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In sports, there is what’s known as a “trick play.”
This is an unexpected, not-so-common tactic that the opposing team isn’t expecting. Due to its unique nature, the play often produces great results.
Marketers need to think about their own trick plays. In the business setting, this means out of the box ideas to increase sales or reach your other marketing goals.
These strategies produce better-than-average marketing results because they are the type of ideas that competitors haven’t thought of yet. So you should think of out-of-the box marketing ideas to get the advantage.
In this discussion, we’ll look at examples of out of the box ideas to increase sales in your PPC accounts using different tools and strategies.
Let’s get started.
Marketing has always been a hyper-competitive field. In the Digital Age, this is even more true. Businesses have to contend with even more competitors than in the past, making it harder to engage customers and drive sales consistently.
Aside from helping you stay ahead of the competition and keep your conversion rates steady, there are many reasons why out of the box ideas increase your sales in PPC.
Knowing your target audience is vital to successful marketing. The deeper you understand your customers, the easier it is to develop relevant, engaging experiences.
There are many different types of audience insights, ranging from demographic information to interests and even helping you understand when and where customers are active.
Since out of the box ideas are new and fresh, they help you test what sort of strategies capture the audience’s attention best.
Over time, as you test more interesting ideas, you’ll start to separate the strategies that work versus those that don’t.
This is essential to successful marketing — minimize what doesn’t work and maximize what does.
Out of the box ideas increase your sales because, like a trick play, they are unexpected and new. Customers are always delighted by what’s fresh and exciting, which improves engagement and conversion rates.
New, creative strategies attract more attention. Such types of experiences that have the chance of breaking out and even going viral.
People love to be the first to share something completely unseen before.
Plus, when audiences compare your strategies alongside what every competitor is doing, yours will be sure to stand out.
Being different can be a great asset when marketing on competitive channels, like social media or search results pages.
Out of the box ideas don’t just help you attract new prospects, but also keep the ones you have.
It’s easy for your current customers to lose interest when your strategies become stale and stagnant.
As your customers start to lose interest or become less engaged with your experiences, it becomes easier for competitors to draw them in.
While not every unique, out of the box idea will pay off, the ones that do should keep your strategies fresh enough to continue engaging your audiences.
Plus, customers are always willing to voice their opinions when things are to their liking or not. This can be valuable to inform your other strategies and better understand what meshes with audience interests and what does not.
The most valuable information is knowledge that you can apply yourself. So, let’s take a look at examples of out of the box ideas to increase sales in pay-per-click.
You can use any of these ideas in your own ad campaign optimization to help raise your conversion rates and other key performance metrics.
Before getting started, you should consider reevaluating your audience.
Often, businesses have a rigid idea of their target audience. However, this doesn’t guarantee that it is the only, or even the best, customer profile that suits your business. There may be other audience segments that you haven’t tapped into.
The first out of the box idea to increase sales in PPC is through your keyword research. This may seem on the nose, but it depends on how you approach your PPC keyword research.
For many marketers, it’s about finding the most popular and prominent keyword targets. For a car dealership, keywords like “buy a new car,” “car sales,” or “cheap cars” are the first few that come to mind.
Popular keywords look promising because so many people are actively searching for these topics. The problem is that they are also popular amongst your competitors, meaning that it will be challenging to rank for these search terms.
The out of the box approach is to look for less obvious keywords. While these keywords may have less search volume, they could actually produce better results.
For instance, longer keyword phrases tend to be more specific and have a clear intent. This allows you to match content and offers that are more relevant.
If someone simply searches for “buy new car,” we don’t know the type or brand of car, how much money they want to spend, etc. However, if that search is “buy a new SUV $3000 down,” there’s a lot more context and value.
To summarize, the deeper you go with your keywords, the more out of the box targets you’ll find.
Have you ever thought about the time of day that your ads and marketing messages appear?
If not, you should probably start because catching a prospective customer at the right time can make all the difference.
This is where your sales and marketing data can be a huge help. You can look through this information to determine which days of the week customers are most active and likely to purchase.
