What does every successful ad campaign have in common? It’s not witty ad copy, a unique offer, or design worthy of an art gallery. It’s people. Creative, analytic, and articulate people working together toward a common goal: conversion. Together, they’re known as your conversion team.
What is a conversion team?
A conversion team is a group responsible for generating conversions for your advertising and marketing campaigns. They are not the same as a conversion optimization team, which focuses on testing and improving current marketing campaigns.
In-house or contract, conversion teams work to form a compelling pre- and post-click landing page for prospects in a particular stage of the marketing funnel. Who is this team made of? Tyson Quick, CEO at Instapage, elaborates:
Your conversion team should be made up of those creative individuals who understand how different messaging and content impact narrative.
Since personalization has the single biggest impact on conversion rate for its ability to deliver highly relevant context to potential customers, you have to make sure that the team consists of the best communicators available to you.
While effective communication is what your audience sees in the finished product — a successful ad campaign — there are many skills and steps it takes to get there. Here are the people who can help you.
Your B2B and B2C conversion teams
These roles and how they’re structured will vary from business to business, but the positions are ones you should consider when building your conversion team.
Copywriter
With a strong command of the written word and a firm grasp of what makes your product unique, the copywriter is an essential role in every digital advertising campaign. While both B2C and B2B copywriters focus on content creation to sell the product, they do so in different ways.
The challenge of a B2B copywriter is to convince not just one person to purchase, but an entire team or company. Combined with the fact that B2B products are, on average, more expensive than B2C, this translates to more stages of approval before the sale, which means a longer buyer’s journey. For this reason, a B2B copywriter will write content that spans more touchpoints throughout the journey to sale.
The type of content a B2B copywriter creates will also be different. Since B2B businesses often nurture prospects with the help of assets like ebooks, tip sheets, demos, and more, post-click landing pages will focus on lead generation and nurture. Ann Hodge, a Senior Copywriter at Instapage, describes on the creative process of a B2B writer:
When writing ad copy, you want to keep a few things in mind. Who is your audience? What stage of the funnel are they in and what do they really want?
You’re going to write a completely different ad for someone who searched “what is a landing page?” on Google vs. a retargeting ad for someone who visited your website’s pricing page. Always write with your audience in mind.
The audience Ann refers to is not only different based on the medium they find you through, but whether they’re a business or a lone consumer. In B2B copywriting, jargon is much more common. In an Instapage ad, for example, you may see terms like “demand generation” or “post-click automation.” That’s because they’re intended for a professional audience familiar with those terms.
On the other hand, most B2C companies are writing to the average consumer, for whom jargon only hurts comprehension. In plain, straightforward writing, B2C writers focus less on lead nurture and more on sales for a few reasons:
- Products are usually less expensive, which means sales are not as difficult to come by.
- The buying process does not involve as many shareholders, which quickens the buyer’s journey.
- Turnover is higher in B2C customers, for whom a one-off purchase is not atypical. This means writing for immediate acquisition is more common among B2C writers.
Where B2B copywriters may be creating long-form post-click landing pages and explainer video scripts, B2C copywriters would be more likely to write promotional newsletters, splash pages, and product detail pages. Either way, they’re an integral part of your conversion team.
Analyst
No matter the industry, analysts have their jobs cut out for them. Without data, you can’t be sure of anything: not the efficiency of your ad spend, productivity, revenue, etc. That makes this role invaluable to all, and more now than ever before.
Today, marketers routinely claim their greatest challenge is making sense of data. Considering the mountains they collect through various software available to track the customer journey, it’s understandable. Though massive and perplexing, these data sets are necessary.
The modern marketing team can no longer be satisfied with basic metrics like CTR, CPC, and conversion rate. That’s because modern consumers expect more. They don’t just want an offer. They want their offer. They want personalization at every stage, on every device, medium, and beyond.
But assembling and interpreting this data takes a unique skill set. Analysts can’t just look at a single campaign’s key performance metrics; they have to tie these metrics to drivers of revenue. They have to see each campaign in the context of the business. Even if a campaign has a high conversion rate, for example, doesn’t mean it’s improving the business. And which business you’re working for, or which industry you’re in, will greatly impact how you approach analysis.
As if this weren’t difficult enough, analysts have to move at the speed of advertising — which today is a blistering pace. Their analysis doesn’t just prove the value of every activity, it also forms the basis for new ones: like A/B or multivariate testing, or a technique like account-based marketing.
Traditional advertising was very much a guessing game. But, thanks to analysts, every digital advertising activity can be justified, and budgetary bleeding can be stopped before it’s fatal.
Graphic Designer
Everyone online is fatigued by ads. They’re in sidebars, news feeds, emails, and games. They follow you from website to website. They pop up on your mobile device. This makes the job of the designer on a conversion team especially hard.
When potential customers are pulled in a thousand directions at every moment, designers must be able to create an ad that draws attention. They have to use colors that contrast surroundings, the right images with the right models. They have to create designs from scratch.
And even when they do, attention only goes so far, says Rafal Bogdan, Graphic Design Manager at Instapage:
To get your ad clicked, you must create something that will generate an emotional response from the user. It’s all about consistency, too, because a best practice is to use the same images/style from ad to post-click page.
In every case, the creative should support the copy and enforce overall messaging, not just be added as decoration. Finally, test everything because there is no hard rule on what type of graphic will affect conversion rate.
Graphic designers are more than people who create landing pages and eye-catching ads. They’re creatives who are at the heart of success in the pre-click stage and the post-click stage. They create trust with message match — the same colors and designs from ad to landing page; they create brand equity with similar design schemes in effective repetition; they subtly guide users to important elements like forms and CTA buttons. Without a skilled designer, your campaigns are bound to come up short.
PPC Director
Nearly 80% of brands say that PPC is a main driver of business. With so many publishers to choose from, there are countless ways to reach your prospects with digital ads. But, which will return the most for your investment?
This question is at the heart of a PPC director’s work. In addition to identifying the best places to run pay-per-click campaigns, a PPC director will be responsible for carrying out and reporting on those campaigns.
With keyword research, they’ll discover the ways prospects search for your product and services. They’ll also analyze the competition to uncover related bidding strategies.
As the campaign runs, they’ll test different ad creative to determine the best performers, and they’ll optimize those campaigns dependant on results.
Like analysts, PPC directors are responsible for ensuring efficient ad spending throughout all campaigns. Unlike analysts, though, they have control over that spend and will shift it if necessary to more profitable places.
Marketing Manager
Every group, including the conversion team, needs a leader to empower their production; to keep them collaborating effectively, on schedule, and to direct all activities within the context of the overall marketing strategy. This is your marketing manager.
A marketing manager will oversee project deadlines for the conversion team, serving as the point person for any question regarding campaign strategy. Of course, that means your marketing manager should be knowledgeable in all areas related to campaign creation and strategy. Usually, the marketing manager will have more experience than most of the conversion team.
These team leads are positioned between upper management and the creative group, which puts them in an ideal place to translate long-term marketing goals to short-term campaign directives for the conversion team. With agile meetings, collaboration software, and clear project guidelines, the marketing manager ensures that all deadlines are hit and that each campaign is a small step toward the larger organizational goal.
Accomplish more of your conversion goals
Through personalization, your conversion team is the group that will create campaigns that drive user action. The positions above are must-haves, but every conversion team is different in its structure and scope. To learn more ways to generate conversions with relevant, personalized ad campaigns, get an Instapage Personalization Demo here.