And, when you’re quoted a price it makes it harder to question if you’re overpaying for your service, or getting a bargain. It’s one that you can only really work out when the results start coming in, but even then it’s difficult knowing if you can get the same results for cheaper elsewhere.

Not knowing the price can also make it hard to factor into your budget when deciding whether or not it will be worth the cost for your business.

So, to make this easier, we’ve done the research and found the average cost of agencies in the UK, split into different services. This data was gathered from a range of freely available sources and online pricing information, as well as confidential submissions from various UK based agencies and clients.

Note: these are just averages and don’t take into account the hours or particular offerings that an agency might offer.

This is what we found (click the image for the full-sized version).

TD;LR: Monthly retainer rates are the equivalent of an average 1-3 days of work per month on a long-term ongoing basis. Per campaign/project refers to average pricing based on a single marketing campaign or goal that the agency undertakes for a one-time basis.

SEO

SEO (search engine optimisation) is all about getting your brand found on search engines, sending more organic traffic to your website. It includes services such as link building, technical SEO and on-page SEO, depending on each individual agency.

Our study found that the average prices for SEO are:

• £394.75 per day
• £901.50 monthly retainer
• £1556.25 per project

For specific SEO projects, local SEO came in the cheapest and eCommerce as the most expensive.

Looking for high-quality SEO agencies? Here are some of our top picks:

• Dashword
• SEO PowerSuite
• Advanced Website Ranking
• Mangools
• Answer The Public
• SEMRush

Organic social media

Organic social media services include managing the day-to-day running of social media platforms, social strategies and creating social media campaigns.

The average prices for this service are:

• £650 per day
• £1,120 monthly retainer
• £400 per campaign

Most agencies base this price per platform, so if you have more than one social channel that you want looking after, expect this figure to increase.

Paid social media

Paid social media services are all about building creatives and paid campaigns across social media accounts, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and more.

The average prices for this service are:

• £430 per day
• £587.50 monthly retainer
• £266 per campaign

Although these prices may seem cheaper than organic social media management, you need to factor in the cost of paid campaigns on top of this.

Some agencies will also charge extra per creative, so if you’ve got a whole library to create, expect £40+ per creative that’s needed.

If agencies operate using a % pricing model, expect to pay 15% of your advertising spend on fees.

Content marketing

In 2021, content is still king. If you want to engage your audience, build your brand reputation and increase your traffic, you need to be producing new, high-quality content.

If you want to outsource your content marketing to an agency, this is how much you can expect to pay.

• £725 per day
• £817.90 monthly retainer
• £325 per post

Some companies will also charge per 100 words if that’s all you want. However, you might find more luck with a freelancer for this service.

Ready to improve your visibility and brand authority? Check out StoryChief and FatJoe.

Here are our top content marketing agencies for you to choose from:

• StoryChief
• FatJoe

PPC

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) agencies will help manage and create paid advertising campaigns across Google, Microsoft and more, helping you achieve the best conversions or profits for your budget.

Average costs for PPC services come in at:

• £725 per day
• £1040.90 monthly retainer
• £1016.60 per project/campaign

Like paid social media services, some agencies will also adopt a % price model instead. The average fees for PPC services are 10-20% of your advertising spend.

In addition, PPC services also have the most restrictions in place for accepting a client. Nearly every agency has minimum advertising spend per client before they are onboarded.

This minimum advertising spend ranges from £400 per month to £10,000.

Website build

Need a new website to send your traffic to and help convert your leads?

The average cost of a website build in 2021 is £5452.30.

However, there are a lot of different factors that influence this figure. Generally, the more complex your website is, the more expensive it will be.

Simple, one-page websites are a lot cheaper to produce, with prices ranging from £350-£2,000. In contrast, multi-page eCommerce websites can cost as much as £30,000.

Marketing strategy

Marketing strategy is the vaguest service but encompasses anything from consulting, helping build strategies, campaigns and implementing all the elements involved. It’s often tied into other services such as SEO, PPC and more, but sold as one simple package.

The average prices for marketing strategy are:

• £684.28 per day
• £738 monthly retainer
• £2412.50 per project

Marketing strategies also have the biggest number of annual retainers, which range between £40,000-£250,000 depending on the level of work involved.

Why hire an agency?

If these costs look high, it’s worth remembering that you don’t need to hire an agency if you don’t want to. You could do all of this yourself and there’s no one going to stop you from that.

But you need to weigh up what you save in cost, versus the time and effort that you’ll spend doing this yourself. If you don’t have the skills, that also might mean hiring in or extra time spent on training and getting up to scratch. It all adds up.

Hiring an agency will save you this time.

As the picture below demonstrates, hiring an SEO agency can save your business a total of 29 hours a week. That’s just under 4 days that you could use to grow another part of your business. Now, that’s worth the cost.

TD;LR: See the full breakdown of how much time an agency can save your business here.

Find your next agency today

Ready to find your next agency?

We’re here to make that process simple with the Adzooma Marketplace. Just search for the service you need and we’ll bring back a list of trusted, high-quality agencies, freelancers and more that are ready to work on your next project.

Read reviews, dig a little deeper if you need and when you’re ready, get in touch to seal the deal.

Methodology

Data collected from a range of freely available sources and online pricing information, as well as confidential submissions from various UK based agencies and clients.

A big thanks to Spread Like Wildfire Media, My Remote Partner Limited, Ecrubox, Impression, Distinction, Marketing Labs, Internet Sales Drive, Vitty, GM Marketing, Regent Branding, Alba SEO, Generate Leads Online, Pixated, Marble Agency, Plume, Rise Online, Social Thyme, Digital 22, Cabana, Andrew Laws Associates, Adao, Indigoextra, Tom Crowe Digital, HARO Helpers, IFax App, Studio 54, and Daniel Foley for their help and contribution for the article.

The results that were generated were fascinating.

There were three pillars that went into it. If you want to jump right to the analysis and the recommendations to help you get more from your PPC ads, these three articles are for you:

• How To Select The Best Digital Marketing Channel For Your Business
  • The University of Cambridge analysts examined a sample of data to determine whether Microsoft, Google and/or Facebook Ads is the best marketing channel for you
• Why Your Content Strategy Is So Crucial To PPC Success
  • The Cambridge team took a deep dive into sentimentality to help shape how you write your PPC ads
• What Makes A Landing Page Convert
  • Using the data, the team took a close look at how to get those extra leads and customers from your landing page

For everyone else, here’s a behind the scenes look at the process.

*Disclaimer – All campaign data provided to study participants was selected at random and anonymised.

What we did

Data analysis and science is crucial for any business in the SAAS space. Sure it’s important to have developers, marketers and business gurus to help shape the product and its direction, but without someone combing through the data on a continuous basis, it’s very easy for that direction to end up on the wrong path.

Afterall, when you create software which utilises AI and machine learning, the person shaping that machine needs to have the right information to hand. That’s why we have a number of data scientists in-house, and why we love undertaking projects like this one.

So how did this project come about? Here’s our Head of Partnerships Sal Mohammed:

“Whilst at Google, I was lucky enough to work with Cambridge Judge Business School to lead a project that was carried out by five of their graduates,” says Sal who completed his Barclays Scale Up programme at Cambridge University.

“Such was the calibre of the candidates, I’ve since been itching to work with a cohort from the university again. So earlier this year, when I was contacted by the Director of Enterprise at the business school to see if we would be interested in hosting a cohort this summer, it didn’t take long for me to say yes.”

Of course, the University of Cambridge is renowned as one of the best institutions in the world. The MBA programme itself is regarded as top 5 worldwide, so to be able to team up with such an impressive group of individuals was something we couldn’t turn down.

The individuals in question? Sunil Grewal, formerly of Amazon, Akanshaa Khare formerly of the World Health Organisation, and Srishti Warman recent MBA Star winner at the Women of the Future Awards.

Each one of the team was tasked with leveraging Adzooma’s data to identify new ways for small to medium sized businesses to maximise their ad spend when using the Adzooma platform.

“The data was not very complex, but required cleansing and adjustments to bring out meaningful business insights,” explains Akanshaa.

Then, once that was done, it was on to the task in hand.

“The aim of the deliverable was to create playbooks that will illustrate what leads to better ad conversion rates,” Srishti tells us. “The problem was viewed from different angles – the three pillars.”

“First pillar – how the content of the ads being shown to the customer yields to better customer engagement, i.e. what type of imagery was being used, what the language and tone was used in the ad copy, and how this would affect the ads’ click through rate.

Second pillar – after the customer clicks on the ad and visits the landing page of the ad, how was the website quality of the landing page impacting the click through rate, i.e. was the page easy to load, was the content on the page matching the expectations of the customer, etc.

Third pillar – if the customer were to view the ad from the same ad provider (business client owning the ad e.g. John Lewis) on different platforms such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft, how would it affect the ad conversion rate.”

Why we did it

Finding out answers to those three pillars of questions would be vital to improving the experience for our users.

Our platform is all about taking a user’s ads to the next level. When you first sign up to Adzooma it’s not unusual to see game changing results, as Phillip Bacon can attest to in this piece which saw him achieve 1100% ROAS using Adzooma in just a couple of months.

Then, once you’re established, it’s all about those incremental gains that keep the ads ticking over nicely and keep the cost per conversion low. From an Adzooma perspective, this is where we have to work hardest, to make sure we find as many incremental gains as possible to keep improving your ads.

If answers to the questions could be found, three crucial steps of the customer journey would be improved massively. And the knock on effect this could have for our users and the industry could be monumental.

I say industry, because Adzooma is special in the fact that we have access to thousands of accounts across three different platforms. No one else has the ability to compare such data, which makes what we’d find in this project entirely unique.

