This article is a weekly summary of where we’re spending our money as an agency (K&J Growth) for our clients and what other organic initiatives are working for my other company, Rugby Bricks. I’ll share my top two tips from the week and the one thing that we’ve found isn’t working. Let’s dive in. 

Last week, we produced 109 pieces of organic content and spent $37,886 on paid ads. Here are some highlights that have crossed over from Rugby Bricks and our paid spend on the K&J side: 

1. Better Retargeting

It’s no secret that Facebook ads aren’t what they used to be.

In the last year alone, the cost per click is up 50%, and the cost per impression is up 25%. This means more money in Facebook’s pockets and less in yours.

We’ve been navigating this problem at K&J Growth, our performance marketing agency, for a while now, and we’ve just made another breakthrough. This week, we’ve increased our lead conversion rate by 108% with remarketing ads.

Remarketing is the act of running ads targeted toward past visitors to your site.

You’ll have seen these on Facebook many times. They’re those ads on your feed saying that ‘you must have forgotten to complete your order, hurry back for blah blah blah’. Or maybe you don’t recall them at all – which is precisely the problem.

For forever, retargeting ads have been the most profitable on Facebook – in our experience, they outperform cold audience ads by anywhere from 10 – 20x. But most brands know that now, so everyone is running them, and they all look the same.

So this is what we’re doing with our retargeting ads to stand out.

Your Target

First, you’ve got to decide who you’re retargeting. At K&J, we’re retargeting people who’ve visited our sales page but not taken any further action, i.e. they haven’t clicked our ‘contact us’ button. 

Your Creative

Once you know where you’re retargeting your audience from, you’ve got to create ads that match your website experience. We use the same Headline, Subtitle and Imagery from our sales page.

– Note that most brands use generic copy and imagery for retargeting ads that don’t match their website. So they blend in with every other retargeting ad on FB

Mistake #1

Your Offer

Now that you’ve got someone’s attention because your ad stands out in their feed, and they recall who you are as they’ve been to your website. It’s time to make an offer – but don’t just say, ‘please come back to our website we want your money‘

Mistake #2

Give more. At K&J, we direct people back to a case study on our website to further prove the value we can create for a client.

You could offer a free trial, money-back guarantee or video testimony from your customers.

In terms of the ad setup itself we choose:

1. Set up a “conversion” campaign as an auction buying type

2. When you’ve had enough people visit your site (typically over 10 K visits in the last 180 days) you choose a daily budget if you’re on a shorter time frame choose a lifetime budget

3. When choosing the audience make a custom audience that has people who only visited this URL (your offer sales page) and then exclude anyone who visited your success URL (your conversion offer page)

4. Then match your creative strategy to what is above

Again you need a lot of visitors to do this but you can run your ads to the prospective audience who didn’t convert the first time around. 

Make your retargeting ads stand out by using copy and imagery that matches your on-site page experience and offer a little more to bring people back to your website.

2. Try Before You Buy

A lot of SaaS companies (and one of our clients) are now moving to a lightweight free version of a product on the landing page of their site for people to test that isn’t gated – no email, no name or no number.

The typical freemium model has been to put a gate between the user and something of high value as a trial and then grab details for remarketing. Our client has seen a conversion rate increase of 30%+ sign up for product demos compared to their prior gated method.

Here’s what their CTA’s (notice more than one) are looking like: 

Want a guided demo from our team – or prefer a self-guided interactive demo?

Want to try it now (no forms required) – or ready to sign-up and get started?

Want to start with an empty account – or borrow a pre-built template from us?

Here is an example of a site (www.veed.io) that is doing this type of user onboarding. 

Most users want to poke around before we commit and the product is the sales tool. 

3. What Hasn’t Been Working

We’ve been running small snippets for organic traffic on Quora – I receive roughly 20 K+ views on the content I produced over 4 years ago. We’re doing this in two ways:

1. Updating old posts with outbound links to our newsletter – basically, they didn’t let me update any of my previous answers and removed the link because it violated their community guidelines. We tried doing this slowly one answer a week and rapidly all at once. Neither worked

2. Writing new posts based on the content we’re producing with outbound links to the article. The posts received little to no upvotes but performed incredibly well on Reddit

We’ve given up on this as a channel for traffic. We may need to recalibrate our approach but after a month of tackling this, we’re now exhausted. If anyone has seen any other growth tactics that are working for you on Quora let me know in the comments – more than happy to be proven wrong.