What We Can Learn from Wrike’s Paid Search Strategy

Effective paid search advertising begins with a strong strategy.

Having a robust PPC strategy will enable you to plan, execute, and refine targeted, goal-oriented ad campaigns and, in turn, drive traffic, boost ROI, and enhance brand recognition.

Let’s take a closer look at how a leading work management SaaS business has utilized its paid search activities to create landing pages that engage visitors and encourage conversions.

Meet Wrike

In a nutshell, Wrike is a comprehensive project management solution that enables teams to coordinate and track projects. It helps organize project requirements, create project plans, and visualize schedules on the Gantt chart.

Additionally, it features real-time work updates, allowing each team member to have a clear understanding of work priorities and get notified of any project plan adjustments.

Wrike’s Homepage Design

A user’s first impression is formed quickly, and the homepage is an important part of that impression. While there is no silver bullet formula, there are some good guidelines that you can follow.

Take a look at Wrike’s homepage. Along with a bold headline that tells you right away that the company is going after businesses at the enterprise level, you’ll also see:

• A subtitle using copy designed to appeal to and engage the specific target audience (i.e. goal-oriented enterprises)

• Social proof in the form of quantifiable data (“trusted by 20,000+ happy customers worldwide”) and logos of well-renowned companies to build trust and convey value

• A simple, yet powerful call-to-action

• Clean design and easy to find navigation

How They Use Top-Level Navigation to Engage Users

Wrike knows what their visitors are after – understand how the platform could fit into their organization, and is giving them that information right in the navigation.In the Solutions dropdown, notice how Wrike is providing the logical next step and targeting users both by their role within an organization and by specific use case.

The first use case, for instance, is reinforcing what is already hinted in the headline (i.e. ‘Enterprise Project Management’), placing the focus on enterprises. At the same time, the second use case is targeting agencies in different industries.

Overall, splitting your solutions into role-based versus use-case is a wonderful starting point for crafting an account-based marketing strategy that delivers engaging and consistent customer experiences.

Wrike’s PPC Strategy: Going After Competitor Keywords

By now, most SaaS marketers know that PPC is one of the most effective digital marketing tactics for increasing ROI.

Because it’s a very dynamic process, PPC requires you to continuously identify search demand, keep CPC on target, and add more relevant keywords by utilizing paid search keyword expansion tactics.

Looking at Wrike’s Advertising Research data on Semrush, you can see that in just a couple of months, the brand has nearly doubled its ad spend in paid search.

To get a better understanding of Wrike’s ad spend increase, let’s explore the keywords that they’re using.

On Semrush, you can see that the company is heavily invested in leveraging competitor keywords.

While you can’t use competitor names in your ads without getting into legal trouble, you can use them on your landing page to help make it more relevant (and even increase your quality score).

After all, when it comes to B2B tools, businesses rarely make a purchasing decision based on the first landing page they see. Instead, they research and compare all possible options before making a final decision. In order to use this to your brand’s advantage, you will need a well-thought-out competitor landing page.

Crafting Cleverly Designed Comparison Landing Pages

By targeting competitor keywords, Wrike is aiming at bottom-of-the-funnel users who are researching their competitors. For this to work, however, you’ll need to build an effective product comparison landing page.One of the top competitor keywords Wrike is focusing on is Asana. This is the landing page that they serve up when somebody is searching for their competitor:

What we like about this landing page experience:

• Features clear, bold copy that implies that the competitor is missing performance reporting and highlights that Wrike enables users to “build a report in one click”
• Includes dynamic visuals to keep the attention – featuring a graphic overview of how Wrike’s performance report works

• Keeps consistent with offering social proof and authority bias (i.e.showcasing big names such as Google, Lyft, and Siemens)

• Leverages the category heuristics bias (head-to-head competitor comparison table) as a way to boost consumers’ confidence and nudge them closer to conversion

• Focuses on differentiation by emphasizing three main features – reporting, real-time collaboration, and flexible workload views

What we’re skeptical about:

• Although the side-by-side comparison table is very straightforward, it lacks a certain level of depth and sophistication

• Highlighting what users need to consider before choosing a project management tool might be a risky move as you are effectively asking the viewer to reconsider their criteria

• Showcasing the company’s presence around the world might be confusing to users.

Consider this: a user in the US might not be interested in knowing that there are officers in Europe, Asia, and Australia because they are only going to be served by the US centers.

This is a missed opportunity to take a more localized approach and show users the local presence, show them that their data is secure, and that support is going to be there in their time zone.

Building Smart Landing Page Experiences Based on Use Cases

Going back to Semrush, let’s peek under Wrike’s Ad Copies category.

Here, let’s spotlight a very well-built landing page that is specifically aimed at the use case of a marketing professional – “Strategy Template for Marketing Plan”.

What we like about this landing page experience:

• The headline is immediately speaking to a manager who is doing planning and is also reminding them that these are easy-to-use templates (so they’ll not be starting with an intimidating blank canvas)

• The landing page copy is clearly addressing marketing professionals in their own language by using words such as ‘ROI’ and ‘campaigns’

• The design continues to include cognitive biases to help encourage visitors to take further action

• The page is successfully highlighting three major aspects that are likely to strike a chord with the target audience:

1. “Turn Your Best Ideas Into Incredible Results” – speaking to creative people and allowing viewers to visualize how the creative process can work in their marketing team
2. “Optimize Campaigns In Real-Time” – talking about budgets and showcasing a social media performance report that lets marketers see where the ad spend went and how different things performed
3. “Optimize Your Marketing Operations” – showcasing sequential steps in an operational workflow and goal setting for each campaign

What we’re skeptical about:

• The case studies featured at the bottom of the landing page are rather generic. For a marketing persona, more marketing-focused case studies would be a better way to lead the user in.

Taking Your PPC Strategy to New Heights

Although Wrike could be doing a few things better with their copy, overall, they are doing an amazing job, and – as seen in Semrush – they are getting really serious about their ad spend.

Ready to level up your PPC game? Here’s how to use landing pages for paid search keyword expansion.