Once you’ve determined your most active days, you can begin looking at specific times of high activity. This allows you to zero in on the exact time frames that produce the best results, whether it’s weekends, Monday mornings, Friday afternoons or any other time slot.
The other way to approach your timing is to be active when competitors are not. If every competitor targets customers between 12AM and 1PM, a great strategy is to push your ads outside this time frame. You’ll face lower costs and higher ad ranks.
Another way to refine your targeting is by user location. No matter the size of your company, you’re dealing with audiences from different areas.
If your customers are across the US, you have to consider that the interests, values and beliefs of someone in Minnesota are not the same as someone in Florida.
These differences only become more extreme for global companies targeting ads to prospective customers in various countries.
Even a local restaurant has people from different towns and neighborhoods coming to eat. Local companies can target ads by distance, adding another layer of value to your strategies.
When looking at your PPC marketing metrics by location, pay attention to the areas producing your best and worst results.
You may find that certain locations are wasting too much ad spend to be valuable. You may need to exclude these areas from your targeting.
Marketers often spend so much time selecting which keywords to target that they don’t consider the ones they should not be bidding for.
Your negative keyword list is a great out of the box idea to increase sales and improve your conversion rates. It works by selecting keywords that you want to ignore in your targeting.
There are several reasons why you want to exclude certain search terms.
Remarketing is a highly effective out of the box idea to increase sales. It’s the act of retargeting visitors that have already left your site.
If you’ve ever shopped for a product online, left before purchasing, and then seen ads for that product all over the Internet, you’ve experienced remarketing first hand.
Traffic from your PPC ads make great remarketing targets. These individuals have already expressed interest in your business when they clicked your ad. Plus, you’ve paid your click cost for this interaction.
Remarketing is the opportunity to bring these individuals back to your site again and convert their business the second time.
You can also use remarketing to encourage future actions from customers that have already converted. For instance, a retail company doesn’t want a shopper to only make one purchase, but keep returning for future sales.
Remarketing helps you keep your business and brands fresh in customers’ minds and encourage them to return again and again. This maximizes the lifetime value of each customer.
Creating imaginative, compelling and never-before-seen marketing strategies is not an easy task. The best out of the box ideas to increase sales originate from creative brainstorming and collaboration sessions.
Sadly, many marketers find it hard to carve out time in the day to just sit and strategize.
You have so many responsibilities and moving parts to track, especially in PPC marketing. How do you find time to sit and develop out of the box ideas of your own?
The answer is automation.
Automation has the power to free up hours out of your daily marketing routines. This is time that you can then allocate to higher priority tasks, like brainstorming the next big marketing idea to give you a leg up on the competition!
There are many tasks on your daily marketing to-do list that, while necessary, are incredibly tedious and time-consuming.
For example, PPC marketers are in charge of monitoring ad accounts for noteworthy changes, tracking any fluctuations that occur and analyzing the data to find out the cause.
But, given the size, complexity and speed of your PPC data, this is like trying to control a birthday party full of sugar-laden kids.
You’re going to be pulled in every which way, putting out fires when you can. At the end of the day, you’ve only managed to mitigate some of the damage.
With marketing automation software, you can take much of the pressure off your shoulders. The right PPC management tool can automatically monitor your campaigns for risks and opportunities and present only the most significant data to you.
Instead of looking everywhere, you can focus on the data alerts that matter most.
Automated marketing analysis tools have become the hottest item on every marketer’s wish list. As a result, new companies are appearing all the time with the promise of automated marketing solutions.
While having lots of choices is great, it comes at a cost. How do you find the best PPC optimization tool and avoid the duds?
There’s one easy solution: choose PPC Signal.
PPC Signal is a complete Google Ads management tool that uses machine learning algorithms that automatically scan your account for notable changes in performance.
When the system notices a significant increase or decrease in the data, it springs into action and begins analyzing the data.
This all happens behind the scenes. What you see is this:
This is PPC Signal’s primary dashboard, where the tool presents all of the active changes in your account.