“I knew this project would have massive implications for Adzooma and the MARtech industry as a whole,” says Sal.

“Very few companies have the data and skill set to undergo such a study. Even big players like Google and Microsoft only have the data that pertains to their individual channel. The question of what makes online marketing work is one which very few have the resources to answer – yet a question that has been plaguing marketers for as long as the practice has been around.

Armed with our data and unique view across platforms, matched with the analytics skills and vast business experience of the students, it was a perfect fit to set about revealing key insights to the question.”

The results

I mean, this is the reason you’re here for, right? As mentioned above, we have written full reports of each pillar’s findings, so I’ll again direct you to those

• How To Select The Best Digital Marketing Channel For Your Business
• Why Your Content Strategy Is So Crucial To PPC Success
• What Exactly Makes A Landing Page Convert

So here I’ll just give you a little bit of a snapshot of what we saw with some words from those involved.

Ad sentiment

For Sunil who worked on the project what initially surprised him from Adzooma’s data was, “the breadth of industries and countries that Adzooma customers operate within”, which helped create such a foolproof analysis, one that was relatable for anyone in the world, not just users from a single country.

What was found was really interesting…

• Those with Google and Microsoft ads accounts connected to the Adzooma platform see a much higher CTR than industry average – 6% vs 1.91% and 3.7% vs 2.83% respectively
• Those advertising on Microsoft Ads with positive sentiment in their ads saw a 4.2% CTR, compared to 3.6% for neutral sentimentality and 3.3% for negative sentimentality
• This was in contrast to those on Google ads who saw a 6.5% CTR for negative ads, compared to 5.7% for neutral and negative

“Based on the analysis, the users of different advertising platforms have different responses to ad copy sentiment”, says Sunil. “This is important because it can impact return on ad spend if Adzooma’s clients can refine their ads to capitalise on this.

“Adzooma users can use the findings to tweak their ads to test and learn what works for their target customers in order to maximise their return on ad spends.”

Landing pages

“We have always known that some digital ads end up getting more clicks/customer engagement than others,” says Srishti who conducted the landing page analysis.

“Even amongst the clicked ads, there are a few websites which tend to get a higher conversion rate than others.

“The task was to identify the key parameters that lead to a higher conversion e.g. faster page speed, better optimisation for mobile and web viewing, page responsiveness, etc. This analysis would eventually help understand not only which companies scale quickest within verticals, but critically, why.

“The impact of this project would deliver resounding effects, not just for existing businesses worldwide, but also shape the routes startups and fledgling businesses exercise when looking to scale.”

And some of the results were indeed resounding…

• Landing page best practices have the biggest effect on conversion rate
• Under Lighthouse checks, 0% of tested landing pages had a perfect score for best practices
• Overall, only 5% of landing pages had a perfect score for website performance checks

“I was really surprised to know that best practices to create the landing page is the most important factor that directly impacts the conversion rate,” says Srishti. “I was expecting Performance that audits how fast the page is to open to be the most important factor in affecting conversion rates.”

Which platform is best to advertise on?

“While doing business-level data validation, I discovered that very few SMB customers use multiple channels (Facebook, Google and Microsoft),” says Akanshaa, the lead on this project.

That’s a really interesting piece of analysis, and not something that was part of the main project. But it’s something we’ve stressed the importance of a lot, how being seen across every touch point is crucial to digital advertising success.

Most people just stick to Google as that’s where they’re told to be, but that’s not always the best case for everyone’s business, as Akanshaa can attest, “The analysis pointed out that Facebook seems to be the most conducive channel for SMBs based on cost (CPM, CPC) as well as return (impressions, clicks)”.

• Facebook is the most cost-effective channel on average for SMBs
• Microsoft is the most responsive channel for increasing ad spend
• Only 56% of advertisers are looking to acquire new customers with their online ads

As Akanshaa says, “I believe my findings will help Adzooma’s SMB users form successful digital marketing strategies by helping them to one, select the appropriate marketing channels. Two, plan their ad-budget in a more informed way. And three, know if they are lagging behind competition and seek help from Adzooma’s Marketplace accordingly.”

Improving Adzooma through data analysis

As we all know, getting access to the right data is crucial for any business’ digital success. But one of our missions at Adzooma is to take all that hard work away from you.

As Srishti says:

“Businesses that tend to manage their own ad accounts are usually with limited resources and lack digital expertise.

Adzooma as a platform is currently helping such businesses optimise their digital ads through multiple channels and increase their click through rates. This research in particular will empower them to ensure that once the ads have led the customers to the businesses’ landing page, that they have done all they can to ensure that the conversion rate increases too.

The clients who are technically capable can make such changes such as avoiding deprecated APIs, not logging browser errors to console, displaying images with correct aspect ratios, background and foreground colors to have a sufficient contrast ratio, amongst other things.

Those clients who need some technical help, can again be connected with the right talent through Adzooma Marketplace.

In short, we are providing the mantras for the businesses to improve their conversion rate. If they need help to get it done, they shall be provided support through Adzooma’s platform.”

That’s how you make your online marketing work.

They undertook a variety of research projects, which we’ve written full reports of. You can find their other findings here:

• What makes online marketing work – An Adzooma & University of Cambridge Study
  • A background look into how and why we ended up working with the University of Cambridge
• Why Your Content Strategy Is So Crucial To PPC Success
  • The Cambridge team took a deep dive into sentimentality to help shape how you write your PPC ads
• How To Select The Best Digital Marketing Channel For Your Business
  • We drove into our reams of data to determine whether Microsoft, Google and/or Facebook Ads is the best marketing channel for you

One of the topics they looked at was based on a simple question: What makes a landing page convert?

Now, there are parts of a landing page that you’ll hear marketers talk about time and time again. You need relevant keywords to bring in the right kind of traffic to your website. You need good copy to sell your product and convince customers to cross the line.

All of this is still true and you can read more advice about it in our guide to creating landing pages that convert better than your website.

But it’s not the only contributing factor. And so, part of the research between Cambridge University and Adzooma was to understand how website quality can have an impact on conversion rates.

*Disclaimer – All campaign data provided to study participants was selected at random and anonymised.

Increasing conversions with landing page performance

For this study, the Cambridge students were given access to an extract of campaign data from Microsoft, Google and Facebook advertising that was being managed through Adzooma. These businesses were selected at random from a variation of industries to keep the study unbiased.

In terms of landing page conversions, one of the tools that was invaluable for this research was Lighthouse. The Google automation tool checked the quality of the landing pages from the data sample in terms of performance, accessibility and other best practice guidelines, delivering numerical values for each key area. The students then compiled this data, measuring performance scores against conversion data.

Out of all the data submitted, only 5% of websites came back with a perfect score. For 95% of businesses in the sample, there was room for improvement in their landing pages.

When analyzing the data, the Cambridge students didn’t just find a direct correlation between landing page performance and increased conversion rate, but also what aspects of landing page quality are the most important.

We’ll outline all of these aspects in order of importance, starting with best practices.

1. Best practices

Google Lighthouse best practices check to see that your website is built and formatted in the best way. They don’t check the content or copy of the page. If you’re interested in seeing the best practices for this, head further down the article.

Some of the checks that run under best practice are:

• Using HTTPS
• Displaying images with correct aspect ratios
• Serving images with an appropriate resolution for clarity
• Avoiding a request for location when the page is loading

Most of these practices are about building trust with the user. An HTTPS is a secure protocol connection for users that are becoming standard for websites, whether or not sensitive data is shared. If your landing page is driving users to a payment gateway or collecting information, users will need the security for extra peace of mind.

Similarly, if a notification box pops up asking for someone’s location without context, users will become suspicious or mistrustful of the website and why they would possibly need this information. If you operate a landing page that has users search for the nearest store, make sure this request is tied to the action and not page load.

More trust means more conversions.

Out of all the landing pages analysed for this research, 0% of them had a perfect score for this particular section.

2. SEO

The Google Lighthouse SEO section makes a number of checks to see if your page is optimised for Search Engines.

This includes factors such as:

• Having meta titles and meta descriptions
• Making sure the page is indexable with a valid robots.txt
• Ensuring that the links used on the page are crawlable

The Cambridge researchers found that 3. SEO factors are the second most important quality element that impacts conversion rates.

Considering that organic clicks are not usually the main source of traffic towards landing pages, this one may come as a surprise for having a direct effect on conversion rates.

SEO and CRO are different disciplines, but they overlap in key areas of putting users first and providing quality content that answers questions. Therefore, making sure that your page is optimised for SEO is a good way of ensuring that your page is optimised for users generally.

3. Performance

Performance for the Google Lighthouse refers to how well the page physically performs, rather than any conversion goals or metrics you might be personally monitoring in Google Analytics.

It checks factors such as:

• Load time, which can have a direct impact on conversions
• Ensuring there’s no unused JavaScript or elements on the page slowing it down
• Avoiding excessive DOM sizes to reduce memory usage

I’m sure you’ve heard stats about how load time can affect conversions and performance before. But to hammer home the point of why this is so important, let me remind you that 40% of customers won’t wait more than 3 seconds for a website to load.

1, 2, 3. If your page takes longer than that to load, nearly half your audience has already left.

Even a 1-second delay on your website can reduce customer satisfaction by 16%. Even the BBC loses an additional 10% of users for every extra second it takes for its site to load.

4. Accessibility

Google Lighthouse accessibility checks how accessible your page is. Accessibility on the web is massively important for conversions and usability as if your site isn’t accessible for all, you’re automatically discounting part of your audience.

It’s equivalent to building your store on top of a steep set of stairs with no handrail. Not everyone will be able to climb them and make it to that final stage.

