{"id":12999,"date":"2017-07-05T17:00:38","date_gmt":"2017-07-05T16:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.intercom.com\/?p=12999"},"modified":"2020-07-30T12:57:55","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T11:57:55","slug":"do-you-know-what-your-future-customers-are-searching-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/do-you-know-what-your-future-customers-are-searching-for\/","title":{"rendered":"Do you know what your future customers are searching for?"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the most effective channels for fueling your startup\u2019s growth is online advertising. Yet advertising can also set a startup back. At best, spammy, impersonal ads will hurt your reputation. At worst, your audience tunes out your ads entirely.<\/p>\n

So what separates an effective ad from just another spammy banner or piece of clickbait? It comes down to serving ads that feel personal to the consumer. Invest time getting to know your audiences and what they\u2019re searching for, and you have it in your control to send ads to only people who are ready to buy your product, using content that matches their intent.<\/p>\n

Our ad campaigns became profitable when they became personal. Here\u2019s how you can make your ads personal too.<\/p>\n

What are prospects looking for?<\/h2>\n

The first thing we had to get right was showing ads to people based on what they\u2019re interested in and figuring out what job customers are hiring our product for<\/a>. This meant figuring out what they searched and serving them the most relevant ad and landing page. If somebody’s searching for a knowledge base tool<\/a>, we’d serve them an ad and landing page that helps them get our knowledge base<\/a>, and not an ad that shows them how great our pricing is.<\/p>\n

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There are several different ways to figure out what your users are searching for and integrate that data with your ad channels. Let\u2019s walk through them.<\/p>\n

The three paths to the data you need<\/h2>\n

Let\u2019s say that you run and manage paid ad strategy for AvoToast.io, a popular startup in San Francisco that delivers on-demand avocado toast, from regular toast to toast topped with bacon and goat cheese. You\u2019ve been running ads with some success and you think that figuring out how to deliver the right toast to the hungriest people at the right time will take your ad campaigns to the next level.<\/p>\n

To deliver the right toast to the right person, you need to figure out which kind of toast someone is craving.<\/p>\n

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If you were a running a productivity app, the process is similar \u2013 you may want to find out whether a consumer is interested in project management or internal team communication. You then have three good ways to surface the data you need to create effective ads.<\/p>\n

1. The low bandwidth solution<\/h3>\n

A good first step is to help ad networks, like Google AdWords or even Facebook Ads, find new visitors who are similar to your customers, and then send them ads that are personalized to what they want.<\/p>\n

Send them an ad and a landing page both focused on the same product, rather than your homepage.<\/p>\n

Begin with adding your favorite ad network remarketing tag to the page that you serve users after they make a purchase, whether that\u2019s the order confirmation or a different page. This is so you can tell your ad network who has been on your site and are live customers, and you can exclude these customers from seeing your ads.<\/p>\n

Because AvoToast.io has unique landing pages for unique products, such as regular avocado toast, toast with a fried egg, toast with almonds and smoked olive oil and toast with bacon and goat cheese, you will get even better ad customization if you create unique audiences based on people who have purchased on each of these individual pages. At Intercom, we apply this advertising principle to our three solutions: live chat<\/a>, onboarding and retention<\/a>, and customer support<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Your ad network should generate a list of visitors who have characteristics similar to your customers within a few hours. You can target these folks with ads that are specific to the product category they\u2019re looking for, with a corresponding landing page. Visitors that your ad network defines as similar to customers who converted on your avocado toast with almonds landing page are likely to want this specific product too. So you can send them an ad and a landing page that are both focused on the same product, rather than your homepage.<\/p>\n

2. Using Intercom to surface audience data<\/h3>\n

If AvoToast.io is an Intercom customer, you can create intentional audiences easily. All you\u2019d need to do is download your customer email addresses from Intercom and upload them to your ad network. Your ad network should anonymize your customer emails for you, so privacy won\u2019t be a concern here. Here\u2019s a more in depth look of how to do it.
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