How Wallaroo Media made a client $347,815 with $16,571 in ad spend
Wallaroo Media had a new client approach them with a challenge: to become a household name in every closet and drive dramatically increased sales through online advertising channels. Every woman utters the words “I have nothing to wear” at least once as she stares at a closet full of clothes, so this brand wanted to change that.
“Challenge accepted”, Wallaroo said.
To accomplish this goal, Wallaroo knew they needed to get new merchandise in front of new audiences and present it in a visually stunning way that the target audience couldn’t help but click.
The solution?
Facebook and Instagram advertising!
As they kicked off the project and got to work, they realized they had some dynamics at play that would serve them very well as well as being challenges to growing successful campaigns.
Challenge: Visual and Click-Inducing Merchandise
Because this client is a women’s ecommerce boutique, it’s visual and click-inducing. Wallaroo Media knew that clothing that was promoted would sell out very quickly.
This is a fantastic issue for an ecommerce shop, but it also presents a challenge to marketers because ads (“creative” in the advertising business) need to swapped out quickly when the product is no longer available so as to avoid wasting ad spend.
To accomplish this, Wallaroo Media:
- created ad designs that could be easily mixed and matched with new images and copy, and
- created copy that matched the brand and audience they were trying to reach.
They did this all with the two client goals in mind:
- Generate online sales for boutique inventory updated weekly;
- Keep audiences interested in styles of clothing that are being sold at other boutiques.
How They Work With The Client
Client communication is one of the most underrated parts of a successful engagement, whether you are hiring a consultant/agency or are the consultant/agency. Communication solves many problems, and many problems are avoided by simply communicating early in the process to reach understandings around goals and approaches.
For Wallaroo, they sought:
- To generate online sales for boutique inventory with high turnover, they established clear communication with the client to receive new images for design before inventory went live so they could have ads designed and ready for implementation once new arrivals launched. They also created lookalike audiences of their customer email list for advanced targeting purposes.
- To keep audiences interested in this boutique’s particular styles, they chose to highlight features of items that were key selling points for our audience.
The Results
The ad campaign ran for 5 months before the case study was created.
Over that period of time, the client spent a total of $16,571 on ads.
These ads directly generated $347,815 in revenue over five months!
To read the whole case study on their site: http://wallaroomedia.com/womens-ecommerce-boutique-case-study/
What’s the best CMS for small business SEO?
One question we get a lot is:
What’s the best CMS for small to medium size businesses to use for SEO?
I do not believe that anyone should choose a particular CMS (or theme or code language) only for SEO reasons, as there are many things to take into account with a website’s backed such as:
- Maintenance/maintainability
- Ability to customize according to your business’s unique needs
- Ease of use (if the users are non-technical)
PPC Pricing Ponderings: In Defense of Percentage of Spend (And a New Model!)
This is a guest post from Kirk Williams, the founder of Zato Marketing, an industry-leading PPC specialist, and an all around good dude. He read my post a couple of weeks ago and wanted to write this response. I sprinkle a little bit of commentary through it in italics. Enjoy! – John
Last week, the savvy and wise (John note: and good looking!) John Doherty (flattery gets me everywhere, right??) wrote a thought-provoking post concluding that percentage of spend fees in PPC pricing models were ill-advised.
Since I am writing this article as a response, you may want to read through his initial article here: Why Paying A Percentage of Ad Spend Sets Everyone Up for Failure
John and I talked before he published the post, and we were able to think through some aspects of his analysis, as well as PPC pricing models. I asked if he would mind if I wrote a “response” of sorts to his article, and he graciously acquiesced!
How to market a small business
If you are looking to market your small (or medium or even large) business, it’s all about your audience. That’s where you start and that’s how you market to them.
Why Paying A Percentage of Ad Spend Sets Everyone Up for Failure
I have problems with paid acquisition agencies who charge a percentage of spend. It’s the PPC version of hourly pricing, where you’re paid for the number of hours that you work.
Here’s my problem with hourly pricing and thus billing a percentage of spend:
Incentives are misaligned and it rarely leads to a successful engagement on both sides.
Website Page Architecture for SEO
I work on a lot of large websites. Most of the time when I am brought in to work on one of these sites, whether a content site or a marketplace (similar to ecommerce), one of the biggest changes I can make is fixing their site architecture.
That’s what we are talking about today.
How Does Content Marketing Work?
Ah content marketing. Content marketing has been the darling of the digital marketing world for the last 5 years, once SEO became much more complicated and difficult (you can’t just throw a bunch of links at a page and expect it to rank long term anymore) and PPC started to get more expensive.
A lot of people, myself included, started beating the content marketing drum with the implicit promise that content would solve all your business’s problems.
“Content is king!” they would cry. “No it’s queen, X is king!” the naysayers would yell back.
10 Questions to ask SEO Consultants
If you’ve never hired an SEO consultant or agency before, you likely don’t know where to start.
These are the questions you should ask a potential SEO consultant or agency:
- What are some of the strategies and tactics you have seen working well recently for a business like mine?
- Can you give me some examples of working with a site like mine?
- How often do you report on the work you are doing, and how can I know if it is successful?
- How does an engagement with you typically start, and what do you require from me?
- What’s your approach to link building?
- Do you have a minimum project engagement length?
- If approached, would you work with my direct competitors as clients?
- How long does SEO usually take to start working after someone begins working with you, and what level of effort is required?
- Who will I speak with on a regular basis?
- How much should I expect to pay?
Let’s explore each of these in depth.
Should You Hire The Person Who Ranks #1 For SEO Queries?
I’ve seen this question so many times that I want to give my thoughts on whether or not you should hire an SEO agency simply because they rank #1 or #2 for queries relevant to their business, such as “SEO agency Denver”.
How does SEO actually work?
Update: you can now download these as a PDF here.
In my day to day, I get asked questions such as “But what specifically will you do to grow my audience?”, “What specifically did you do to get those results?”, or “How long should I expect SEO to take before it works?” often.
If I had a dollar for each time I was asked, I’d already own that SUV I have my eye on.
Through this post you will see multiple examples of what different search marketers and agencies have done to grow their clients.
Your takeaway should be that there are many ways to grow a website, and there is no one-size-fits-all strategy. Every business and site are different, and depending on history of SEO work the strategies and tactics needed to be done will vary. This post should serve as a set of signposts and give you ideas for what the different paths to take could be. If you need help figuring out where to start, maybe engage someone on Credo for a technical SEO site audit.