Although Google Lighthouse doesn’t provide a complete check of a website’s accessibility, it does check for factors such as:

• Making sure images have alt attributes for visually impaired
• Any lists are formatted correctly for screen readers
• Buttons have accessible names

In addition to these checks, you will want to think about how accessible your landing page is on different devices. Does it work as well on mobile as it does on desktop? Can someone load it on older browsers and systems?

The more accessible you make your landing page, the wider you open the door for people to convert.

What other factors influence landing page conversion rate?

Landing page quality has an impact on conversion rates, but it’s not the only factor going on. Customers aren’t going to buy your project just because the website has a great build.

These are some of the other factors you need to consider to improve landing page conversions.

1. Content

Content is the big one here. All the words, images or videos on the page should all be working together to guide your user to take action.

If users are landing on your page and you’re not experiencing any technical problems highlighted above, then it’s your content that will need looking at.

The best content will:

• Be engaging and relevant to your target audience
• Answer any questions or reassure any doubts about your product. Give them exact sizes or dimensions, mention your return policy, talk about your guarantees. You want to remove any hesitations your users will have and give them total faith in your product.
• Promote your USP. Your USP (Unique Selling Point) is the thing that makes your business different from the rest. It’s the reason users should buy from you, and not from your competitors. It’s that extra ‘Thing’ that will help you beat the competition and it should be there, loud and clear in your content.

Not a writer? There are thousands of freelancers or agencies that can turn your copy into solid gold. Find exactly who you’re looking for here.

2. CTAs

A CTA (Call To Action) is a short, direct message that tells your users what action they should take. Most commonly, they appear as buttons such as “Buy Now” “Add to basket” or “Book your place”.

CTAs are a fundamental part of a high converting landing page because they push users into converting. Without them, you could have an excellent page with a brilliant copy. Your users could be hanging off every word and have their credit card ready to sign up right now. But without a CTA… they don’t know what to do.

If you can’t direct them at that exact moment, you’ve lost them.

3. The PPC to landing page journey

Landing pages don’t work in isolation. Users don’t stumble across them by accident – there are campaigns or PPC adverts that are guiding users to that page.

To improve conversions, you need to make sure that every stage of your user journey is lined up and working together.

If people are clicking on an advert promoting the softest, comfiest mattress in the world, they don’t want to be taken to a landing page advertising every mattress type that your business offers. They want a relevant, ultra-targeted and specific page promoting your softest boys.

To help identify if this is a problem with your landing page, you’ll want to use PPC software such as Adzooma. When linked up with your Google Analytics, it will be able to identify what campaigns are performing well and getting a lot of clicks, but aren’t converting so you can go in and make necessary changes. It’s free to use for as many accounts as you wish.

Check the quality of your landing page

Want to check the quality of your own landing page?

There are dozens of tools that you can use to get a handle of your own website. To get you started, we’ve listed some tools that you can use to check your performance.

Google Analytics

If you’re not already using Google Analytics, then it’s time to change that. This tool will show you how users are using and interacting with your website, giving key metrics such as bounce rate for your landing pages.

Lighthouse

As explored earlier, Lighthouse can provide key stats on the quality and performance of your landing page and checks that you might be failing.

To run your own Lighthouse check, load up your landing page. Then, right-click and choose the ‘inspect’ option. This will bring up a screen with a lot of code, but don’t worry – we’re not going through that. You just need to click Lighthouse at the top of this screen.

If you can’t see it listed, press the >> button.

Once loaded, click the ‘Generate Report’ button and wait for your results to come back.

Semrush

When you enter a URL into Semrush, you’ll be able to access reports and insights for SEO, PPC, Social Media, Content Marketing and Market Research. Although not all of these will be immediately useful for checking your landing page quality, you will be able to see:

• Keyword analysis and ideas for your PPC campaigns or to gain more organic traffic
• Competitors SEO/PPC strategy to see if there are any gaps you can target
• Questions that your audience might be asking – and that you can address with the content on your landing page

To access all of these features, click here for your 14 day free trial.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is another tool that, like Semrush, is primarily based around SEO. But, as we discussed earlier, knowing the SEO shortcomings of your landing page can help you build a better experience overall, increasing the number of conversions.

Screaming Frog provides in-depth SEO reports and site maps which aren’t necessarily needed for your landing page. However, some checks such as broken links page titles and metadata checks will come in handy.

You’ll be able to test for these checks using the free version of their tool.

Adzooma

What can we say, we left the best for last. The Adzooma platform is designed to make your PPC management easier and more efficient. AND, we have just launched Adzooma Plus. Adzooma Plus is more than just an add-on or paid platform. It’s your new growth partner to help take your business to the next level. 

It comes with all the features of the free Adzooma Essentials platform, PLUS more advanced tools, insights and optimizations specifically designed to achieve results.

Our landing page opportunities check factors such as your: 

• Page speed, as slow websites can kill sales. The longer it takes to load, the more customers you’ll lose. 
• Landing page experience, which is a measure of the quality of the page that your customers are taken to. If a page isn’t relevant, is hard to navigate or doesn’t provide the right information, it will be seen as poor quality. Poor quality landing pages don’t just harm your sales, but also impact where your adverts are placed in the search results page. 
• Mobile experience, which measures how user friendly your landing page is. 
• Broken landing pages or errors, giving you reassurance that your pages are always working. 

What’s more, we’re also going to use the results from the Cambridge study to improve the platform and bring you more Opportunities to improve your landing pages.

You can access these features and more for free. Sign up today.

Need a whole new landing page?

Found that your landing page isn’t up to scratch and need to rebuild? Or just want an extra hand increasing conversions?

Head over to the Adzooma Marketplace. We’ve got all the web developers, CRO agencies and copywriters you’ll need to increase your conversions and draw in more profit.

Find what you’re looking for on the Adzooma Marketplace.

To carry on supporting SMB’s, we’ve done a deep dive into digital marketing strategies with the help of MBA students at the University of Cambridge. The main aim of the study was to uncover actionable insights around the key factors that drive clicks, conversions and growth, which will help improve our product and further aid businesses to improve their marketing performance.

You can find their other findings here:

• What Makes Online Marketing Work: The Cambridge University & Adzooma Findings
  • A background look into how and why we ended up working with the University of Cambridge
• Why Your Content Strategy Is So Crucial To PPC Success: The Cambridge University & Adzooma Findings
  • The Cambridge team took a deep dive into sentimentality to help shape how you write your PPC ads
• What Makes A Landing Page Convert
  • Using the data, the team took a close look at how to get those extra leads and customers from your landing page

This is just one of the many things we do to try and improve our product, as we can utilise the data to provide more accurate suggestions to our customers. If you want to read more about our optimisations, you can do so here.

For now, here’s why digital marketing strategies are so important, why we partnered with Cambridge University and a deep dive into our new research to help you succeed online.

*Disclaimer – All campaign data provided to study participants was selected at random and anonymised.

Why is this important to me?

Knowing which digital marketing channels work for your brand is essential. Each platform has different audiences with different intent, so what works for one business might not work for you.

For example, although Google Ads is the most popular advertising network, that doesn’t mean it’ll help you achieve the best results in every single area. As this research uncovers, increasing ad spend on Facebook Ads will actually have the biggest impact on impressions.

What’s more, as 54% of Bing users are over the age of 45, and a third of them have a household income of over $100,000, Microsoft Advertising works best for targeting a more professional and affluent audience. Features such as LinkedIn Profile Targeting are also designed for this reason and are more suited towards industries such as Automotive, Finance and Travel.

“The question of what makes marketing work is one which very few have the resources to answer – yet a question that has been plaguing marketers for as long as the practice has been around.

Armed with our data and unique view across platforms, matched with the analytics skills and vast business experience of the students, it was a perfect fit to set about revealing key insights to the question.”

Sal Mohammed, Ex-Googler and current Head of Partnerships at Adzooma

Who took part in the study?

This research was undertaken by Cambridge Business students Akanshaa Khare, Srishti Warman and Sunil Grewal. All three of them have worked with multinational companies such as BCG, ZS Associates, Amazon and Barclays.

Having worked with such teams in the past, they were able to build on their knowledge of the digital marketing industry to identify the most effective ways for SMB’s to maximise their return on ad spend and ultimately grow their brand.

The partnership came about as a result of a previous project with Cambridge Judge Business School and Adzooma’s Head of Partnerships, Sal Mohammed. He told us “such was the calibre of the candidates, I’ve since been itching to work with a cohort from the university again”.

Each student focused on a specific area of research, but this piece will focus on the digital marketing strategy, based on secondary research, factor analysis, iterative regression and a comparison of ad effectiveness and cost efficiency KPIs.

What the study told us

Taking a deep dive into the hundreds of thousands of advertising accounts on Adzooma, this gave us the unique insight of being able to compare data across the three marketing channels of Google, Microsoft and Facebook ads. Data that couldn’t be found elsewhere.

Therefore applying the findings of this unique research could be crucial to helping SMB’s transition online during this time and create a successful digital marketing strategy to achieve their goals.

“The aim of the eventual deliverable was to create playbooks that will illustrate what leads to better ad conversion rates”, said Sristhi Warman. This data would then be used by small businesses and agencies to improve their online advertising performance, as well as enhance the Adzooma platform.

Study A: How do I select marketing channels?

A long-lasting strategy is a strategy that looks at the big picture.

With this in mind, the Cambridge students looked at data aggregation across Google, Facebook and Microsoft, data enhancement and other methodologies including calculating digital advertising ratios. Using this data, they created a 5-step strategy small businesses can use when starting out.

This includes:

• Knowing your target customers and selecting a combination of marketing channels accordingly
• Defining business objective of the ad campaign, based on the comprehensive marketing funnel
• Using the channel-selection framework for suitable advertising formats and channels
• Using overlap resolution methodology to make a choice between overlapping channels from the previous step
• Testing and learning, to understand your customers better and adapt your strategy as you go

So, let’s explore what the first step looks like.

