So what is the solution to effectively grow the market share of these challenger brands while improving their online positioning?

Turning a challenger brand into a market leader requires following a specific five step process. Each step builds on the one before it resulting in a continuous cycle – a cycle of growth and efficiency.

First, let’s review the steps:

1. Conduct a market analysis of your client’s vertical
2. Dig into their competitors using Competitive Intelligence (CI)
3. Audit your client’s program and baseline
4. Create efficiency through optimization
5. Use the room you created to test and drive growth

Rinse and repeat.

By properly leveraging this cycle, you can take a brand that is spending significantly less than their competitors in the market and incrementally increase their market share through growth and efficiency tactics.

This strategy proved highly successful for one of the current US leaders in aesthetic services –  laser hair removal, cellulite reduction. They initially committed to $50,000 in monthly spend at 2,500 leads/month. Due to the straight direct response nature of this vertical, brand growth would be determined by driving efficient leads, bookings, and ultimately patients. That’s a tough job.

In order to do it, efficiency needs to be created first, lowering CPA to make room for testing and growth. After applying the cycle of growth and efficiency over the course of the two-year campaign, their spend rose to $650,000 a month while averaging the same CPA from the day the program started while their volume increased over 11 times. They grew from a challenger brand into the market leader and maintain that position today.

Now that you have an example to reference, let’s go through each step so that you can adhere to the same process to help turn your challenger brand clients into market leaders.

1.  Conduct A Market Analysis Of The Vertical

In order to understand the potential of growth, it’s important to research your client’s vertical. To do this, you’ll want to communicate with agency representatives at Google, Bing and Facebook. They can help you understand the maximum search volume in your client’s market across search, display and social. The total impressions and clicks constitute your target measure, the goal being to efficiently reach 90% impression share.

This data can also be used to determine the maximum spend by multiplying the maximum clicks with the average CPC of a top three position.

2.  Dig Into Competitors Using Competitive intelligence (CI)

Success in the complex PPC marketplace requires a blend of paid search expertise, cost-effective budgeting strategies and the right technologically advanced tools to drive results.

In an earlier article for Search Engine Land, How to Use 3 Competitive Intelligence PPC Tools - leading budgetary, bidding and competition monitoring products were highlighted to give paid search campaigns a competitive edge.

Applications like iSpionage, KeywordSpy and AdBeat can help marketing departments manage keyword costs and click-through rates while identifying efficient strategies the competition is implementing. Utilizing these competitive intelligence tools will maximize campaign effectiveness for your client.

3.  Audit Your Client’s Program & Baseline

It’s critical that you record the current baseline of your client’s program across multiple KPI’s and factors.

These include:

• Bid strategy:  What is the logic behind the determined bids?
• Keyword portfolio:  The number of keywords, match types and search query report
• Campaign structure: What is the geographical and demographical structure of the program? How many ad groups are there? How tightly themed are they?
• Ads: Consider the CTR and conversion rate analysis of existing ads. Are these ads tightly themed with the keywords in the ad group?
• GDN Placements: Evaluate placement reports and plan accordingly
• Landing pages: Are the ads being directed to relevant pages? Should they be optimized?
• Path to conversion: What keywords drive assists?
• Cross-channel attribution: What other channels, traditional and/or digital, are influencing conversions?
• Segmentation: Laptop vs. mobile, day-parting, geographical, demographical – select the setting that’s best for your goals

4.  Create Efficiency Through Optimization

Improvements in efficiency are gained through continuous tracking and optimizing of performance. These are some of the tactics used for improving campaign efficiency.

• Time of Day/Day of Week segmentation:  Analyze and then increase or lower your bid based on time of day/week data
• Creative (Ad Copy) testing and tracking: Split test new ads and continually retest to drive the best results
• Separation of search and content network campaigns: This is basic. Still, no campaign should target both Google search and content  – split them out
• Competitive monitoring: Employ technology to make sure you’re alerted when others bid on your brand
• Rule alerts: Setup alerts to email your strategists if thresholds like CPA go up or volume goes down to tend to the situations manually
• Addition of negative keywords: Improves CTR by reducing the appearance of brand damaging terms
• Addition of broad match modifier: Improves CTR and gives you more accurate bidding control
• Run search query reports: You’ll be able to find negatives and new exact matches
• Multivariate Testing(creative and landing page together) : Once a user clicks, it all comes down to the landing page and the path the user goes down. It’s important to leverage technology to test and optimize
• Geographic segmentation: It’s one of the best ways to create efficiency. For example, bids in NYC are higher than mobile bids)

5. Use The Room You Created To Test & Drive Growth

Once efficiencies have been achieved, it is time to grow the overall number of conversions at a favorable return rate.

