“Which is better: SEO or PPC?”

There’s a loaded question for you. It mistakenly assumes one is better than the other. Still, pitting SEO vs paid search marketing is one the most common things businesses do when first trying to tackle digital marketing — much to their bottom line’s detriment.

Which is why we recommend figuring out instead:

“Which will provide the best return for XYZ goal: SEO or PPC?”

A little less zingy, but a whole lot more valuable.

Below, we’re going to help you answer that second, far more profitable question. We’re going to look at the difference between SEO and Paid Search, their pros, their cons, and — most importantly — which is the better investment per your business’s specific goals.

Why You Should Care About SEO and Paid Ads

Many say SEO and Paid Search are the two pillars of digital marketing. A quick look at some organic and paid search stats, and we quickly see why.

Overall, organic and paid searches are responsible for 68% of all website traffic:

• 53% of site traffic comes from organic search
• 15% of site traffic comes from paid search

Those figures are averaged across all industries. (The numbers fluctuate according to industry. For example in B2B, organic accounts for 64% of traffic. For eCommerce, paid accounts for nearly 24% of traffic.)

What’s more, it’s been found that paid and organic search generate 72% of revenues.

Maybe we should take a moment to let that sink in.

Research shows that combined organic and paid search bring in two-thirds of all revenue. That’s crazy high. That’s why you should care about SEO and paid advertising.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO)  is the process of improving the visibility of your website and webpages in organic results of search engines, like Google and Bing.

Mostly this means trying to get your webpages to rank higher and brand to take up more real estate on search engine result pages (SERP). This is accomplished by optimizing your online content to appease search engine algorithms, which calculate the quality and relevance of your pages, and rank you accordingly.

Pros of SEO

• Less expensive long term
• Requires less maintenance
• Generates consistent, sustainable traffic
• Builds brand trust and credibility
• Wider potential reach
• Higher ROI long term

Cons of SEO

• Takes longer to produce results
• Poor for time-sensitive content
• Provides less control over performance
• Provides vaguer analytics

Want to know more? Check out the top benefits of SEO.

What is Paid Search?

Paid search is the process of paying to improve the visibility of your website and webpages on search engines, or their partner sites. It is often referred to as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

The hope is to deliver these sponsored ads at the very top of SERP. This is accomplished through bidding and keyword targeting. Costs are most commonly incurred each time they get clicked (cost-per-click or CPC) or by how many people see them (cost -per-thousand or CPM).

Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Amazon all provide PPC advertising platforms.

Pros of Paid Search

• Quick to produce results
• Useful for time-sensitive content
• Provides more control over performance
• Laser-focused audience targeting
• Provides detailed analytics
• Higher ROI short term

Cons of Paid Search

• More expensive short term
• Requires more maintenance
• Grows less effective over time
• Can require bigger budgets

The Difference Between SEO vs Paid Search

The biggest differences between SEO and paid search ads are:

1. Placement on SERP
2. Real estate on SERP
3. Cost for Placement

SEO vs Paid Search: Placement on SERP

Paid ads appear at the top of search results. They dominate above-the-fold, and will always be the first thing a user sees. They take up to the first four snippets on desktop and three on mobile. Sometimes paid ads appear at the bottom of the page, making them the last thing a user sees, as well.

Organic search results take up the remaining 10 snippet spots on a page, but users have to scroll down the page past paid ads just to get to the top ranking organic results.

SEO vs Paid Search: Real Estate on SERP

While paid ads come first, organic content takes up more space. Paid ads always appear in the same spots, and are confined to how much real estate they can take up on a page.

Organic SERP content is more flexible.

Not only can page snippets expand and provide additional branded info, thanks to stuff like FAQ schema. But brands can use SEO to appear in additional areas of a results page with rich snippets, the local Map Pack, and the Knowledge Graph. All together this provides a ton of potential real estate for brands to promote on SERP via SEO.

SEO vs Paid Search: Cost of Placement

Paid search has a direct cost, in that businesses must pay for their ads to appear on SERP (via CPC or CPM). As a result, the costs associated with paid search ads can escalate quickly.

SEO has no direct cost. Placement in organic results is provided for free by search engines, making it a much more cost-effective strategy over the long term.