Display, search and social advertising are important for all businesses. But as time goes on and you sharpen your targeting, you might find you want to focus more on one channel than another. This is where the research aimed to conclude the most effective mix of advertising platforms for an SMB.

The research shows that marketing channels which fall into the question mark category could be risky for SMB’s, and those who are categorised as ‘dogs’ should be avoided.

Based on the Cambridge digital marketing acumen and academic literature, it’s also clear that customer behaviour differs across the marketing journey, and based upon which part of the journey a customer is in, they are “more likely to visit a specific channel and respond to a kind of advertising format accordingly”.

This evaluation is supported by existing research which surveyed 1,000 cross-industry SMB’s. It showed:

• Acquiring new customers is the most chased (56%)
• Other goals ranging from ‘generating awareness’ to ‘generating leads’ & ‘retaining customers’ are comparably chased (45% to 49%)

Taking this data into account, the Cambridge students decided that merging the traditional sales funnel with the customer lifecycle model would be the best way for an SMB to manage their overall marketing goals.

The graph below shows which platform a customer is most likely to begin their buying journey on, and where they become more loyal to a brand.

Following this, overlap resolution methodology was used to determine the impact of cost on different marketing channels. This way, SMB’s would be able to effectively determine which platform is best to use when similarities occur – as seen in the funnel above.

The results showed which factors had an impact on results:

Having determined a connection between channel and cost KPIs, further research was conducted to find out the average CPM and CPC across Google, Facebook and Microsoft Ads.

Overall result: Facebook is the most cost-effective channel on average for SMBs.

So, if you’re choosing between Google and Facebook to advertise your business, on average Facebook would be the best bet. But, it’s also advised to look at the click-through rate of both channels as this could differ depending on factors such as industry and geography. Average CTRs are publicly available to help you make a clear decision.

For SMB’s that are debating between Google and Microsoft, the MBA students suggest using Google due to its high reach and low cost. Microsoft could also be useful in addition to Google or particularly suitable for specific business types, especially as it offers high-level targeting and demographics.

Study B: How much should I spend across channels?

For years, advertisers have questioned how much of their budget should be spent on paid advertising. A budget too big might go to waste, but one that’s smaller might not bring the return you need. Again, we worked closely with the MBA students at Cambridge University to find the answer.

To explore this hypothesis, a regression analysis was undertaken to validate if ad spend actually has an impact on increasing the number of impressions and clicks. In other words, whether increasing your budget on platforms such as Google Ads would improve the performance of your campaigns.

The advertising accounts that were analysed were connected to the Adzooma platform, ensuring the data was current, reliable and representative of the three major advertising networks.

Overall, the analysis showed that, on average, if an SMB increased their ad spend by just £1 when using Adzooma – which they can sign up for at no cost – they could expect to see different results across all three channels.

Overall result: Microsoft is the most responsive channel for increasing ad spend.

SMB’s could use this research to distribute their budget more accurately and get a clear idea of which channels will give them the best return on their investment.

However, it’s important to note that “every business is unique and channel mix selected through this framework should be validated through their own experiments”.

How will the data help Adzooma and SMBs?

Generally, the data collected will help to improve the Adzooma platform and allow us to provide more accurate optimisations.

For example, it was suggested that Adzooma could evaluate how channel partnerships can be best leveraged for our SMB customers. As Facebook seems to be the most used channel by 70% of SMB’s, and data analysis suggests it is optimal in terms of cost and return, Adzooma could use this data to scale their Facebook features and Opportunities.

This idea was reiterated by Sal Mohammed, Head of Partnerships at Adzooma, who said: “A lot of the learnings we unearthed from this study will go directly into the core technology. We already demonstrated that Adzooma users receive higher click-through rates than the industry averages by leveraging our technology and the changes we will implement following this work will only enhance that dividend.”

After seeing how easy it is for Adzooma users to compare account performance, the MBA students also devised a benchmarking method SMB’s could use for their own analysis.

The graph would allow businesses to find their peer group and compare ad effectiveness and efficiency, helping them decide which platforms to use. A feature like this is excellent for SMB’s trying to grow their brand and drive traffic in the industry.

If you need support in a different area, Adzooma Marketplace has the expertise you’re looking for. It’s the number one platform that connects agencies, freelancers and more with high-quality leads looking to buy. Browse the categories today to find your ideal match. Or don’t hesitate to get in touch if you’d like to discuss the findings further.

Maximise success with the right channels

If you’re new to advertising or managing your own ad accounts, it can be difficult to build an effective digital marketing strategy. There’s a lot of time and effort involved, and you may have limited resources or digital expertise.

Using the data above, you should have a clear idea of how to select the best digital marketing channels for your business. If you have a tight budget, as the Cambridge research has shown, you will get more for your money using Facebook Ads.

Plus, although Google, Facebook and Microsoft ads are the most popular online advertising platforms, there are alternative (and less expensive) places to list your ads. Although they’re still effective, having fewer users means it’s often easier to reach your exact target audience.

These examples were not analysed within the research, but could increase your profits aside from your most profitable platform.

A few examples include:

• Capterra: An ultimate software review site that allows people to search for new software based on thousands of trusted reviews. Users typically spend a lot of time here, so it’s a great opportunity to set yourself apart and sell the benefits of your business.
• Amazon: 300 million people actively use Amazon which makes it an excellent network to list your shopping ads.
• Reddit: You only need $5 minimum to launch a campaign on Reddit. Popular posts are promoted on the front page, and ‘subreddits’ reach users who share similar interests. Both options allow you to share diverse content with audiences from across the globe.

To find out more about overlooked digital marketing channels, read the full blog post.

No matter how optimised our campaigns are, there’s always room for improvement somewhere, and that’s why we always need to be humble enough to never rest on our laurels and always keep an eye out for improvements.

But there’s only so much time in the day and there’s only so much resource at our disposal.

Of course these days most marketers you speak to will use some kind of software such as an SEO platform like SEO PowerSuite, a visibility platform like SEMrush, or Adzooma’s free PPC management platform, and these platforms will, of course, save you oodles of time.

But that doesn’t mean the time you saved should be spent on yoga (I’m not slagging yoga off, it’s great, but it’s not going to improve your marketing results).

Instead, it gives us more hours in the day to focus on the bigger picture, on our strategy, and that’s where this article I’ve got for you today comes in.

Working in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, our in-house product and data scientist team alongside three Cambridge MBA programme students, took a deep dive into Adzooma’s treasure trove of data with the intention of using that data to make Adzooma better and to answer the question – What makes online marketing work?

This article is one part of a wider series, here are the rest:

• What Makes Online Marketing Work: The Cambridge University & Adzooma Findings
  • A background look into how and why we ended up working with the University of Cambridge
• How To Select The Best Digital Marketing Channel For Your Business
  • We drove into our reams of data to determine whether Microsoft, Google and/or Facebook Ads is the best marketing channel for you
• What Makes A Landing Page Convert: The Cambridge University & Adzooma Findings
  • Using the data, the team took a close look at how to get those extra leads and customers from your landing page

*Disclaimer – All campaign data provided to study participants was selected at random and anonymised.

So why content?

The question on your mind right now is probably an extension of the one above, “Okay, so if you wanted to answer the question, ‘What makes online marketing work?’, why is this article about content?

Well, that’s just how crucial content is. Once the Cambridge Uni students were aboard, each member of the team was tasked with leveraging Adzooma’s data in a way that would help small to medium sized businesses to maximise their ad spend.

One of the things that jumped out at them? Yep, content.

This probably isn’t the biggest surprise for many of you. It’s something that marketing gurus and thought leaders bang on about all the time often using those three immortal words: ‘Content is King’.

I mean, ever since the invention of the printing press we’ve seen how powerful content can be, so this isn’t groundbreaking stuff.

However, it’s fair to say that not everyone treats it with the respect it deserves. Your content strategy is something that needs to be considered at a business level right alongside your sales strategy, accounting and customer personas.

And by content strategy, I don’t mean your content marketing strategy, I’m talking everything from your tone of voice, to your sentimentality, right through to your imagery.

Let’s start with an example. Say you’re an in-house PPC manager for a UK travel company who specialise in gap year holidays. When your company was created, your founder would have had a typical customer in mind:

• Affluent – able to afford an expensive airfare and sustain themselves for a year
• Adventurous – looking to travel to a region of the world dissimilar to their own for an extended period
• Young – the type of person who doesn’t mind the hostel life, constant travelling, and has no family commitments
• Time to spare – students who’ve just finished university/college or millennials on a career break

Of course, there will be so many more considerations, and not every person going on a gap year will fit this mould. Typically, however, they would, and from this persona is where your tone of voice and sentimentality is created.

So how do you speak to them in your PPC ads? Are you upbeat, are you trying to evoke some excitement from their soul? Or do you want to go the other way and play it cool by impressing them with sophisticated diction?

These types of decisions are crucial, and aligning these decisions across your whole marketing strategy is a key to success.

That’s why I say your content strategy needs to be a business level decision. And if isn’t, and you are that PPC manager as highlighted above, put the word in to your boss, maybe ask them to get a marketing strategist on board. Because it’s fine writing evocative ads, but if this doesn’t align with the type of customer who’ll be seeing your ad or interested in your product or services, that disconnect will show up in your results.

How to get it right & the research to back it up

Getting your brand’s sentimentality right is tough and requires work. You need to be agile, you need to always be abreast of the latest trends, you need to be able understand your audience, you need to understand your niche, and your standing in that niche too.

