The Future of Paid Search and Authentic Forums

This episode features an interview with Susanne Rodriguez, CMO at Auvik, a cloud-based IT management platform that reduces friction and increases agility.

In this episode, Susanne talks about how they think about growing market share by getting customers to switch to Auvik and their big investments in community. She also discusses the future of paid search and why they are focused on authentic forums like Reddit. 

Key Takeaways:

• Despite the “paid search is dying” narrative, paid search remains a high ROI channel. Continue leveraging search but prepare for shifts by building a presence in other forums like Reddit and focusing on authentic community building.
• Campaigns focused on switching customers over from competitors can be part of a strategy to gain market share. Categorizing potential customers into "easy switchers," "difficult switchers," and "non-switchers” can help target campaigns.
• Auvik saw success with their rapid response campaigns, partially because they so specifically catered the reward to their target customer, which attracted qualified prospects and encouraged meaningful product engagement.

Quote: 

• “  I mentioned Reddit as part of a, one of our three paid channels that are uncuttable, but we also have a really large effort to build awareness and conversation and community in Reddit more organically. And that's just because, as we talk about the future of search and search disappearing, if we think about where Google could potentially drive people, it's to these forums like Reddit. And so we're working hard to build our presence there organically, too. Reddit's tricky, though. You have to be authentic on Reddit in a way that you don't have to be on any other platform. They will call you up.”

Episode Timestamps: 

*(02:26) The Trust Tree: Getting customers to switch from competitors 

*(10:14) The Playbook: Paid search and authentic forums 

*(27:34) The Dust Up: Get aligned and come armed with data 

*(29:38) Quick Hits: Susanne’s quick hits

 

Sponsor:

Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn
• Connect with Susanne on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Auvik
• Learn more about Caspian Studios