Starting new client relationships can be stressful. You know very little about their business (since you just started working together), so it’s harder to apply your marketing knowledge.
On the other hand, the PPC client’s trust in you is at an all-time low (because you just started working together), so it’s easy to feel a lot of pressure to perform.
For me, the first months of a relationship with a new client are like tests at school, where you have to show teacher customer that you know what you are doing. If the first few months are about the test, the first week is the lecture – and the best way to learn in class is to ask questions.
This is what I do, and you shouldalso: to ask a lot questions about them, their company, their objectives, their sector of activity – everything that will be useful to your new partnership.
Learn everything you can about them and their business, so you can use all the marketing knowledge you have in your big brain to help them achieve their goals.
Here are eight questions to get you started.
1. What are your business goals?
We’ll start with the most obvious here. You cannot be effective in any form of marketing without knowing the objectives, as the strategies can differ significantly depending on the client’s objectives.
With e-commerce, you will focus more on shopping campaigns and generating revenue, but a nonprofit can focus more on awareness. This is why it is extremely important to align on objectives before developing your PPC strategy.
Dig Deeper: PPC Client Launch: Strategies for a Successful First Meeting
2. Who is your target audience?
Marketing, at its core, has a simple goal: to get your product in front of the right people, in the right place, at the right time.
Keywords and geotargeting cover both time and location, but we still need to know who we want to advertise to.
Most companies have an “ideal customer,” or someone for whom their product or service is designed (for example, Michelob Ultra is designed for calorie-conscious beer drinkers).
Once you determine your ideal audience, you’ll have a much easier time writing ad copy and setting up display advertising on sites these users frequent.
3. What differentiates you from your competitors?
Drawing on your target audience, it is essential that you know the specific selling points of your client’s product or service. These sales pitches are used to convince our target audience that you are the answer to whatever problem they are facing.
Going back to the previous example, Michelob Ultra has fewer calories and carbs than most beers, setting it apart from its competitors, making it perfect for health-conscious beer drinkers. If you look at all of their advertising, they almost look like a sports brand, with all of their messaging focused on physical activity and having athletes benefit from their product afterward.
Finding your ideal audience and what sets you apart from your competitors is how you determine your brand message and should be one of your first questions when onboarding a new client.
Dig Deeper: How to Compare PPC Competitors: The Definitive Guide
4. What is your marketing budget?
Before developing a strategy, you need to know what type of monthly budget you are working with.
A local business with a $500 monthly budget can’t afford to be as aggressive as a multi-million dollar business. You must therefore adapt your strategy to this reality.
All budget levels can succeed in PPC, but the lower your budget, the more judicious you need to be in how you invest your money.
I like to start at the bottom of the marketing funnel and work my way up. With the lowest possible budget, you start at the bottom of the funnel (branded, some non-branded keywords). As you see success and increase the budget, you can start adding middle and upper funnel strategies to the mix.
Dig Deeper: Client onboarding and offboarding: the PPC agency guide
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5. What are the busiest/most important times of the year for your business?
Almost every business has some sort of seasonality. For many, this is the holiday season, when the majority of retail purchases are made, but this could be at any time, depending on the industry.
If there is a busy time of year, you’ll want to know so you can adjust your budget accordingly. The last thing you want is to get to the holiday season and have the same budget you had during the slowest time of the year.
6. Who are your main competitors?
Every business has competitors and finding out who your client’s competitors are will help you in several ways:
- This will give you a good idea of how the customer views their own business. A clothing company that says its main competitor is Supreme is very different from one that says its competitor is Fruit of the Loom.
- It allows you to research competitors and observe how they advertise. Use this information to decide what to do or not to do in your own advertising.
7. What is the LTV for a customer of your business?
Some products only require a single purchase, while many others require repeat purchases or are associated with recurring revenue.
Depending on the situation, tracking income from the initial purchase may not be your best option. Instead, it’s more useful to track the customer’s lifetime value (LTV). Tracking LTV gives you a much more accurate view of how your ads are performing.
For example, if you are advertising a subscription service that costs $20/month, under normal conversion tracking, each purchase would allocate $20 to the campaign.
However, you discover that a customer subscribes for 10 months on average, or an LTV of $200. In this situation, LTV tracking attributes 10x more revenue to your campaign and gives you a much better idea of how aggressive you are in PPC advertising.
8. How quickly do you expect results?
After discussing company goals and strategy at length, I like to finish by setting expectations. Although you may experience success with PPC faster than with other marketing channels, it is by no means an instant solution.
The best PPC results come from working consistently and intentionally. I like to describe it like a snowball rolling down a hill: it starts slowly, but as you get more and more data, the snowball starts rolling faster and the results improve.
It is extremely important to be on the same page regarding deadlines and continuous optimization in order to have an excellent long-term relationship with clients.
Start new PPC client relationships with the right questions
One of the best parts of the job is discovering new businesses and helping them succeed, but to do that you have to start things off on the right foot. This means asking the right questions.
You can probably think of 10 other questions that I haven’t included here, and that’s great!
The more questions, the better.
Ask so that you and your client can feel confident and prepared for this new working relationship.
Dig Deeper: 6 Tips for Building PPC Client Relationships
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