HelloExperts – Meet Sanne, Team Lead Digital Marketing @ Helloprint

HelloExperts – Meet Sanne, Team Lead Digital Marketing @ Helloprint

Sanne is 29 years old, lives in Rotterdam and is hooked on escape rooms and reading books. When she’s not travelling in Asia, she loves discovering new hotspots in her hometown. She joined Helloprint two years ago as Team Lead PPC and is now leading our Digital Marketing Team.

Digital Marketers seem to love abbreviations. What is SEA? And what does PPC stand for?

Haha, yes we sure love abbreviations! SEA stands for Search Engine Advertising and is one of the main channels within digital marketing. It consists of (mainly) text advertisements that are shown on the search result page on Google (or any other search engine) when someone is looking for a specific search query. We pay for this type of marketing per click, that’s why it’s also known as Pay-Per-Click advertising or PPC.

How do we benefit from SEA at Helloprint?

SEA has played an important role in our rapid growth. With our ads, we can target people that are actively looking for printed products (e.g. searching on Google for “flyer printing”). We also use online search volume to determine what products or markets to launch next. If we see the demand for a certain product increasing (like fidget spinners two years ago), then we’ll add this product to our product range as soon as possible.

What other channels do we use to acquire customers?

Although SEA is a popular channel to acquire customers, it can get very expensive. That’s why we’re also investing in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Content. We have our own in-house content team that produces videos and blog articles (like the one you’re reading now!) to help and inspire our customers. In addition to digital marketing, we also use offline marketing to acquire new customers, such as attending trade shows and sending out direct mails.

How much money do you need to make an impact on SEA?

That really depends on your niche and what keywords you want to advertise on. Before I joined Helloprint I’ve worked in Telco, where you pay around €10 for a click on the keyword “sim only”. With 50,000 searches per month, you need very deep pockets to join that game. However, if you’re operating in a niche market with low competition, you could get yourself a decent amount of traffic for 100 euros per month. For insights into search volume and competition for your product, I recommend using Ubersuggest.

How do you think SEA will evolve in the next years?

First of all, there are more and more tasks that we can fully automate within SEA. This doesn’t only free up time for marketers, but machines also often perform better (and faster). The newest feature within SEA automation is that we can automatically optimise our text ads. We provide multiple headlines and descriptions and an algorithm will combine these to optimise for the best ad. 

The second big trend in SEA is Voice Search. It is predicted that by the year 2020, 50% of all online searches will be performed with Voice Search. How will ads be served through a personal assistant such as the Google Home? And how can we sell printed product through Voice Search? These are all questions we’ll need to answer.

What are you most proud of? 

I’m most proud of the recognition we’ve received for our work at Helloprint. It started with an article that Google published about us. And following that article, we got invited to speak at two international digital marketing events. Scary, but cool!

What would be your top tip to someone who wants to work in digital marketing?

University degrees are great, but they don’t prepare you for a career in the real world. If you want to become a digital marketer, there are a lot of free online courses that will definitely give you an advantage over other graduates when you enter the labour market. Not just courses about Google or Facebook Ads, but also courses in coding and machine learning. You don’t need to be a pro in all of them, but if definitely gives you a competitive advantage if you know the basics.