Each active signal represents a complete PPC marketing insight that’s been packaged and ready for you to open. Here’s one example:
In this small window, you can see:
The system also tracks changes over different dimensions, like device type, location or time. For this sample, the cost per conversion is rising in Charlton, MA.
The Explore button allows you to open the insight and view the details more closely.
There are many beneficial features on this page. The first you’ll notice is the enlarged chart, which makes it easier to see your data up close. You can even use the zoom slider to look even closer.
That said, the real value of this chart is the ability to look at multiple metrics alongside one another.
Many metrics in PPC marketing share close relationships with each other. A change in clicks, for example, will create a ripple effect that impacts other measures.
Adding extra performance metrics to this visualization lets you see how the insight impacts your other metrics. You may also discover the root cause of the insight.
This interactive chart also allows you to view the data as a table and export the information to use elsewhere.
At the top of the page, you’ll see the signal details, along with options to Bookmark or Take Action.
Bookmarking a signal will allow you to return to it later on. This is an excellent tool if you want to wait before you react to the change or you don’t have time to address the opportunity or problem at the moment.
Using the Take Action button will allow you to resolve this problem. If you do not know how to act, PPC Signal will suggest a follow-up activity to respond to the data.
In essence, the PPC Signal system handles the monitoring and analysis of your PPC data, so all you have to do is choose what data to investigate and how to act.
In the sample screenshot of the PPC Signal dashboard, you can see 21 active changes ready to be explored.
This is a relatively small PPC campaign and scrolling through a handful of new insights isn’t that tedious. The problem starts with larger accounts that house hundreds of campaigns.
In this scenario, it would be easy to have hundreds of active changes on your dashboard daily. That’s a lot of insights to dig through!
You don’t want to resolve these actionable insights in order. Instead, you want to focus on the most significant changes impacting your goals.
PPC Signal makes it easy to filter out the less essential changes to focus on the signals with the most value.
Along the left side of the dashboard are several filtering options.
You can filter by:
These filters enable you to interact with your insights how you want. You can choose to focus on a specific metric, like clicks or conversion rate. Or, you could pick a particular campaign to begin optimizing first.
One of the most complex types of changes to detect in your data are anomalies. By definition, an anomaly deviates from what’s expected or normal.
This abnormal quality makes it hard to pinpoint where an anomaly occurs, why it started and how to act.
PPC Signal highlights abnormal changes and presents them as complete insights. Consider the following signal:
What makes this an anomaly? In PPC, more impressions should result in more clicks. If more people see your ad, you anticipate more clicks.
This insight shows that, for this particular campaign, the opposite is occurring. While your impressions are steadily increasing, clicks are actually decreasing.
Detecting this anomaly helps you quickly fix the problem to ensure that you’re fully taking advantage of the influx of impressions.
Search ads are the most popular form of PPC marketing because of their effectiveness. People continue to turn to search engines to answer questions, find new products and more. The Google Search Network allows you to pay for top positions on search results pages for keywords relevant to your business.
PPC advertising is highly effective. Being a top result, paid or otherwise, on search results pages leads to more website traffic, higher sales and many other benefits. It’s a small price to pay for a potentially big reward, depending on how high you value your conversions.
The best out of the box ideas to increase sales are the ones that are both creative and strategic. New experiences are always more attractive to customers. If you can bring a fresh angle to your marketing, you’ll see good results. That said, also consider what’s relevant and valuable to customers. That’s the strategic side of things.
The best out of the box ideas to increase sales are only as good as your ability to repeat them.
PPC Signal’s automated Google Ads management solution allows you to find daily ways to improve your marketing campaign effectiveness.
Consistently and automatically discovering new actionable insights help you continuously grow your strategies (and your business) and build a competitive edge.
You’ll be able to seize emerging opportunities faster than your competitors. At the same time, you’ll also detect early warning signs of possible risks and mitigate them before they cause significant damage to your performance.
This ability to maximize value and minimize losses daily in a straightforward and efficient environment is a powerful advantage.
Not only does PPC Signal optimize your campaigns, but also your Google Ads costs and time. This frees up resources to commit to even better out of the box ideas to increase sales!
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