If you’re a big enough brand, you should be social listening, monitoring social media channels for mentions of your brand and analysing the way people talk about you. That’s a crucial way of understanding your audience. Some great tools I’d recommend:

• Awario – The comprehensive way to monitor your brand’s mentions online. Simple as that. Prices start at $29 per month
• Agorapulse – Near perfect tool for managing your brand’s mentions across social media, and searching for keywords on Twitter. Prices start at $79 per month
• Mention – Really basic, but easy way to monitor your brand’s mentions across the internet, though do be careful as it doesn’t spot everything. Starts at $25 per month
• TweetDeck – A free platform which is basically how I imagine the people at Twitter wish they’d designed Twitter. Super easy to use

If you don’t have that following yet, monitor your competitors, industry trends, certain hashtags and keywords related to your business. Sometimes this might have a wider scope than for just your business too.

Back in March at the start of the pandemic, The Edelman Trust found in a report that customers wanted brands to stop marketing that was “humorous or too lighthearted in tone.” I’m sure you wouldn’t have done it, but imagine if you’d carried on running your travel ads not even taking into consideration the pandemic. Wouldn’t have worked would it?

You may think this out of your scope as a PPC manager, but it really isn’t. The key to stepping up from a good PPC manager to a great PPC manager is becoming a more well-rounded marketer.

But it also gets deeper than that, because you also need to understand the network you’re advertising on too. And that’s where our research comes in.

Studying 3,500 phrases across an even split of Microsoft and Google accounts connected to our platform, we were able to deduce some fascinating data.

First, I’ll start with a bit of a boast, but only because it provides you with little bit of context for the stats to follow.

From the analysis we found for both Google Ads and Microsoft Ads the click through rate for the accounts connected to the Adzooma platform was around 6% and 3.7% respectively, which if you’re up on your industry averages, far exceeds the 1.91% and 2.83% you’re expected to see.

This could obviously be for a couple of reasons: the accounts connected to our platform are of a high quality or our platform drives our users’ CTR up (which is probably the case considering it’s one of the many benefits you get from our Opportunities feature).

But this wasn’t the intention behind our research. What we wanted to do was take a real look into the sentimentality of the ads – whether positive or negative sentiment in the ad copy had an affect on the click through rate.

Going back to the travel example, what kind of ad would you opt for? Negative sentiment like, “Get out of dreary old Nottingham today!” Positive sentiment like, “The golden shores of Brazil await!” Or neutral sentiment like, “Book your holiday now!”

Being off brand will still bring customers in, sure, and the example ads will work in their own way, but writing ads specifically to your brand’s guidelines and the advertising channel you’re using is the key to success.

So, knowing the importance of this, when drilling down into the data, we saw quite the discrepancy. For Google Ads, those ads written with a negative sentiment saw a click through rate of 6.5% compared to 5.7% for neutral and positive.

With Microsoft Ads, that completely switched with positive sentiment seeing a 4.2% CTR, neutral 3.6% and negative 3.3%.

The reasoning? Of course it’s hard to be sure, but it’s important to acknowledge that these aren’t like for like comparisons. Indeed, when you compare any sets of data, you need to appreciate the scope for discrepancies – it’s hard to truly create a full proof test.

Yet whilst acknowledging those potential discrepancies, it’s also wise to look at the demographics of both the Google and Microsoft audiences.

We all know Google to be a beast, the first choice search engine of the majority of internet users, but Microsoft still has over 60 million search users in itself, and these users tend to be a little bit older (45 compared to Google’s 38), more affluent (1 in 3 Microsoft searchers have a household income of $100k, with 35% spending more on online shopping than a Google user), and more educated too (50% have a college degree).

These stats may seem abstract with relation to the sentimentality analysis, but if you cross reference them, we find some correlation.

For example, though people say money doesn’t buy happiness, a Harvard Business School Study found out that those with more money were roughly 0.25 points happier on a 10-point scale. A study by the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry discovered that, “Despite the physical ravages of age, older people are actually happier than younger adults.” While work from Blanchflower in 2008 shows that life satisfaction is higher for the more educated.

Does that mean then that Microsoft users are more likely to click positively worded ads because their userbase are likely to be happier than those who use Google? I think the answer is nuanced.

Nuance in research

Really, that’s how we should evaluate every piece of research we read, with nuance. Stats and datasets are hugely important, but you have to add your own context to them, especially in marketing.

The stats we gleaned from our research are really interesting, but taken in isolation, it’s not going to change your business. Using our research alongside your own research, your own content strategy, and your own brand identity, then that might. These were the recommendations made by the University of Cambridge students.

So keep digging into your audience, keep trying to find out who you truly are as a business. Our free PPC platform will help you immensely by easily telling you about the ads that aren’t performing and why, plus there are one-click optimisations for so many of the Opportunities too, which really allows you to focus on the strategy side.

But at the end of the day, no machine will ever be able to write ads or come up with a better marketing strategy than you could (not even GP-2). That’s why our platform is designed to take the manual side of the business away from you, so you can spend time on the work unique to you.

So much of the research and the questions that you ask yourself, your co-workers, your customers, or your employees may be deep, but that’s what you want, philosophical answers.

As the great business academic Gary Hamel said, discovery is the journey, insight is the destination.

So does that mean you shouldn’t be advertising on the Microsoft Audience Network? Well, actually no, not at all. Just like you wouldn’t neglect advertising on the radio if you were running a TV campaign, you shouldn’t neglect Microsoft just because you’re on Google. 

When you look at Microsoft’s audience, it is still so vast:

• 13.7 billion monthly PC searches
• 638 million unique PC users
• Reaches 63 million users that Google doesn’t

Plus Microsoft’s audience is both more educated and more affluent with a third of Microsoft users in the US having a household income over $100k.

So with all that in mind, it’s time to answer the questions: How much cheaper is Microsoft Ads than Google Ads? Which search engine drives the lower cost per conversions? Are you missing a trick by not advertising on Microsoft?

To answer those questions, in part one, we’re going to take a look at five like-for-like campaigns that one of our clients has been running, plus a selection of keywords we have been bidding on, across both platforms from April to December 2020. 

In part two, at the end of January, we’ll look at the stats across the thousands of accounts connected to Adzooma and compare the overall difference between conversion rate, cost per conversions, cost per click, clicks and impressions.

Now let’s get into the data.

Google Ads vs Microsoft Ads     

Unfortunately, we can’t reveal the names of our client’s campaigns as we don’t want to give you visuals into the granular of someone’s PPC strategy, so we’ve just named each campaign Campaign #1 and #2, with three brand campaigns thrown in too. Though, we will give you a clue and tell you it’s an ad account from the marketing industry.

Just glancing a quick eye over the data, you can see huge discrepancies between the Google and the Microsoft campaigns right away, and they’re really interesting discrepancies too.

Indeed, what we expected to see – that campaigns ran on Microsoft are much cheaper than on Google – we did see.

And it’s actually quite staggering to see the true cost differential between Campaign #1 and Campaign #2 on Google vs Microsoft, especially when you compare the clicks too which aren’t massively down. 

Cost Per Click on Google was an average of £5.15 compared to Microrosft’s £1.17.

However, what really is surprising is the conversion rate. Though you’re paying a massive chunk extra for your clicks on Google, you are getting a ton of conversions, whereas on Microsoft those conversions are minimal, and for most businesses, not enough. 

Cost Per Conversion on Google is £139.44 for 971 conversions, while it’s £151.11 on Microsoft for 43 conversions.

That intent differential is interesting and not something that’s immediately thought of as being a Google advantage. It’s actually something we’re digging into and will report on in part two of this piece.

To dig down a little bit further, I think it’s important to show you the differential in keyword pricing here too. Unfortunately, we can’t show you the impressions, clicks and conversions.

Really is quite remarkable the difference between the two. There isn’t too much between brand keywords, but everything else is pretty stark. Just look at PPC tools exact phrase (£17.59 compared to £1.12) and optimize PPC broad match (£33.51 compared to £1.49).

Overall for the 44 randomly selected keywords, the average CPC for Google is £11.76 while Microsoft is £2.06.

What the data means for advertisers 

“Microsoft Ads can be significantly cheaper than Google Ads for a large range of keywords, which can make the platform more affordable to some advertisers. 

“However, it is always important to remember that the reason for the lower costs is the lower level of demand, so you are unlikely to receive the volume of engagement on Microsoft as you would on Google.”

Sophie Logan, PPC Manager at Adzooma

I think what this data shows is the true benefits of advertising across both platforms. 

As I alluded to at the top of the piece, those searching on the Microsoft Ads Network are:

• More educated (50% have a college degree)
• More affluent (a third have a household income over $100k and spend 35% more than Google searchers)
• Slightly older (45 on Microsoft compared to 38 on Google)

And you can see from our data that conversions on Microsoft arrive regularly too. From just the top level data, you also don’t know what type of conversions they are. Those ones that came through Microsoft may indeed be of better quality.

They definitely aren’t as frequent as Google, that’s been established, but that’s why you should be across both platforms, to appeal to both audiences and get more conversions. 

Plus, it’s really easy to get started on Microsoft Ads if you’re already on Google – you can just do a simple import. And, exclusively with Adzooma, you can get $125 in Microsoft ad credits for just $25 when you sign up for a new Microsoft Advertising account.

Then, you can sign up to Adzooma for free, connect your Google and Microsoft accounts, and manage both accounts in one platform so you never have to hop between the two. 

The best of both worlds.

Diversify, diversify, diversify

Diversifying your marketing channels is crucial to success. It allows you to reach a different and wider audience, but it also future proofs you too. We also did some research on this with the University of Cambridge that might be of interest.

