At 5 Fold, we’re constantly improving our marketing campaigns

How Boost, PPC & content keep getting better

As we’ve covered in some of our previous blog posts, the world of internet marketing is in a constant state of change. The web today—from search and social media to website design and mobile usage—is remarkably different from what it was four or five years ago. That’s why one of our founding principles as a company included remaining flexible and adaptable, as well as open to improving our product. As the web changes, we’ll be ready to make quick, minute adjustments that improve client campaigns.

Of course, internet marketing isn’t always as black-and-white as that. Great marketing often takes experimentation, and our team often needs to test new elements and strategy. In this post, we’ll review a few examples of how we’re constantly tinkering with campaigns and improving our product.

Boost

Our signature marketing feature, Boost, is our way of improving client campaigns every single month. During the “Boost day”, our team comes together to discuss how we can further optimize the campaign for even better results. Whether that’s John and myself creating a new webpage or Bijo adjusting and experimenting with on-site SEO, our team figures out a way to make the client’s website stay ahead of the pack.

The best part? Boost gets more effective with every passing month, as we begin to learn what’s working—or not working—with content, web design, SEO, PPC, photography, or social media. This kind of proactive approach may account for the steady growth of our client campaigns, such as that of Crash of Rhinos Painting, who saw their leads increase by 125%.

PPC

PPC, or pay-per-click, advertising is an arena where experimentation is a necessity. We sometimes get well-intentioned questions asking us why we don’t just nail the ads the first time. Our PPC Specialist, Drew Martinez, jokes, “If I knew Google’s algorithm, I’d be working at Google.” That’s just the way both search engine optimization and PPC advertising work.

We build our work upon a ton of online research about best practices, whether from Google themselves or third-party sources. Yet, in the real world environment our clients exist in, we have to build ads, place them, test them, measure how they did, and then make adjustments to the next batch.

For a HVAC company in Anchorage, Alaska, “Anchorage heating company” may have better returns than “Anchorage furnace company”, or vice-versa. The best way to know is to conduct A/B testing, which involves comparing two versions of ads (or web pages) under similar conditions to see which performs better. We’ve been big believers in this form or rigorous testing, but, in the coming months, we’ll really be stepping up our game to optimize campaigns using this method.

Content

Paradoxically, content is both the most stable aspect of client campaigns and the most prone to revision. Unlike PPC or SEO, certain rules regarding content are, well, ruled by grammar conventions, which change very slowly, if at all. But, content is also present in everything else. Words make up web pages, form PPC ads, are present in SEO, and speak on social platforms. So, content is also influenced by the forces (Google et al.) that rock other parts of our client’s campaigns.

Our company’s content writer has been tasked with finding ways to make our content better that don’t actually have much to do with writing itself. For example, most experts agree that a higher word count (on a well-designed page) is better for search, but does that logic hold true for all of our clients, or just some of them? What keywords are working, and which aren’t? So far, our content department has sought to make content longer while simultaneously making it more readable. We’ll be exploring what else we can do in the last months of this year.

Refining our marketing product

As 5 Fold grows, we continue to improve and refine our product. Does that mean our current product is poor? Not at all, as evidenced by the growth of our client’s campaigns. However, we’re not content to just continue doing what we’ve been doing. Nor is that going to work in this fast-moving marketing environment. So, we’ll continue to be learning along the way and improving client campaigns.