Of course, both SEO and PPC have indirect costs. Such as the costs it takes to create and develop online content and maintain it.

SEO vs Paid Search: KPIs

Two of the best key performance indicators (KPIs) for both SEO and PPC are:

• CTR: Click-through-rate
• CVR: Conversion rate

According to the latest data, the top result in Google’s organic search results provides an average CTR of 31.7%. (The second and third spots yield 24.7% and 18.6%, respectively.)

Paid ads on Google have an average CTR of 5%. Their average CVR is 3.75%.

While calculating an average conversion rate for SEO is difficult, it’s been estimated that overall organic search results are 8.5x more likely to be clicked, while paid search ads are 1.5x likely to convert. That would give a CVR for SEO of 2.5%, roughly.

Which Strategy is Best for Your Business Goals?

To the crux of the matter.

We’ve shared the differences between SEO and paid search. We leave it up to you to decide which is better. (Hint: They’re both great.) Now we want to focus on what really matters, and speak in terms of specifics to your business.

To do this we’ve listed the most popular goals brands set for their digital strategies. We’ll see how well each — SEO vs Paid Search advertising — stack up, and determine the one you would be better off implementing.

Goal: Instant Results

Edge: Paid Search

If you want to generate immediate sales, paid search is the way to go.

Purchase intent is a fickle beast. Consumers are quick to change their mind so it’s crucial brands get in front of them when they possess strong purchase intent. PPC advertising is the fastest way to reach customers primed to buy on search engines.

SEO takes time to implement and return positive results. PPC allows for more immediate results.

As such, paid search is a great short term solution for promoting your products and services, especially if you provide seasonal or time-sensitive offerings.

So when you feel the need for speed, go with PPC.

Goal: Exposure

Edge: SEO

The goal of greater exposure boils down to potential reach. In that regard, SEO has the edge over paid search.

Not only does SEO provide the opportunity to fill up more SERP real estate with branding, but a comprehensive SEO strategy will allow your website to rank on multiple search engines and for multiple search queries, with little additional effort or cost. In order to similarly serve paid ads you need to create multiple campaigns and ad sets on a variety of different platforms, which takes time and can get very costly.

With SEO you can expand your overall reach exponentially and ongoingly with a single piece of content. And although paid search may have better targeting overall, nothing can compete with the influence SEO has over local exposure.

Goal: Audience Targeting

Edge: Paid Search

Knowing your audience and effectively targeting them is an important part of any marketing strategy. SEO can target specific queries, but any other targeting beyond that is very limited. The targeting methods of paid search on the other hand know no bounds.

PPC advertising affords the most comprehensive way to target your ideal customers.

The sheer variety of targeting tools PPC ad platforms provide is mind-bogglingly awesome. Enough to make any digital marketer giggle with delight. You can segment your audiences by age, geographical location, gender, affinity, language, device, lookalike audiences, parental status, income, in-market interests, keywords, online activity, and several other factors to ensure your ads are being served to the right people at the best possible times and excluded from negative audiences.

Goal: Credibility

Edge: SEO

The long term success of brands live and die by their online credibility. Trust and goodwill leads to repeat business. Authority and expertise attracts new customers.

Advertising can come across as contrived and intrusive, especially when poorly designed. As a result, users tend to trust paid search ads less.

SEO on the other hand is all about building trust.

Search engine algorithms place a lot of emphasis on EAT content. That’s content that conveys Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. A high rank gives your business a stamp of approval. Anyone with enough money can pay to be in the top spot for PPC, but brands have to earn the top spot in organic results. Users know this. They often scroll past search ads because they trust organic results more.

To improve your brand’s credibility with SEO, start by targeting attainable, less competitive keywords and move towards higher volume targets as your website and brand become a source of reputable content. Make sure you create high-quality EAT content and relevant backlinks.

Goal: Scalability

Edge: SEO

Scalability defines how easy it is to increase returns, such as impression, traffic and click volumes, as well as customers, revenue and profit. Done correctly, over time, SEO can create a significant source for all those returns. That’s because the best organic optimizations compound over time.