When Google launched 23 years ago, only a handful of people could’ve predicted where it would be today. So what’s to say something else won’t come and take its place in time? And with all these antitrust cases currently being levelled against Google, is it still going to retain its search dominance?

At the turn of the century, Microsoft had the dominant internet browser, they had the dominant operating system; they were bound to trounce anyone who came their way. Yet MSN Search, as Bing was known back then, never did dominate, nor get close. Bill Gates looks back at it now as a rueful mistake, but perhaps it was out of Microsoft’s hands.

“Because of antitrust enforcement, that’s why we have Google,” Gary Reback, an antitrust lawyer told The Ringer in 2018. “There is no other reason.” 

Microsoft had previously destroyed Netscape in the browser market and they could’ve easily done the same in the search market were it not for the antitrust case in 2001.

Fast forward nearly 20 years and the boot is well and truly on the other foot. Microsoft’s not exactly a porper, but in the search market there only exists one dominant force, and it’s not them.

Yet now it’s antitrust season again, and this time it’s Google’s time to sit in the hot seat in the US federal court, so what does the future hold?

It’s a fascinating question, but that’s one for the lawmakers of the United States to answer.

What we’ll do instead is come back with more Google Ads vs Microsoft Advertising data for you in part two.

Google is now the latest to go under the microscope, with the US government announcing last week that they were suing the company for harming competition and monopolising the search market. Just in time for the 20th birthday of Google Ads. 

It’s the biggest antitrust case towards a tech company in the last two decades. What happens next may change Google’s future – for better, or for worse. 

So, with Google being sued, how trustworthy do users find Google and what are their opinions on their advertising? 

You’re about to find out, as we surveyed 662 people to get the answers. 

The full results of the study are as follows (click the infographic for the full high-res version):

59.7% of people think Google is trustworthy 

“Google Ads, especially on YouTube, are literally harassment with extra steps. If there were other options out there I would stop using YouTube”. 

When asked how trustworthy people thought Google was as a company: 

• 19% of people said Google was untrustworthy
• 31.3% of people remained neutral 
• 59.7% of people thought the company was trustworthy

Although the majority of respondents viewed Google as trustworthy, nearly a fifth of them didn’t agree. That’s a lot for the world’s biggest search engine. 

One of the big concerns with Google was how they used their data for personalised adverts, stating: 

“They feel intrusive. It feels like they are blatantly selling my search information without regard to privacy”. 

“Personalized ads are an invasion of privacy, especially if the person has not willingly opted in. Google should make it easier for people to turn off personalized ads” 

A personal favourite of mine was the simple statement “Stop listening to my thoughts”. It really does feel that way sometimes.

“Make em’ f#cking obvious”

“I do not like them being at the top of my search results, looking like any other search result at first glance. They should have their own spot.” 

When asked if they knew where ads are normally placed in a Google search page: 

• 74.7% of respondents said they did, but intentionally don’t click them 
• 15.3% of respondents said they did and clicked them
• 10% of respondents said they didn’t know where they were placed.

In 2018, research found that 60% of people didn’t recognise Google Ads, showing a massive increase in visibility over the years.

In addition, 67.7% of respondents said that paid ads are very visible to them, making it easy to make a distinction.

However, some users felt as if the adverts, particularly on search pages, blended too well into the page and want a better distinction between adverts and organic results. One user said that the lack of distinction between the organic and paid search results made them “feel like I have been tricked” if they clicked on an advert. 

But the absolute best response was from a user who said: “Flag em’. Make em’ f#cking obvious. They should get a big fat f#cking red letter ‘A’ emblazoned on em’ like Demi Moore in that f#cking movie”.

If that reference goes past your head, they’re talking about Demi Moore in the 1995 film The Scarlet Letter, a very loose adaptation of the literary classic that was once reviewed as “the worst film ever made”.   

It’s a powerful statement that shows that paid advertising subtly on the SERPs doesn’t work for everyone, despite Google slowly changing its design that way over the past 20 years, as this infographic shows.

Over 40% of people see harmful advertising 

Among the articles making the news about Google allowing adverts for fake financial companies to run, or advertising ‘anti-coronavirus’ products, we asked participants how often they’ve seen paid ads they would describe as harmful. 

• 14.7% of people said they often saw harmful adverts
• 26.8% of people said they sometimes saw harmful adverts 
• 58.6% of people said they rarely or never saw harmful adverts

That’s good news for the 58.6%, but it does mean that nearly half our respondents are regularly exposed to harmful adverts. 

One respondent gave a specific example of being targeted pornographic adverts because of his interest in anime, stating: 

“Stop giving me ads for porn comics just because I like Anime. I poke around on anime articles every once in awhile just to stay updated like CBR.com, but it just leads to a lot of odd ads everywhere else I go. One-click and I already look like a pervert. I mean, at least hide it down lower or something, I get bored when in public and I don’t want odd glances just because I was looking at a Dragonball poster.”

If you’re interested in Google’s guidelines on this, the following are actually allowed to show as long as the user doesn’t have safe search enabled. If you’ve got kids who like anime, I’d suggest getting this turned on to avoid them getting targeted with the same content. 

Tricking users to click ads 

When asked if they think Google tricks people to click on more paid ads, 77.2% of respondents said yes. 

One such trick is that the loading times of the adverts themselves mean users ‘accidentally’ click on them by mistake. One user wrote that “as a search page loads, the ad link suddenly moves down beneath my cursor and I click it unwillingly.” 

Or, as this angrier respondent put it: “APPEAR AT THE SAME TIME AS THE REST, I CLICKED ON THEM BY MISTAKE SEVERAL TIMES”. Got to love an all-caps answer. 

Other respondents listed a lack of visibility as being “tricked” into clicking adverts, again calling for a better distinction between paid and organic search results. 

What’s next for Google & it’s users? 

It’s still very early days for Google’s lawsuit. But, as a much bigger case than what Facebook was subjected to, it’s likely to have a massive impact on the company going forward. 

Right now, 19% of people find Google to be untrustworthy and 77% of them believe they employ tricks to get people to click on the ads. 

After the lawsuit, these numbers may increase, causing more and more users to leave the platform for alternatives. That’s great news for search engines like Microsoft Advertising or DuckDuckGo, who will be waiting in the wings to pick up these users and benefit from Google’s downfall. 

One thing we can learn is that there’s no better time to diversify your advertising and make sure all your eggs aren’t in Google’s basket. 

Methodology 

Data collected from 662 anonymous responses via SurveySwap.io. Because of Adzooma’s partnership with Google and position within the advertising industry, this survey was not sent to any employees, clients, affiliated companies or persons associated with Adzooma.

A demographic breakdown of the survey respondents is as follows: 

• 47.3% of respondents are aged between 18-24 
• 40.4% of respondents are aged between 25-34
• 8.5% of respondents are aged between 35-44 
• 3.2% of respondents are aged between 45-54 
• 0.5% of respondents are aged between 55-64

All comments used in this article are from the respondents. To retain anonymity, no other demographic information was collected for this survey. 

Bing was initially launched in 2001 as ‘Live Search’ and is owned and operated by Microsoft. Its size and scale make it a powerful search engine for users opting for an alternative to Google.

Google is the world’s leading search engine, launching in 1998. Even the saying ‘Google it’ refers to the act of using a search engine to find the answer to a query, regardless of what search engine will actually be used.

To give you a better understanding of the two search engines, the similarities and differences of the two shall be explored, including how differently Bing search and Google search can be used by advertisers.

A brief history

Google

Google started in 1996 as a universty research project by Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Scott Hassan when they studied at Stanford. Hassan worked as the search engine’s original lead programmer and left before the company went public.

It was originally named “BackRub” referencing its use of backlinks to order links on its search results pages. This was part of its algorithm called PageRank which is still used in the background today, helping to determine site relevance for organic listings.

In 1997, Page and Brin registered the Google.com domain and went public a year later.

Bing

Bing started life as MSN Search in 1998, around the time Google became a company. Inktom, an internet software company, provided the search results. MSN Search comprised of a search engine, index, and web crawler.

In early 1999, MSN Search incorporated listings from Looksmart. There was also a period when results from AltaVista were used instead. By 2004, Microsoft built its own web crawler, updating its index weekly. It came out of beta in 2005.

A year later, MSN Search rebranded as Windows Live Search with tabs for the Web, news, images, music, desktop, local, and Microsoft Encarta (remember that?).

Then in 2007, Microsoft separated its search products from its Windows Live services and rebranded the service again as Live Search. It also merged with Microsoft adCenter (which later became Bing Ads and then Microsoft Ads.)

Microsoft rebranded its search services once more in May 2009, when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer revealed its new name: Bing.

In October 2020, Microsoft changed Bing’s name once again to Microsoft Bing.

Market share and features

Google is an absolute powerhouse that dominates the worldwide search engine industry. According to Statcounter, between June 2019 and June 2020, Google saw 91.75% of the world’s search share. Bing came in second with 2.75%. Other search engines including DuckDuckGo and Yahoo! achieved less than 40% of Bing’s share during this period.

However, in terms of the basic search functions, there is no difference between Google and Bing. Both can facilitate search via text, video, image and maps, along with a shopping feature and news feed.

The search engine results pages (SERPs)

Even how these search results appear on both of the platforms is similar. The first screenshot is of the search query “Adzooma” in a Google search result and the second on Bing.

Even the two navigation bars are of similar style, both offering a similar range of features including voice and image search.

Most importantly for your average internet user, the search process and results are generally the same. Simple enter keywords or search terms relevant to the product or service you are looking for and click search. No hassle, no fuss.

Search algorithms

Google

A notable difference between Bing and Google is with the openness of their search algorithms. Google is notoriously secretive about its algorithms—a source of comedy for many SEOs. As of April this year, Google is involved in a lawsuit where the plaintiff, a company named Foundem, requested access to its long-guarded algorithm secrets to prove bias against them.