Extended reach and increased volume are accomplished through the targeted implementation of:

• Keyword expansions: Leverage the search term suggestion tool and competitive intelligence to add new keywords to the mix
• PPC engine expansions (Bing/Yahoo/Facebook): Are you only on Google and Bing? Try new platforms like Facebook and Local Pages
• Content expansion: Test new placements on the content network
• Remarketing: Create remarketing campaigns to bring users back to the site for additional conversions
• Bid elasticity testing (position): Bid-up on those keywords averaging position 5 or higher as well as those with a good CPA or assist count to increase volume.

Regardless of the scale and scope of a client, driving simultaneous growth and efficiency is no easy task. But there’s no question that for challenger brands, it is doubly difficult.

However, digital marketers needn’t look outside the box for a solution to transform challengers into market leaders. Integrating a growth and efficiency cycle into your next PPC campaign will bring your client five steps closer to the pinnacle of market leadership.

That’s because according to eMarketer, social media is the fastest growing digital media channel. As impressive as that is, it doesn’t tell the whole story. First, let’s consider some statistics:

• “More than half of 25 to 34-year-old social network users say they can’t live without their social media sites” – eMarketer 2011
• “9 out of 10 Internet users visited a social networking site each month in 2010”– comScore, February 2011
• “74% of consumers are influenced to buy AFTER soliciting feedback from social media ” – comScore, February 2011
• “67% of Twitter users who become followers of a brand are more likely to buy from that brand” – comScore, February 2011
• “60% of Facebook users who become fans of a brand recommend that brand to a friend ” – comScore, February 2011

With the demand for social media continuing to skyrocket, it’s critical that we, as advertising professionals, hone our craft to leverage this channel on behalf of our clients.

To help you succeed for your clients, I’ve put together this Top 15 list of ‘secrets’ that will benefit your paid social campaigns. I’m going to focus primarily on Facebook and a bit on LinkedIn. Twitter ads are still in beta and can be rather cost-prohibitive.

1. Automate Your Creative Refresh & Rotate Ads Often

Like Google, Facebook makes its money when a user clicks an ad. As such, it’s in their interest to drive CTR. Since Facebook users can easily get banner blindness, the social network values ad freshness above all else.

It is arguably the most critical factor in a successful Facebook paid social campaign. Make sure you rotate your ads often and if possible automate this rotation so it’s constantly changing every week.

2. Segment ‘Bins’ & Micro-target

The beauty of Facebook targeting is it allows you to get super-granular. And, as we know, segmentation in any marketing program leads to efficiency. Paid social advertisers should take advantage of this by targeting as many relevant demographic bins as possible and creating ads that specifically speak to those demographics.

3. Use Automated Bid Optimization Based On Conversion Events

With dozens, hundreds or even thousands of bins and ads, it’s important to leverage automated bid technology. There are several platforms specifically designed for Facebook ads. Do your homework to determine the best one to help you achieve your campaign goals.

4. Don’t Stop At Solely Tracking Engagement, Track Conversions

Some companies and agencies make the mistake of only tracking front-end engagement KPI’s, namely Facebook Likes and LinkedIn connections. It is important to track all KPI’s including:

5. Leverage Your PPC/SEO Data To Help You Target New Bins

If you’re running a paid social account you’re probably also running PPC campaigns or managing organic SEO. Don’t look at them in silos because the data you have through those channels can translate into paid social gold.

To start, take the keywords that you know drive conversions for your client via PPC and/or SEO and test-target those keywords as an interest. If it shows sufficient reach, create a bin and a targeted ad and you’ll see results.