The same can’t be said for paid search. In fact, quite the opposite.

PPC ads have short lifespans compared to organic content. (Typically lasting one to two months, at best, compared to several years for organic.) Their returns start to diminish after a short period of time. And the second you stop paying, their returns dry up completely. All this makes it impossible to cost-effectively scale your advertising.

SEO can sustain growing returns over the long term. To accomplish this, we recommend building a majority of your SEO content around evergreen content (i.e. content that will not grow outdated). That way you ensure your content is strongly positioned to sustainably scale.

Goal: Control

Edge: Paid Search

Having control over your marketing operations is essential for accurately calculating budgets and schedules. To that end, paid search provides far more control than SEO.

Google algorithms have the final say on what ranks where with organic content. While the right SEO experts can circumnavigate Google’s algorithms to provide the best results, it still makes it more challenging to control your marketing. Especially since SEO changes can take days, sometimes months, to effectively appear in search results.

Paid search ads, however, are unaffected by organic Google algorithm updates.

Your budget dictates performance, not Google. Once your campaign is set up, your ads will appear as you’ve written them in the placements you’ve selected. By controlling the bid, keywords, targeting and creative, you (or a paid search expert on your behalf) determine how effective your SEM will be.

Goal: Budget

Edge: SEO

SEO typically does not require as large a budget as paid search. The right SEO agency can optimize organic strategies at minimal cost to return huge results. To get similar numbers of visitors, revenue and profit from paid search would require a much larger budget. Especially right out of the gate.

Don’t get us wrong. PPC campaigns are incredibly effective. But they can be expensive to run, especially in competitive industries. They also often cost much more to get started than SEO. We’ve seen instances where an SEO campaign with a $10K per month budget outperforms a paid search budget in the millions per year.

Goal: Beating the Competition

Edge: SEO and PPC

In today’s marketplace if you’re not performing multichannel marketing, you’re not competing. Your competitors are probably doing both SEO and PPC. And if they aren’t, you have an easy opportunity to get ahead.

Here are some of the ways in which SEO and PPC can be used together to improve your marketing efforts:

• Convert More Traffic: Drive new visitors to your website with SEO. Then remarketing to those visitors with PPC ad campaigns
• Get Betting Insight: Take the detailed analytics provided by PPC platforms and apply to your SEO strategy
• Boost Keywording Effectiveness: Use keywords from your PPC ads that generate a high CTR in your SEO title tags, headlines, and meta descriptions to boost CTR for your organic listings

Bottom Line: To succeed in SEM, businesses need to leverage both SEO and PPC in a collaborative marketing strategy.

Conclusion: SEO and Paid Search are Both Great

So, which is better: SEO or PPC?

Neither. They’re both great.

Both SEO and paid search ads can benefit your business and provide amazing ROIs. But ONLY if you know when to use them for maximum effect. Ultimately, which digital marketing channel you choose and when you use it depends on your goals.

There’s a good chance you’re looking at the goals we listed above and thinking to yourself, “But all those are my goals. So if I can only choose one which should I go with?”

If you’re unable to do both right away, rank your goals and start implementing the strategy that applies to the one at the top. Then work your way down from there. That said, we recommend taking a cue from that last goal — in order to remain competitive and dominate your industry you need to effectively implement both SEO and PPC. That’s the only way to ensure you profit from all your business goals.

Well, that and a really great support team.

Every team member at Titan Growth is a triple-certified search engine marketing expert. Contact us to learn more about how you can benefit from a partnership with our team, and use SEO and PPC to provide the best return for your goals.

Google has introduced a new algorithm update that’s meant to target a specific type of online content. Here’s what that means for content creators and businesses.

Google’s “Product Reviews” algorithm update has a lot of implications for review articles/blogs that are meant to compare or review products online. The good news though is that with the new update also comes some information on best practices for just how to create that kind of content. We’ve decided to unpack it a little here so that businesses can know how to get the best traffic growth.

What exactly is the Google product review algorithm update, and how does it change the world of product review SEO?

Read on to see what it means for your online marketing strategy.

The Basics of the Google Product Review Algorithm

First announced on Google’s Search Central Blog, they explain that the main goal of the new update is to address online product review content and to make sure that the best, most helpful reviews show up in search results.