But it’s not just one algorithm. Google’s ranking systems use a series of algorithms that look at a number of factors and ranking signals including:

• Words of the query
• Query relevance
• Expertise of sources
• Location

Some of these factors are weighted depending on the query type and the “freshness” of the content.

To help ensure that the algorithms continue performing, Google uses live tests and external Search Quality Raters who follow guidelines that reinforce the goals for its search algorithms.

Bing

Bing is a lot more open about its algorithms, going as far as making one of them open source. In 2019, Microsoft added its Space Partition Tree And Graph (SPTAG) algorithm to GitHub. The algorithm uses vector search and AI models to provide results based on search intent.

Other Bing search algorithm features include:

• Using click signals to improve accuracy of SERP listings (something Google has denied doing)
• Favouring the authority of older websites and content compared to newer sites
• Preferring sites with more qualitative backlinks and less focus on the quantity
• For online forums, Bing cites popularity and authority as trust signals as well as the quality of moderation

Google Ads vs Microsoft Advertising

Whilst the search side of things is very similar, there are many more differences when it comes to the advertising side of each platform.

For clarification, in 2019 Bing Ads changed its name to Microsoft Advertising. Google Ads was also previously named Google AdWords, before changing in 2018. It is not uncommon for people to use a mixture of both of the new and old names, with the name Google AdWords ingrained in the vocabulary of advertisers.

The main difference, and probably the most important to an advertiser, is the difference in CPC across the two platforms. Due to the difference in demand, CPC differs greatly between Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising.

The difference in costs can make Microsoft Advertising a much more feasible opportunity for advertisers with limited budgets looking to include paid search into their marketing activities. The opportunity for lower CPC also means a reduction in Cost Per Conversion, resulting in higher ROAS.

However it is worth remembering that whilst CPC may typically be lower on Microsoft Advertising, search volume is also typically lower too. This is a reflection of Bing’s lower search volume share in comparison to Google. So whilst conversions may come in cheaper, their volume may be low.

Other differences include:

• Demographics – Bing is used more by those with higher levels of education and of older age ranges, meaning that for the right advertiser this audience’s preference of Bing can be highly advantageous. In comparison, Google’s key demographics skew towards a younger and more technologically savvy audience.
• Networks – Google Ads offers advertisers the opportunity to advertise on both the Search and Display Network, whereas Microsoft Advertising only facilitates Search. This means that advertisers wishing to use image or rich media ads can only do so via Google Ads.
• Targeting – A current Microsoft Advertising Beta allows advertisers to target their ads via LinkedIn profile information including company, job function and industry. Once this is rolled out for all accounts, advertisers will be able to target their ads based on the profile data available via professional LinkedIn profiles for more precise targeting. As Microsoft owns LinkedIn, it is unlikely that this will ever be an available feature on Google Ads.
• Reach – As Microsoft owns Bing, Yahoo and AOL, ads are eligible to show on all 3 search engines.

For advertisers, there is no harm in using both platforms to advertise on. In fact, by using both platforms, they are ensuring that they are reaching a wider audience than just those using Google as their search engine.

The final result

Whilst Google is a clear leader for the search engine industry, Bing is continuously upping their game and becoming a more competitive force. And with more and more public issues regarding privacy, company ethics and corporate responsibility, Google is likely to lose more of it’s search share to Bing and similar competitors as time goes on.

Google and Bing only scratch the surface of search engines available for the general internet user, but by developing a working knowledge of the two, advertisers can reach the lion’s share of internet searches. Both platforms hold their value and any advertiser would be mistaken for only focusing on one.

Resources

• Search Engine Market Share Worldwide
• I Used Only Bing for 3 Months. Here’s What I Found—and What I Didn’t
• Bing vs. Google – A side-by-side comparison
• How To Optimise Your Microsoft Ads (Tips & Advice)
• Bing Announces New Design & Features For Webmaster Tools
• Google Is Not A Meritocracy
• Mythbusters: If You Use Google Ads, You Don’t Need Microsoft Advertising
• How Effective Are Microsoft Ads Compared To Google Ads?

But how successful is this tactic?

To find out, we surveyed 378 people* to find out what they think about brands with strong personalities and how it influences their purchasing decisions.

Here’s what we found.

57.5% of customers buy from brands with strong personalities

51.2% of people have purchased from a brand because of the way they spoke online.

What’s more, 57.5% of customers said they are more likely to buy from brands with strong personalities.

29.9% of people have said that they wouldn’t be influenced either way, and just 12.7% of people have said they would be less likely to buy from brands with a strong personality.

“I absolutely love brands that have a very strong personality. It’s the same way that people would like to follow a person with a strong personality as well. There’s just something about charismatic and attractive about them.”

Kenny Trinh, Managing Editor of Netbooknews

Friendly personalities are what customers want

When it comes down to the personalities customers resonate with most, 35.1% of people say that they prefer brands to talk in a friendly and conversational way.

In addition:

• 13.1% of people prefer a professional tone
• 13.1% of people preferred a fun or ‘quirky’ tone
• 2.4% of people preferred a sarcastic tone
• 21.4% of people prefer a mixture of all

There’s a real divide in what people want a brand’s personality to be. Although friendly personalities are in the lead here, it won’t work for every company.

Getting it wrong can also cause you to lose customers, as 55.7% of people have unfollowed a brand for the way they speak online.

“I think it’s great to see all these different brands speaking online in different tones and voices. It makes it more exciting and makes each brand unique. I’d much rather buy from a brand that has clearly found their voice and represents that personality in everything they do than one which just doesn’t seem to be trying at all.”

Carla Diaz, Cofounder of Broadband Search

Polarising personalities

“Every person differs on how he/she takes the ad he/she is seeing – some may like a taste of humour, some may be looking for a more professional tone.”

Sonya Schwartz, Founder of Her Norm

People are different. There’s not one single person that’s loved by everyone. Even Tom Hanks can’t win them all. By incorporating a personality into a brand, you’re immediately going to turn some people away.

But there is a bright side to this.

Jake Rheude, VP of marketing at Red Stag Fulfillment, stresses the importance of brand personalities as a crucial factor in how brands connect with their audience.

Personalities are a way to break the ice. It humanises a brand, making them easier for people to talk to. The more people talk to and engage with a brand, the more they’ll remember it. So, when the time comes to buy, there’s only one name on their mind.

“The more a brand portrays a person-like characteristic, the more it can create a connection to its customers or clients. However, the same with a real individual, brands also have different personalities that greatly impact how audiences would react and support them.

Samantha Moss, Editor & Content Ambassador at Romantific

Stronger personalities, stronger brand recall

“It’s inspiring to see someone who doesn’t try to be a conformist and is willing to take a stand for themselves. Even if you dislike it, you will remember this kind of strong personality and brand – there’s no denying that.”

Dmytro Okunyev, Founder of Chanty

Strong personalities can be polarising for the audience, but they are also more likely to be remembered. Good or bad, strong personalities are great tools for brand recall.

To Brian Robben, CEO of Robben Media, having a strong personality can also be seen as an endorsement for the brand, as “No one gets loud, reasonably, unless they are confident in their product or service”.

With so much competition online, it could be a case of who shouts the loudest wins.

“[Brand personalities don’t] always influence my purchasing decisions, but it certainly influences my daily conversations with friends.”

Cathay Pedrayes, Lifestyle Expert

Mr Robot-No

“I prefer a genuine voice, that is a mix of friendly, funny and informative. Brands that are too professional come off as a bit robotic to me, and I tune out immediately.”

David Foley, Founder of Unified Cosmos

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have brands that avoid personality to the extent of becoming emotionless robots. This isn’t great either, as a robotic tone of voice isn’t likely to captivate or engage your audience.

As John Linden of Mirror Coop says, “No one is on social media for the professional side of life; that’s already what people have to face at work, so they log on to social media to unwind”.

Customers aren’t on social media to be sold to. They’re there to unwind, talk to family and friends and be entertained. If your businesses can fit into that circle, they’re much more likely to remember and engage with your brand.

This may also be the reason 35.1% of people prefer brands to speak in friendly and conversational ways online.

Be true to your brand

“Whatever your personality or voice, use it, be consistent and make sure that it is honest, authentic and true to you and your brand. If you do, you’ll naturally attract the customer who is looking for you and what you’re selling or talking about. The worst thing to be is ambiguous, boring or stuck in the middle.”

Chris Fernandez, CEO of Women’s Health Interactive

Brain V. Folmer of FirstLook, states that brand personalities depend on the industry and category the brand is in. As an example, Brain listed Ugly Drinks, who use a cheeky tone-of-voice and often use colloquial text speak, like “git” “gon” and “u”.

This tone of voice works for Ugly Drinks because they are an alternative soft drinks company aimed at younger generations. It fits into their brand value of honesty and ‘no-sugar coating’. It wouldn’t be appropriate for, say up-market brand Gucci to use this language. It goes against the image they’ve built from themselves of class and sophisticated fashion.

Basically, it’s all about your audience and how you can communicate and connect with them. If sarcastic or witty tones are what they love and enjoy, then it’s what’s going to resonate and work well for your brand.

“Effective branding is less about having a strong personality online and more about having a distinct personality that makes sense, given what the product or service is selling. The most relevant the brand is to the consumer and followers set of values, the more likely they are to follow. I don’t care how a brand speaks – I only care if they are doing it memorably, consistently, and aligning with their brand values.”

Kimberly Solarz Gordon, Brand Strategist at KSG Group LLC

Has the pandemic solidified the need for personas?