6. Test ‘Friends Of Connections’ Targeting

There is a little known targeting option in Facebook that allows you to target users whose friends are connected to a page, event, group or application:

Think about the potential on this one. The average Facebook user has 130 friends. If you find a page that has 1,000 fans and you target friends of connections to that page, you’re going to reach 130,000 users.

7. Test Occupation Targeting

A very powerful but underutilized way to reach specific consumers is through Facebook occupation targeting.  CEO of aimClear Marty Weintraub spoke about this at SMX Advanced and touched on this recently in Search Engine Watch.

When discussing the proper ways to conduct occupation targeting, he pointed out that selecting job titles within the Precise Interests and then entering a keyword like ‘Marketing Manager’ would result in the following bin:

You can extrapolate this data to any number of job titles depending on your client’s product.

8. Target Decision Makers On LinkedIn

Facebook isn’t the only paid social platform that allows you to do occupation targeting. LinkedIn is making a great run at the B2B market and allows for some really sophisticated targeting.

Similar to the powerful testing capabilities recently highlighted by Marty Weintraub, LinkedIn was shown to drive comparable results not only test-targeting job titles but high-level decision makers with a presence on the social network.

9. Test Leading Consumers To Your Fan Page vs. Website

Don’t just lead users to your Facebook page. You should test results by rotating your ads to drive users to every part of your online presence. A completely optimized paid program is essential.

Whether you place a higher premium on your social fan page or website, giving your users more choices will encourage brand awareness, loyalty and conversions.

10. Test Leading Users To Multiple Page Landing Tabs

An update launched this past February now directs users to any location on your Facebook page, i.e. wall, info, etc.  Rotate your ads to drive users to these various pages and optimize based on the conversion rate.

11. Try Embedding Your Lead Capture Form Within Your Facebook Page

Get the best of both worlds by embedding the same lead capture form on your website within your fan page. Here’s an example:

As always, conduct continuous testing to measure which approach is most effective.

12. Don’t Use The CPM Option

Facebook CTR’s are traditionally very low, even with a great program. As such, don’t pay Facebook a CPM to simply show your ads, which in tests have not resulted in any lift in impressions, cost savings, click-throughs or conversion rate.

Always select the CPC pricing option.

13. Try Geo-targeting ‘Affluent’ Areas & Luxury Interests

Have a client selling luxury goods or big ticket items? Try cross-targeting affluent areas of the country with luxury interests. For example, target users in Beverly Hills that like cosmetic enhancement brands or users in New York City that like investor services.

You can also go further by digging into the Facebook interest tool. There, you can target relevant ads to ‘owners clubs’ across a wide range of luxury verticals.

14. Leverage Your Facebook Data To Do Other Media Buys

The great thing about Facebook data is that it can give you insights about your consumer base that you might not have otherwise known. Leveraging, among other things, a user’s gender, age and interests can help you make smarter buys across television, display, search and other media channels.

15. Track Every Path To Conversion

If you can get your hands on technology that allows you to conduct cross-channel tracking, its resulting data can be hugely beneficial. It can influence budgeting decisions and help you identify channels that assist the buying process.

Remember – the overriding principle guiding these 15 secrets is if you’re going to take the time to segment and execute micro-targeting strategies, make sure you build tightly-themed ads that match the segment. This will increase CTR, lower your cost and give you the best chance at having paid social success.

If you want more info on Facebook ads check out these resources:

• How To Quickly Customize Your Facebook Page To Attract More Fans – Danny Sullivan’s guide
• Facebook Advertising – Facebook’s dashboard
• Inside Facebook – a Facebook blog for developers and marketers.
• AllFacebook –  another Facebook blog for marketers

Here’s how you do it:  invest your time and money in PPC competitive intelligence and please shhh … don’t tell anyone.

As the auction grows more expensive and more complex, it’s critical to have a view into your client’s competitors paid search program, otherwise you’re fighting blind. The simple truth is, PPC is a competition. You’re competing for the world’s most valuable inventory and for the top positions in an auction that you can’t just win with a wallet, but with skill (i.e. your ability to generate click-thru-rate).

Dozens of factors go into winning of course, and one of the critical factors is knowing your opponents. If you don’t know them, it’s going to be difficult to beat them. Competitive Intelligence tools can help you do that and in this post, I’m going to disclose a few that we use to look at some key metrics and some tips on how to use them.