Their main motivation is to make sure that Google search provides the most accurate, and high-quality content for users that rely on them to research products, make purchases, and navigate through eCommerce decisions.

According to Google the purpose of the product reviews update is to focus on:

“…reviews that share in-depth research, rather than thin content that simply summarizes a bunch of products. That’s why we’re sharing an improvement to our ranking systems, which we call the product reviews update, that’s designed to better reward such content.

“Although this is separate from our regular core updates, the advice that we provide about producing quality content for those is also relevant here. The overall focus is on providing users with content that provides insightful analysis and original research, and is written by experts or enthusiasts who know the topic well.”

It is more website-focused, and not just URL-focused. Meaning that it might be more likely to affect websites as a whole, or sections of a site. Google claims the changes to the algorithm are meant for broader “parts of sites, or the site overall.”

Since the algorithm is not a core algorithm update. That means it only affects rankings for certain types of content in their search index, so non-reviewing brands and businesses that do not publish “product reviews” will not be affected by this update.

  also gives some extra explanation, that this update will control the SEO rankings of not just regular product reviews, but all types of reviews including service business reviews, single product reviews, product “round-ups,” and more.

How Businesses Can Optimize Their Content for the Product Reviews Update

For online business owners, content creators, and marketers, Google has come right out and provided guidance about how to create good content for this product review algorithm update!

There’s no information on how the algorithm works on a technical level, what sort of on-page SEO ranking factors are used as signals, or what sort of writing guidelines for SEO are at play. Obviously, well-known strategies like keyword research, meta-data optimization, and technical SEO are still important, but it’s best to approach this update by making sure that content is written for users first and foremost.

Google’s goal is to float expert and insightful analysis to the top of search results in favor of thin or vague content. It’s meant to promote original research, content written by “experts or enthusiasts” who know the topic well.

Content and Quality Questions That Businesses Can Ask Themselves

In fact, with the announcement of the product reviews update, Google provided 9 questions can marketers use as guidance for their product review SEO. Does your content…

• Express expert knowledge about products where appropriate?
• Show what the product is like physically, or how it is used, with unique content beyond what’s provided by the manufacturer?
• Provide quantitative measurements about how a product measures up in various categories of performance?
• Explain what sets a product apart from its competitors?
• Cover comparable products to consider, or explain which products might be best for certain uses or circumstances?
• Discuss the benefits and drawbacks of a particular product, based on research into it?
• Describe how a product has evolved from previous models or releases to provide improvements, address issues, or otherwise help users in making a purchase decision?
• Identify key decision-making factors for the product’s category and how the product performs in those areas? For example, a car review might determine that fuel economy, safety, and handling are key decision-making factors and rate performance in those areas.
• Describe key choices in how a product has been designed and their effect on the users beyond what the manufacturer says?

To better optimize content for the Google product reviews update, these questions can help content creators ensure they can meet user needs, and not just provide empty words.

How Content Creators Can Protect Against Negative Impact

What do you do if your site has been negatively impacted by the update?

As is often the case with algorithmic changes, and fluctuations in rankings, there isn’t one exact answer. The main thing is to make sure that content is accurate, honest, and is high-quality. That means, that in addition to the trouble-shooting questions above, websites can rely on Google’s Search Central documents on steps for building high-quality sites and avoiding algorithmic penalties.

Their advice: focus on delivering the best possible user experience, ask yourself if you’d trust the information presented on your site the way it’s presented, avoid duplicate/redundant content. Put yourself in the shoes of your target audience – and then pre-emptively create content that makes their journey through your site as satisfactory as possible.

After that, it might be best to audit the technical SEO of your site, or to get in touch with experts in SEO management to see if under-optimized content could be hurting your website’s growth.

It’s Not A Core Algorithm Update

The Google product reviews algorithm is not a core update, meaning that it does not affect all rankings/pages in the Google search index.

This means that for many brands, businesses, eCommerce sellers, and publishers there’s nothing to worry about. That is unless they also publish reviews, such as in the form of blogs. Other than that – there’s no information from Google about what ranking signals are used in the algorithm.

