Sarah BrodyDigital Ads Expert | Former Marketer @ HubSpot
Bio

Paid Ads Consultant & Freelancer. Former HubSpot marketer. Areas of expertise: PPC / paid advertising, Google Ads, Facebook / Meta ads, inbound marketing, lead generation, conversion optimization, revenue growth. 12+ years experience. www.sarahbrodyconsulting.com


Recent Answers


Given that you have a very specific product, target audience, and list of locations, I'd recommend testing AdWords campaigns. Depending on what your product is, you'll likely be able to identify some niche keywords to bid on, and you can segment your campaigns by geography, allowing you to get really localized with your ad copy.

Feel free to shoot me a message if you'd like to discuss this further!


Tough to answer in full without knowing what your service is, but there are plenty of ways to get in front of college students.

A few ideas:
- Build a blog with useful/interesting content, share on social, build an audience
- Incentivize current users to invite their friends through a referral program or a campus rep program
- Find sites where college kids spend a lot of time (think: Reddit), or posts relevant to your service and get involved in the conversation
- Are there on-campus clubs or groups that would find your service particularly useful? Try reaching out to see if they'd be willing to give it a try

Let me know if you want to hop on a call & discuss more ideas.


I'd recommend framing your Adwords ads in a positive light - instead of calling out specific medical issues in your copy, describe the benefits. (ex: instead of "Experiencing hearing loss?" try "Improve your hearing!") I imagine there are several ways to rephrase your copy to get your ads approved and still deliver the same message.

You can also try remarketing on Facebook, if it's a good fit for your audience. I don't believe they're as strict with this rule, so you may find that easier. There should be need to go through a 3rd party retargeting platform - you can build your ads directly through Facebook with no extra fees.

Hope this helps!


Instead of focusing on timing and frequency, you may find it more valuable to consider what content you're sending in your follow-up emails. Are you simply nagging them to call you back? Or are you providing helpful content based on the needs/challenges you uncovered during the initial call? Put yourself in their shoes. What kind of email would you click on or respond to if you were in their position? If you're solely focused on being helpful and not asking anything of them, it won't matter if you send the email 2 days later or 5 days later. (Though I'd argue sooner is better than later, within reason.)

Hope this helps! Let me know if you'd like to discuss further.


From what I've seen across many businesses looking to scale, you hire sales reps and train them on how to sell. They're not expected to innovate. More sales reps = more selling power.

You hire marketers to innovate. They're expected to be able to ideate and iterate quickly and bring new tactics to the table. Smarter marketers = more marketing power.

From what I've heard, it's much harder to find a really good marketer who knows how to grow awareness of your business, create and execute a strong lead generation strategy, successfully nurture these leads to be sales-ready, and measure and optimize every piece of the funnel, than it is to find someone who you can teach how to sell your product.

I'm not saying sales is easy. But I've never seen a company really struggle to find the right sales rep to hire. If you're going for long-term value, I'd go for marketing.


I'd focus on learning landing page best practices and applying them to your specific product and audience. There are tons of resources out there to help you (check out this webinar specifically geared toward optimizing PPC landing pages: http://webinar.unbounce.com/ppc-landing-page-hacks).

I'd be happy to set up a call and help you discover some opportunities for improving conversion if you'd like to discuss further.


Just as you're averaging CPA across all the customers you're acquiring, you should also be looking at your average customer LTV and using that to determine the strength of your overall CPA.

That said, if you have the data to be able to break down CPA by best, average, and worst customers AND can see the source of each of these customers, you may be able to glean some insights around which sources or campaigns yield the best and worst customers. (For example, if your highest-CPA and lowest-LTV customers are mostly coming from AdWords, you should focus your budget/efforts on a better-performing channel.) This will help you cut out high CPA channels and generate higher-quality customers, thereby reducing your average CPA and bringing your ROI up.


I'd recommend focusing on both your SEO and paid advertising, as they serve different purposes and can both be extremely valuable. SEO is inherently a long-term strategy - it takes time to build up authority, get backlinks, and rank for various keywords - but it also has huge payoffs that accumulate over time.

Paid advertising is a very immediate solution that allows you to generate awareness, traffic, and leads quickly. With a sizable enough budget, you can collect data in a short timeframe and use that insight to scale your efforts and increase ROI from your campaigns.

Your keyword strategy should take both organic and paid into consideration, and should also play an important role in optimization of your website and landing pages, to which all of this traffic will be directed.

Hope this helps - let me know if you'd like to discuss further!


You should be looking at both your overall CPA from all sources and also CPA for each individual source. Your goal should be to get the most out of every dollar you're spending on your paid advertising campaigns, which means figuring out which channels give you the most ROI and putting more budget toward those.

In other words, if your Adwords campaigns have a very high CPA, that's making your overall CPA higher than it needs to be. Because your overall CPA here is $30, that indicates that you have other channels that have a CPA much lower than that. If you focus your efforts on those channels, you should be able to bring your overall CPA down.

That said, your non-UTM traffic may be coming primarily from organic search (ie you're not paying for it, so it brings down your CPA to include this traffic in the calculations). You could choose to focus on SEO, but I'd also recommend calculating CPA for all the channels you do have UTM parameters for so you can see how everything compares across the board before deciding where to focus your efforts & budget.

Hope this helps - let me know if you'd like to discuss further!


When it comes to lead nurturing, the importance of getting the timing right is not necessarily about which day of the week and what time of day you send the emails. It's about how quickly you follow up with your new leads in the first place.

Check out this stat from HBR:
"Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead (which we defined as having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker) as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later—and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer."
Article here: https://hbr.org/2011/03/the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads/ar/1

In other words, that first email in your nurturing campaign should be sent nearly immediately, or at least within an hour of the conversion, when you're still top-of-mind for them. If you have a sales team, you should also set up an automatically-triggered email notification to the appropriate sales rep that a new lead has converted and should be contacted ASAP. (Every sales rep I've worked with has been THRILLED to receive these notifications.)

Lastly, if you are looking to get a sense for what days/times work best for email engagement, and your list is sizable enough, you might consider doing a 4-way split test, sending the same email content to each quarter of your list across 2 different days and 2 different times each day. This will give you even more data to work with than your typical 50/50 A/B test.

Let me know if you'd like to continue discussing strategy around setting up your nurturing campaigns. Happy to help!


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