The global pandemic saw a huge boom in local buying, particularly within the food industry. Approximately a third of households increased their digital spend, while 38% of consumers said they will continue to buy from the same stores they visited at the beginning of the crisis.

Micheal D. Brown, Director of Fresh Results Institute, states that because of the pandemic, “Customers are buying more emotionally these days. This means they would naturally go with a brand they have a sentimental attachment to.”

The pandemic has caused an economic crisis, meaning customers are much more careful about where they spend their money. Customers want to buy from brands they trust, including local and friendly brands where customers believe their spending power makes a difference.

Don’t be down with the kids

Of the personalities that we questioned, there was one that received a more negative response than others. This is brands that are ‘over the top’ and post memes in an effort to connect with Gen Z audiences.

Sandra Hurley, Operations Manager of Hayden Girls says: “I’m afraid I can’t take the second-hand embarrassment. I am forced to unfollow and avoid shopping there”.

Embarrassment is not a good feeling to envoke from your audience.

If you want to see anymore, there’s an entire Reddit thread titled ‘How do you do, fellow kids’ devoted to the most awkward and cringe-worthy examples. Yikes.

“If it’s a major company trying to cash in on meme culture, without grasping its subtleties, I’m probably going to unfollow it or keep an eye on it as an example of what not to do.”

Domantas Gudeliauskas, Marketing Manager at Zyro

Knowing when to turn it on

31.4% of people said that they wanted brands to speak in a mixture of different personalities. This doesn’t mean that one day you should be sarcastic and the next friendly – as this will confuse your customer base and muddle your branding.

It’s about knowing when to use personalities and when you need to tone it down, such as in your customer service department.

One person has proved that by pretending to be the customer service department for a number of brands and commenting on people’s posts on Facebook. In fact, there’s an entire page dedicated to it.

Let me just say, people are not happy when they don’t get a professional answer back. It brings out the worst in them and results in many threats about getting him fired.

As amusing as these examples are, it shows an inherent difficulty of brand personalities. They have to speak out but not offend. Gain attention by being different, but also provide the friendly, supportive and professional tone that people expect when they have a problem.

Brand personalities are not permanent. They’re a tool used to gain attention and build relationships with customers, but cannot be used across all aspects of the business.

And we shouldn’t expect them to either. Brands are not single entities, they’re made up of several different people. We should expect brands to be as multifaceted as they serve different functions for their customers.

Should personalities get political?

If you decide to use a strong personality for your brand, does that mean you should be posting about politics?

In another investigation, we found out what customers actually think about brands getting political. The majority of people found them to be insincere, with 43.5% of people thinking that it is just a way for customers to jump on the bandwagon.

In addition, politics can worsen customers’ opinions of a brand and potentially damage your online engagement, as 42.3% of people will unfollow a brand for speaking out about politics.

However, it can increase sales. 63% of people are more likely to buy from a brand that speaks out about politics, but only if customers agree with you. If they didn’t, 67.5% would be unlikely to ever buy from your brand.

Read the full data.

If you really want to engage with your customers on social, you might want to consider having a strong personality but avoiding politics.

Methodology

Data was gathered from 378 anonymous respondents via surveyswap.io. No participant was paid for their response, and the survey was made available to people of all backgrounds, ages, genders and ethnicities to avoid any bias in responses.

With technology advancing at breakneck speed, there are now a number of ways that AI can be used to improve your working day. Streamlining processes such as recruitment, administration and data analysis, intelligent software can prove itself to be an invaluable asset when it comes to assisting a workforce.

But, will AI replace human workers? In short, no – it does have its limits. While it might be a worry, what we’re actually seeing today is a solution for boosting productivity, an opportunity to positively manage a workforce and ultimately, it allows you to better handle the day-to-day operations of the business. If anything, it’s making business MORE human by giving you some breathing space and improving mental health in the workplace.

So, how can Artificial Intelligence help you?

Only 23% of businesses were estimated to have incorporated AI into their processes according to Forbes. But, come the next 5 years, the artificial intelligence market is expected to grow by 50% and regardless of business size, it can be utilised. Below, we’ve highlighted a number of ways that you can integrate AI into your workflow – giving you the chance to bin the menial tasks and focus on the important stuff.

Using AI for recruitment

One of the key areas of your business where artificial intelligence can be implemented is the recruitment process. When your company is ready to hire, you need to be able to create the best pool of candidates as quickly as possible.

Using recruitment agencies for pre-screening is common but can be a costly exercise and is unlikely to offer the same in-depth, personalised analysis that an AI process would. Recruitment agents are essentially profit-driven too, so are likely to tip the scale in their favour when it comes to presenting a candidate to you. This isn’t something AI cares for.

Tools such as Pymetrics use a series of “ethical AI games” to assess a candidate’s cognitive and emotional characteristics, whilst avoiding demographic bias. It can also match the results against existing employees who perform well, giving you a tailored picture of where a candidate might fit within your company. By putting these steps in place, it’s said that it can take 75% less time to hire someone and increase retention by up to 50%.

Give AI the long, boring jobs

There are certain jobs that no one likes but need doing nonetheless. This is where AI can be of real benefit in terms of productivity.

While some might worry this is where they’ll lose their job to a machine, it’s actually expected that there will be net positive job growth into the 2030s as the workforce transitions into higher skilled roles.

Reasons to consider AI for certain roles:

• Speed of execution – AI systems can make millions of decisions simultaneously, unlike a human.
• Less biased – It’s hard not to cast some sort of judgement or biased view as a human. This isn’t a trait AI is capable of, therefore any decision it makes is completely fact-based.
• No saturation point – AI will never burn out or require breaks, meaning the overall time taken to perform a task is significantly reduced.
• Accuracy – No human, means there’s no human error.
• Boredom – Often, errors arise through boredom, it can be difficult to stay focused when it comes to a long, complex task. This isn’t the case for a machine.

So, what jobs might you hand over to AI?

We’re not in any way suggesting you make staff members surplus to requirements in favour of AI, but there are certain roles that can definitely benefit from harmonising their efforts.

Here are four job roles where artificial intelligence can help lighten the load:

Data Analysing

With a need to gather and analyse huge amounts of customer data to spot trends and opportunities, many companies will look to a data analyst to help them stay ahead of the game. With the advent of social media and eCommerce as a whole, there’s been a 344% increase in demand for data scientists since the early 2010s. But with an average salary of $130,000, that’s not always going to be within every company’s budget.

AI tools such as Deloitte’s LaborWise can provide managers with analytics to identify high-cost areas, roadblocks and even provide information about which departments are overworked or understaffed.

Demand Forecasting

Using machine learning systems, you can test mathematical models relevant to your business, predicting changes in demand, supply disruptions and product launches. According to consultancy firm McKinsey, this can reduce supply chain errors through miscalculations by up to 50%.

Administration

Again, we’re not suggesting AI can replace all human aspects of the role, but it can certainly lighten the load. Here are a few tools that can be especially useful for streamlining your administration processes:

X.ai – Connecting all of your calendars, the AI processes will automatically coordinate the best times to arrange meetings, whether internally or when meeting guests.

Otter.ai – Almost like an AI PA system that takes minutes, Otter can create rich notes from meetings, interviews and other important voice conversations – ensuring nothing is missed and all points are covered.

Spoke – Essentially an HR service desk, it can answer questions about pretty much anything HR-related, including leave requests, internal processes. If it can’t, it will direct the question to the appropriate person in your team.

Skype Translator – If you need a conversation translating, it can do so in near real-time. Opening up communications with any foreign market.

MobileMonkey – You can train a chatbot like MobileMonkey to answer frequently asked questions on your website. If it can’t answer, the chat will be directed to a human. Using chatbots can significantly reduce the number of customer queries and 80% of sales and marketing leaders say they already use chatbot software or plan to by the end of 2020.

Marketing

If there’s one area that’s really starting to embrace artificial intelligence, it’s marketing – especially digital. With Google’s implementation of machine learning algorithms such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) for SEO and Smart Bidding for paid advertising, how the industry works is very much geared to favour AI and automation.

Advances in AI and software intelligence is allowing companies to personalise their products and services more effectively, providing a more tailored approach to how they market themselves to consumers. A recent study by Accenture suggests that consumers are responding well to this, with 83% of consumers in the US and UK willing to trust retailers with their data in order to receive more tailored, relevant results.

This willingness from consumers is encouraging and 64% of B2B marketers consider AI to be a valuable asset in their sales and marketing strategy.

Learning with AI

Beyond the recruitment process, we can also use AI to train staff, this can be particularly useful when working with a number of new starters. If your business has a unique way of handling certain tasks, AI can ensure that training is consistent and thorough. There are a few AI tools that can be used for on-site training, here are two examples that are worth looking into:

• Coaching tools such as Chorus can analyse sales calls as they happen, offering real-time tips to sales reps as required. This means there should be little need for shadowing and the sales rep is able to learn at their own pace and experience the training “on the job”.
• A similar tool called Cogito can offer real-time advice while making a call but focuses more on mindfulness and your approach. For example, when learning a new role it’s quite common to speed up in conversation due to nerves, this tool can remind you to “slow down”.

The future of AI

The integration of AI seems inevitable, whether we like it or not. As more and more businesses seek to embrace technology and automation, to avoid it could mean you’re left out of the game.

Those that have integrated AI into their workflow strategy are reaping the rewards when it comes to speed, efficiency and accuracy despite concern that it could mean an end to human jobs. At the heart of the matter, those jobs that were traditionally time-consuming, resource-intensive or laborious, are now being transformed into stronger, more highly skilled positions.

We are not affiliated with nor do we earn any money from the brands or tools mentioned in this piece. You’re more than welcome to use the artwork for your own content, all we ask in return is that you credit Adzooma for production.