Best-Practices for Product-Related Marketing Content

With this update, Google is reminding business across the web about the number one rule: content is king! That means high-quality, user-focused content across your total digital-marketing campaign.

Here’s what brands need for SEO-rich content:

• Providing product information for shoppers is still as important as ever. Google relies on accurate and trusted product data to precisely identify products that are available for shoppers – that means elements like SKU numbers or GTIN information.
• Clear information.
• Exact product names.
• High-quality photos
• Be careful with sponsored content. Don’t rely on sponsored content to give/get backlinks. Website owners can notify Google about sponsored content by using the sponsored content HTML meta-tag on their site, and by properly utilizing robots HTML commands. It’s not known if the product reviews algorithm cares about sponsored content – generally Google understands the existence of affiliate marketing/sponsored content and offers the above elements to handle it.

Why Content is So Important for Shopper Marketing

When it comes to better product-review content, and better digital marketing online, it’s important to remember that users come first!

According to research data from Think With Google, 47% of global purchases are made online, plus nearly 1/2 of all shoppers use Google to discover new items or products, and in 2019 retail eCommerce alone brought in $3.5 trillion in the U.S. Data compiled by BrightEdge claims that search engine traffic (referred to as “organic” traffic) makes up 51% of all website traffic – meaning that the search engine is crucial to the way people begin their shopping journey.

Internet shopping and browsing is the new normal for the way people buy stuff for their daily lives, and even for how they discover new brands.

Before looking at technical ways to enhance your content, businesses should first be sure that website content is high quality and provides value to their intended audience. When writing content, address the questions and concerns of your target audience in order to provide the most value.

All the page #1 keyword rankings in the world mean nothing if visitors don’t find value in your content.

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines for Content

We’ve already emphasized how one of the single best things online businesses can do is to focus on high-quality content. Fortunately, Google’s Webmaster Guidelines provide clear instructions on creating high-quality content which content creators and business marketers can rely on.

Here are few of the main things to keep in mind when strategizing how to engage with your audiences using product reviews:

• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Ensure that your <title> elements and alt attributes are descriptive, specific, and accurate.
• Avoid spammy, manipulative, or misleading content.
• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
• Don’t deceive your users.
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
• Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.

Content for User “Needs Met”

There’s another thing that should be the starting point for all the content on a site – especially for improving product review SEO in the long term. And that is something that Google’s quality evaluator guidelines define as “needs met.”

Will visitors find their “needs met” when they visit your page?

This concept means that everyone who reads or visits your site should hopefully come away from it with the feeling that their needs were fully met.

When creating content for both your website (and even for off-site marketing channels like social) it’s important to make sure that you use product-review SEO keywords that match with the content’s subject matter, and to provide a UX that will help visitors get to their ultimate goal. Whether that’s making a purchase, researching information, navigating somewhere, filling out a form, etc.

This means understanding search intent marketing – what the intent, or the actual individual’s goal is when they use Google – and creating content that actually matches that intent and meets their needs.

So let’s say for example that someone makes a search for “GoPro Hero 9 camera quality review” or “Sony wireless earbuds battery review.” Even for brands that are already using traditional SEO to target these keywords, Google will use the product reviews update to rank the results.

Understanding how “searcher intent” is now core to being able to provide better content, and to improving modern eCommerce marketing. For brands and reviewers that want to appear for these types of searches, and capture people in the shopping funnel, it’s best to consider “what do people searching these things actually want” and to try to create content that meets those needs (a.k.a. “needs met”).

Product Marketing That is E-A-T

Since the Google product reviews update is all about quality content it’s good practice to look at other ways to get good SEO content.

Businesses that want their website to score well on Google have to consider EAT. So what is EAT? It refers to the “expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness” of the webpage, the main content, and the webpage’s creator. Websites that demonstrate lots of EAT feature content that is not only useful, but is built on their overall expertise, authority, and trusted reputation for a certain subject matter or their industry.

The idea comes from their Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines which outline the concept of EAT for the search giant’s human reviewers. It’s what they use to evaluate how well their search algorithms perform – and it can be used as a guide for what Google actually considers good content (even for product review update SEO).