1. Ispionage.com

Budget

Here you can see the average monthly spend. Ispionage tends to be on the low side of its estimates when it comes to spend, so be sure to cross-reference with KeywordSpy, which tends to report on the high side. It also shows you seasonality which can allow you / your client know when he should be expecting more competition and potentially higher returns.

Ads

Ispionage will show you competitors’ top ads, for what keyword they display, how long its been up and several other metrics which you can leverage for your client.

Keywords

Besides the basics like CPC, average position, keyword count, etc., one thing I love about Ispionage is that it has a great feature that helps you identify which keywords you and your competitors share.

This can help you in several ways, including the ability to identify what keywords you’re not advertising on that your competitors are, which can spark new growth initiatives to test.

2. KeywordSpy.com

Days Seen and Last/First Seen

Both Isponiage and KeywordSpy both report on this, which is essentially a keyword effectiveness metric. The # of days seen metric indicates that if a competitor is bidding on a keyword for a long time, they are probably driving sales on from that keyword profitably. Last/First Seen is another metric which shows indicates recency.

For example, if an advertiser advertised for a long time on a particular keyword but stopped 6 months ago, it could be an indication the keyword is no longer profitable for your competitor, which could be useful information for your client.

Affiliate Data

While KeywordSpy shares several metrics with Isponiage, it also has a few unique features. One of which is affiliate data, which tells you how competitive and valuable a particular keyword auction is. If a keyword has a lot of affiliates, it’s probably pretty valuable.

To explain further, since affiliates get paid only a margin of a sale, you might surmise that if affiliates are bidding in that auction its because the keyword is effective for them, even at the lower margin. If your client is a direct provider of whatever that product is, their margin is probably higher, which means you can potentially enter that auction with an advantage, i.e. bid higher.

3. Adbeat.com

Google Content Publishers

The main feature of Adbeat is that it helps you see which Google Display Network publishers your competitors are advertising on. This is critical information you can leverage to compete across the network.

Google Content Advertisers

Adbeat also shows you the top advertisers on any Google content publishes such as NYTimes.com in the example above.

Top Ads

Adbeat will also show you the top ads on a publisher based on the first/last seen metric, which you can then share with your client and leverage for their campaign.

In conclusion, these tools are useful only if you know what to look for and more importantly, how to turn that intelligence into action for you client. Hopefully this information will help you drive better results for your clients by shedding light on your competition.

There are a lot of other tools and uses for each so please comment below on how you’ve leveraged competitive intelligence for your clients.

To start, let’s define the term “broad match.” As the name suggests, broad match keywords generate relevant (right Google?) keyword variations for your campaign. Using broad match in a campaign is useful for a lot of reasons. It generates a large search query list you can then turn into phrase and exact matches, helps accumulate data during growth phases and vastly increases impression share. However, they can make you run through some serious budget. Also, broad match lacks the control of other match types and typically results in low efficiency (high CPA).

The Google broad match modifier can help get a client the best of both worlds.

By adding a plus (+) sign within a broad match keyword, the modifier will ensure that any time your client’s ad is served up on a search, that search must include the token (word within the keyword phrase) that has a + sign in front of it to be served.

For example, a keyword like “expensive shoes” on broad match could possibly display for a query for “expensive sneakers.” However if the keyword has a modifier like “expensive +shoes” the user’s query must use the word “shoe” like “pricey shoes”. Also, it will not display for “pricey sneakers” since “shoe” was modified and therefore a required term. Additionally, your ad will display for stemmings (like “floor” and “flooring”) as well as misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms.

The modifier adds a level of specificity that can help control your budget while accumulating data and mining relevant search queries. It can also help generate additional volume on campaigns that use a high % of phrase match.

Ultimately, the decision to move forward with broad match modifier should be carefully considered on a campaign by campaign basis. Putting a plan in place from the onset of a PPC campaign will go a long way towards determining whether broad match modifier falls in line with your client’s objectives and spend. Still, the modifier certainly appears to deserve an “A+” for the majority of PPC programs.

For Google’s deep dive on broad match modifier check out the Broad Match Modifier Overview pages at AdWords help.