AdWords campaign management can be very time-consuming and when you’ve got other things on your to-do list. Even logging into your Google ads account might seem hard, much less spend time optimizing your ad campaigns. It doesn’t come as a surprise that so many business owners, as well as marketers, make changes to their AdWords accounts only once per month!
Pay per click(PPC) should be a continuous and repetitive process. It takes continuous effort to structure your AdWords campaigns, managing and increasing the keyword list, creating optimized ads, sorting negative keywords, building conversion-friendly landing pages, etc. The list is quite long.
But there’s good news, managing AdWords doesn’t have to be a full-time job! With the help of the right processes, and smart tools and platforms like bgtheory.com on your side, AdWords campaign management can be quite easier to handle.
Brad from bgtheory will audit your Google AdWords account and present you with an account evaluation and list of actionable to-do items to increase your account’s effectiveness.
A founder must be comfortable with data insights and vision.
Brad Geddes, Founder bg Theory
Today we got a chance to chat with Brad Geddes, Founder at bg Theory.
1. Hi, It’s Our Pleasure to interview you, Please Introduce yourself to our audience in your own style.
I’m an international keynote speaker, long time digital marketing educator, and the author of Advanced Google AdWords through its three editions.
2. We believe that every Entrepreneur has a story to tell, Can you please share “your” story of what motivated you to start this company?
I’m a highly organized and time conscious professional. One of the issues we saw in the market place is that companies would waste a lot of time analyzing data just to determine what needed to be done to optimize their accounts.
We wanted to automate the analysis so that PPC analysts could focus on strategic creativity and getting work done in a streamlined manner. We built the tool that we’ve always wanted to manage paid search accounts.
3. Give us brief details about your current company and what it does?
We’re an automated recommendation and workflow engine for managing Google Ads and Microsoft Ads accounts. The computers run the account data through algorithms to create automated to-do lists for PPC analysts. Then we give the analysts the tools to dig deep into the data or quickly accomplish tasks at scale.
4. What is the biggest challenge you have faced during this journey? How did you overcome those?
The biggest challenge was sales. My co-founder and I are very analytical focused. We look at a product from a benefit vs cost standpoint and can make quick decisions about the worth of something. In addition, we know search marketing extremely well and built the tool for smart, advanced marketers. It turns out that’s not most of the market. As smart marketers are better customers than new marketers, we focused on education via our blog and speaking engagements as well as repositioning the tools to show someone ‘why’ the product would greatly assist them in their marketing.
5. What marketing tactics you employed to generate 1st hundred sales?
I’ve been speaking on marketing since 2004 and had quite a following. We initially focused on speaking at a conference and leveraging our existing networks to build our customer based. We then added more education through the blog, videos, and social networking to continue to grow our customer base.
6. Which marketing channel has been beneficial for you in getting more traffic, and customers?
As we’re a PPC marketing platform, we do quite well with Google and Microsoft Ads. We find that the blog and social platforms are good for education and awareness building of the marketing, but in the end, search often closes the deal. We still get quite a few customers from continuing to speak at marketing conferences around the world.
7. How do you generate comfort and trust among your customers, so that they buy your product?
We are marketers who use our own product, so we can talk to paid search marketers in their own language and share insights into their own accounts with them.
To ensure everyone knows how to use a complex platform, we provide a lot of video breakthroughs that make it so users can follow along with how to accomplish various tasks. Lastly, we add a lot of insights and information on our blog to share our knowledge with the community as a whole.
8. Organic ranking generates free traffic. What kind of strategies have you employed to improve organic traffic?
Our blog, name recognition, and social sharing help our organic rankings. We also use various tools to analyze our rankings and site so that we can continue to build out our organic traffic.
9. Can you please share any one growth hack that has worked for you?
We look long term at our customers and how the job market is changing to determine how to position our tool. One of the fears these days is being replaced by a machine. Creating ads that talk about how we’re not replacing your job, we’re enhancing it, and working with you, helped alleviate fears from analysts about losing their jobs and helped engage with the product.
We’ve even seen people sharing our ads as examples of how to create ads. When others are sharing your ads, you get a lot of benefit in terms of traffic and customers.
10. Re-engagement is the key to get repeat business from existing customers. Do you agree with this? How do you re-engage customers? Have you considered using Web Push Notifications for the same?
We’re a subscription-based company, so we look at how long someone is a customer, why they canceled, and then look at how to reengage them. As we have a blog and newsletter focused on education and insights, many of our former customers are still engaged and will later subscribe again. This is very common as people switch jobs and the first thing they do at the new company is onboard our platform. Our goal is to focus someone on getting tasks done. Web push notifications distract from your current task. They run a bit counter to our mantras, so we have not tried them.
11. What steps did you take to make this company a Big Brand? What marketing strategy you employed?
I wouldn’t call use a big brand yet, we’re still growing. We’ve employed blogging, guest article writing, email, paid search, remarketing, paid placements, sponsorships, conference speaking, workshop marketing, media engagement, and social engagements among our marketing strategies.
12. What is the next milestone for the company?
Our next milestone is to double our revenue again. Among these virus filled days, it’s been a struggle to continue to grow, so we’re ensuring we’re still communicating and supporting our customers through these troubled times.
13. As per you what skills a founder must possess in order to succeed?
A founder must be comfortable with data insights and vision. If you can’t look at your data to understand what is happening and what needs to change, or if you don’t have a vision for your products, you will struggle to compete in an overcrowded marketplace.
14. What is the best advice would you like to give to a future entrepreneur?
Don’t be afraid to admit you made a mistake. This could be in product positioning, features, market understanding, or something else. Once you realize a mistake has been made, and they will be made, the ability to lean on your data to understand how to change will be instrumental in your overall success.