Go over what these guidelines are in our post about 13 search quality items that Google’s raters are looking at!

EAT isn’t a part of the search algorithm, but it compels marketers to consider certain signals on their site that can improve SEO. It also emphasizes how “UX” is the primary point of content. After all, what’s the purpose of content if shoppers don’t get what they’re looking for – or worse – only find low-quality, weak content?

Google’s guidance on EAT content works as a guide for inbound marketers using SEO and content strategies. They claim that a “high-quality page should have a beneficial purpose and achieve that purpose well.”

Your on-page content should have:

• High level of Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T).
• A satisfying amount of high-quality main content, including a descriptive or helpful title.
• Satisfying website information and/or information about who is responsible for the website. If the page is primarily for shopping or includes financial transactions, then it should have satisfying customer service information.
• A positive website reputation for the site that is responsible for the main content on the page.
• Positive reputation of the creator of the main content, if different from that of the website.

With this in mind, it’s important that you start optimizing your web pages right away. The above suggestions are some of the best ways to make sure your target customers actually get what they need – and are the best starting points for better product review SEO.

Want to learn more about growing your online traffic? Feel free to reach out to us here… we’d love to chat!

A campaign is only as good as its targeting, and targeting is only as good as your Ideal Customer Profile. Do you know your ICP? Here’s how to find it.

Eliminate Outbound Guesswork with Ideal Customer Profiles

Remember when we looked at the difference between cold email prospecting and marketing emails?

We’ll save you the time of reading that post.

(Though you might want to check it out just so you can get to know Ray Tomlinson better. Yeah, that’s right, the Ray Tomlinson. We’ll give you a hint – he invented email.)

In short, the difference between cold email prospecting and marketing emails boils down to one being outbound (cold emails) and the other inbound (marketing emails).

That’s pretty much it.

Yet, that one, simple directional switch makes a world of difference in business communication.

It’s not uncommon for companies to assume outbound marketing costs more than inbound marketing (more time, more money, and more resources).

And that may be true in some regard; however, outbound marketing can also be cost-effective (not to mention a significant revenue stream) too.

So let the other companies slander outbound marketing’s good name. Because all that besmirching lets you buck popular opinion to your benefit.

Which is one of the reasons why we’re such big fans of email prospecting.

Some people think cold email prospecting is guesswork. Nothing more than a tactic to bother random unvetted contacts with impersonal, mass messaging in hopes that something will stick.

And, sure, that’s the typical approach.

But when done right, cold email prospecting is a pearly white hat tactic to engage pre-vetted contacts with relatable, personalized messaging that brings value, insight, and joy to all.

What sets these two types of cold emailing apart is the type of contact they target.

Which brings us to today’s topic: Targeting the right audience.

Or, as we marketers like to call it, targeting your Ideal Customer Profile.

Using Ideal Customer Profiles to Target the Right People

Effective email prospecting (cold, warm, or otherwise) depends on two things to survive and thrive:

1. Valid email addresses
2. Great messaging

The second is only as good as the first. Because, as any experienced digital marketer knows, email outreach lives and dies by its contact list.

Which is why it’s crucial that we use valid email addresses in our campaigns.

Emphasis on the word valid.

To deem an email address is valid, it must:

• Be legit (e.g., won’t bounce)
• Belong to prospects most likely to buy what you’re selling (aka SQLs)

Every company has different criteria for defining an SQL (sales qualified lead). Sometimes different departments will even have different definitions. So determining validity can get tricky for your outreach, and not doing so correctly, or at all, can spell disaster.

So before any marketing campaign can succeed, we first need to comprehensively identify the criteria used to measure SQLs and validate email addresses.

That’s where an ideal customer profile comes in.

Which begs the question…

What is an Ideal Customer Profile?

An ideal customer profile (also known as your “ideal customer persona” or ICP, for short) defines your most valuable customers. It is a clear, standard, objective definition of who your product’s preeminent buyers and users are. The ones that are a perfect fit for your solution and would benefit the most from what you offer.

In other words, your ICP is your ideal buyer.

They are your sales qualified target market.

In B2B, this means a target company and its decision-makers.

