchmarks per industry.
  • Bidding: Are your bids manual or automated? How can you optimize them for maximum reach and budget efficiency?

2. Test, test, test

Being agile is one of the best qualities you can have as a marketer in an economic downturn, so use this as an opportunity to prove your value. If you’re going to make every ad dollar count, you need to test your messaging before launch, optimize your creative throughout and constantly optimize your website and landing pages toward conversions throughout the entire lifecycle of each campaign.

Whether you choose to A/B test, use rules, or choose Continuous Conversion to “always be testing” it can take a lot of time and resources you might not have. Consider how AI and machine learning can help you optimize your ads and landing pages to increase lift all while delivering a seamless ad-to-website brand experience to your customer. 

3. Protect the customer experience

All too often we spend so much time perfecting our ad copy or visuals that we forget about the post-click portion of the customer journey. But when we take the time to optimize the entire customer experience from the first touch to last, that’s when we see big results.

It’s no secret that customer experience has become one of the most important components of a purchase decision for B2B and e-commerce customers alike. Eighty percent of customers say they are more likely to purchase from a brand that offers a personalized experience. And while personalizing your ads is important (and is appealing to 90% of customers), it is just as essential to optimize and personalize all of the touch points that come after.

Here are a couple of ways you can create a seamless customer experience to boost campaign conversions and customer loyalty:

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  • Take the time to truly understand your audience. Thoughtful research will not only help you target the right segments but will help you craft messages that resonate with them once you understand their hearts and minds. This is why it is paramount to look at both quantitative (e.g. analytics) and qualitative (e.g. heatmaps, surveys, chatbot logs) data to get a full picture of your customer behavior and motivations. Once you flesh this out you can then serve up dynamic content specific to the ad they clicked on, whether they’re a new or repeat visitor, which products or pages they have visited previously, and other contextual and firmographic attributes so you can deliver the right experience at every touchpoint.
  • Test everything. When you test, you cannot fail. Even when you carefully research your audience, you still need to remove assumptions from your marketing and test everything in the field. Our world is always changing, and so are your customer’s needs and context. When you approach every single step of your customer journey with a testing mindset, you’ll generate continuous learnings about your audience and better predict how they will behave. With these learnings, you can optimize your entire customer experience so that it resonates with your customers at any given time and compels them to convert. 

4. Lean on automation

We know these first three tasks are no small feat, which is why it’s essential to lean on automation to continuously optimize your ad spend, landing pages and customer experience.

Automation is key to doing more with less and driving greater efficiencies at scale. When set up properly, your good ideas combined with automation are like a superpower. It saves you valuable time on tedious or complex tasks so you can put more effort into what you do best: coming up with great ideas to connect with your audience and deliver them the best experience.

While automation can’t do everything for you, here are a few things it can help you with:

  • Programmatic advertising: This marketing strategy automates the purchasing of your ads through a real-time bidding process so you can deliver hyper-targeted ads to the right audience (and without all the work!). Plus, you only pay for relevant impressions and have control over the price, frequency, goals and targeting.
  • Segmentation: Automated segmentation allows you to take people who have seen your ads and automatically group them together based on their shared characteristics. Using these segments, you can create hyper-personalized experiences based on those attributes and save a lot of time, money and resources.
  • Website personalization: Your end goal is to drive people to your website and get them to take action, and automated website personalization goes a long way toward that conversion. Using an AI-powered personalization solution, you can dynamically deliver a hyper-personalized website experience that matches each unique visitor’s needs. A great machine learning solution will be continuously learning and improving to adjust the experience in real-time to audience and market behaviors without the need for constant babysitting.

Final thoughts

Remember, when you test you cannot fail, machine learning is your friend, and nothing is set on rinse and repeat. When you take an iterative approach to your digital advertising, you’ll look like a marketing hero. 

For even more tips to optimize your ads and landing pages, read this blog.


About The Author

4 tips to maximize your ad spend and protect the

The largest squandered opportunity in marketing today is low conversion websites. Intellimize solves that problem. Our Continuous Conversion™ platform powers high conversion by using machine learning and marketers’ creative ideas to optimize website experiences for each unique visitor every time. Conversion-obsessed marketers at Snowflake, Sumo Logic, Gong, ServiceTitan, Tableau, Dermalogica, Sunbasket, Drift, and more use Intellimize to deliver more revenue, more customers, and more leads to sales. We’re headquartered in San Mateo, CA and are backed by leading investors including Cobalt Capital, Addition, Amplify Partners, Homebrew, and Precursor Ventures.

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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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