Overall, an ICP is structured around a combination of qualitative and quantitative characteristics, all of which are data-driven.

This data constitutes the firmographics of your ICP.

That’s right: firmographics.

As in, demographics for firms.

Firmographics are to businesses what regular demographics are to people.

They are a set of characteristics used to aggregate individual firms (or organizations) into meaningful segments, forming a profile of your ideal customers that you can easily cross-reference when building out your contact lists.

To put it in more attractive terms: Identifying your ICP helps you target customers possessing the highest purchase intent, greatest retention rate, and strongest affinity for your brand.

How to Create Your Ideal Customer Profile Using Firmographics

An ideal customer profile can be collated by looking at:

• Your previous and current “best” customers
• Customers of competitors
• Engaged visitors on your site
• Industry trends

The latter three are typically reserved for startups and early-stage businesses that haven’t yet built up a healthy customer list. (If this is you, in the next section, we’ll share some tools to aid in your ICP quest.)

For the companies who have been around a while, your “best” customers will be your greatest resource. They are a compilation of closed-won opportunities (i.e., sales qualified leads which converted into customers).

We say “best” in quotations because this won’t be the same for everyone.

Is the best customer one who makes a single purchase or one who makes ten purchases? Is the best customer one who buys in one vertical or one that buys in all your verticals?

There’s no right answer here.

It is something your team needs to decide based on your business model and customer data collectively.

Just remember, this isn’t a good customer or even a great customer.

It is your BEST customer.

As in:

Once you determine who your best customer is, you can create a profile composed of firmographic attributes.

We’re going to use “firmographics” as an umbrella term that also includes employee demographics and business technographics. While these are technically separate segmentation methods, in this context, they all help to create a full profile of your ideal customer covering every level of your customer’s business.

These levels include:

1. Company-Level Data
2. Employee-Level Data
3. Technology-Level Data

Company Firmographics

First, you want to look at your best customer by understanding their company as a whole.

This is what traditional firmographics look like.

Company-level data includes:

• Industry – What products or services does this customer provide? How does what you offer enhance their business?
• Location – Where is this customer located? A specific type of city or region? Are they international? Do they have one location or multiple? Take into consideration the weather, tourist traffic, local demographics, and other factors specific to that location.
• Company Structure – Are they a startup, small business, or larger, well-established company?
• Employee Size – How many employees do they currently have? Are they growing? Downsizing? Segment your best customers according to their number of employees.
• Company Revenue – What is their level of income? Has their revenue increased or decreased? Segment your best customers accordingly.

Employee Firmographics

Next, you want to understand the decision-makers and influencers who will make the purchase happen, also known as buyer personas. These are the people you will be communicating with directly.

Depending on the company structure and size, there could be one or several decision-makers. In some cases, you may only be able to gain access to those decision-makers by first communicating with influencers, like supervisors or lower-level colleagues.

By looking at your best decision-makers’ demographics and those that influence them, you can better prepare your marketing strategy.

This employee-level data includes:

• Gender
• Age
• Race
• Position Type
  • C Level
  • VP
  • Manager
  • Non-Manager
• Job Details – What are their responsibilities? What does their day-to-day look like? What time of the day, month, or year are they most busy? Least busy?
• Pain Points – Which parts of their job are the most challenging? Which parts would they change if they could? Are they a cash-strapped startup owner looking for more money? A tech analyst in search of more valuable data? How can your offering help?
• Lifestage – What stage of life are they in? Are they a recent grad? Are they single? Married? A parent of young children? A parent of teens? Empty-nester? New hire or just promoted?
• Interests – What do they enjoy most, career or otherwise? Do they like surfing? Are they an animal lover? A health nut? Are they an early adopter tech geek?
• Industry Sources – Where do they get information about their business and role? What blogs and industry reports do they read? What sites do they visit? Who do they follow on social media?
• Buying Process – How long does it take them to make a decision? How much nurturing do they need throughout the process?
• Most Common Questions & Objections – What are their biggest concerns? What are the best answers you can provide?
• LinkedIn Profile

Technology Firmographics

Finally, you want to understand what resources they are using and how they relate to what you offer.

These are also known as technographics.

This tech-level data includes:

• Website URL
• Website Structure – What kind of CMS do they use? Is it a custom backend or pre-built, like WordPress?
• CRM – Do they use customer relationship management software?
• Analytics – Where are they getting their business insight from? Do they have a dedicated statistical team? Do they use third-party tools, like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Hubspot, SEMRush, etc.
• Automation – How automated is their marketing? What automation tools are they using?
• Tech Spend – How much do they spend on tech, software, and services?
• Marketing Spend – How much are they spending on marketing platforms such as Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Facebook Ads?
• Other Technology – Are they using any industry or company-specific tech?

The end result of all this data-gathering should look something like this example from HubSpot.

As you can see, a lot goes into forming the firmographics of your best customer.

Even still, this is not an exhaustive list.

There are countless different criteria for segmenting your best customers using firmographics. Above are some of the most common.

A more simplified but also helpful method can be outlined using a BANT framework to ascertain a snapshot of their budget, authority, needs, and timing.

Similarly, the following framework created by Rick Wong, author of Winning Lifelong Customers, can help segment:

But those are only for quick reference.

Ideally, the more data you have, the better when creating an ideal customer profile.

Though getting that data is easier said than done.

Tools to Help Find Your Ideal Customer Profile

As we saw above, ascertaining ICP data requires answering a lot of questions, some of which contain info that is not so easy to find.

To make it easier, let’s take a look at some helpful resources.

If you want to identify customers of competitors, try tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and NerdyData.

If you want to identify engaged visitors on your site, try tools like LeadFeeder.

If you want to identify industry trends, try tools like Google Alerts and Google Trends.

If you want to identify your best customers, some helpful data-collection methods include:

• Digital analytics tools
• Existing customer surveys and focus groups
• Your CRM database
• Interviewing customer service and sales team members

As for online analytics tools, here are several that can provide valuable insight into companies and their employees:

• CrunchBase
• Leadfuze
• Everstring
• ZoomInfo
• Owler

Remember, sometimes the best way to find your best customer is also to know who your worst is. So be sure not just to analyze your current top-performers, but also search for your poor-performing customers so you can highlight their shared attributes as ones that shouldn’t go into your ICP.

Finally, it’s also important to note that not every one of your best customers shares the same attributes. So the task becomes segmenting your customers according to shared attributes and seeing which segment comprises the majority of your best customers.

The sweet spot will be your Ideal Customer Profile.

An Example of an Ideal Customer Profile Definition

Ideally, your Ideal Customer Profile will be very detailed, composed of a ton of attributes. Enough to paint an incredibly clear picture and pinpoint your target audience with exactitude.

However, it’s also useful when all is said and compiled to come up with a short and straightforward definition, summarizing all that data. Or to select the main attributes that comprise an ideal customer.

This ICP definition will make it easier for your entire team, across different departments, to get on the same page quickly.

It’s okay for a business to have multiple ICPs. In fact, it will likely be a necessity if you offer multiple, uniquely distinct services or products.

Next Steps: From ICP to ABM

We’ve come a long way since the start of this post.

Remember, in the beginning, the two things we said all effective email outreach needs to survive and thrive?

They were:

1. Valid email addresses
2. Great messaging

And remember how we defined a valid email address as being one that is both legit and belonging to your SQLs? Well, we just took care of the latter —- finding your target audience.

That’s no small thing.

Finding your target audience is probably the biggest and best step in developing a winning marketing strategy.

So you are now well-equipped to build a contact list, stock full of legit email addresses.

All you need to do is use your ICP to build a high-converting contact list from scratch.

But that’s not all you get from finding your ICP!

You’re also in a prime position to succeed at the second requirement above — great messaging.

That’s because an ICP is a necessity for account-based marketing (ABM). ABM puts the customer at the center of your marketing efforts. It is the end-all, be-all of strategies – omnichannel marketing at its best.

But like we said, we’ve just come a long way and covered a lot of important information.

Reading what to do is one thing.

Doing it is something entirely different.

So if you want some help defining your ICP and implementing it for some account-based marketing with your brand, we’re here to help.

Just get in touch, buckle up, and we’ll buck trends, together.