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Activate Your Silent Salesperson with Digital Retargeting

by Kelly Kubrick on October 31, 2016

Have you ever been tempted to taste a new wine because the offer of wine overcomes your resistance to trying something new? Then gleefully bought a case of said wine? Me too. That’s what this is about: offering your prospects content that is so irresistible that you can entice them further into your conversion funnel, willingly.

First published through the Canadian Home Builder’s Association (CHBA)

Now that we’re well past the era of questioning the value of including a website in the marketing toolkit, today’s business concern is ensuring the digital content produced, actually contributes to the larger sales funnel.

Once a business has put its contact and product information online, the challenge becomes justification for continued investment in driving awareness and usage of the website. To date, low-hanging fruit included launching additional digital channels such as a blog, an email list and social media.

What happens when sources to stagnate?

Digitally, it used to be good enough to make sure you’d sorta-kinda made your website search engine friendly and populated your company’s social media account(s) profile pages with updates. But, if asked, your marketing team will likely admit that your website reach has stalled or that Facebook’s “people-reached” update performance indicator is declining. Now what?

As lead generation sources dry up, where will sales come from?

It’s no longer enough to merely hope that digital reach will continue to grow as it has in the past. What if you could efficiently reach new people likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to customers you’ve had success with previously?

More importantly, what if you could reach that audience in a way that both personalizes your interactions, while automating them, so there’s efficiency of effort? The concept is called a ‘lookalike’ audience and is available through a combination of advertising networks – like Facebook – and your existing website.

Activating your silent salesperson

The consumer packaged goods industry talks about a product’s packaging as a brand’s “silent salesman”. When a consumer buys a product and places it on a household shelf, the packaging dutifully reminds buyers its presence.

There’s a similar concept in digital, called re-targeting, also referred to as re-marketing. Digital publishers provide their advertisers with a small piece of computer code, often called a “pixel” – similar to a cookie – that won’t affect your visitors’ experience or your website performance, but is unique to you as an advertiser. By publishing your pixel on your website, you activate your silent salesperson.

Put your digital content to work

Next – instead of merely launching a sales-oriented advertising campaign, you use that pixel to build a new prospect list through irresistible content. Using Facebook as an example, here’s a big picture visual of how re-targeting works:

With that cycle in mind, it’s time to get granular. An effort like this has a lot of moving parts, but done right, your marketing team gets access to a rich source of digital leads.

Ten Steps of Digital Re-targeting

Using Facebook as an example, here’s what your marketing team will need to do:

Create a Facebook Ads account for your organization and generate your Facebook pixel from within it. Publish that pixel to all pages of your website.

2. Define a specific buyer persona, with unique interests, such as ‘eco-friendly living’, or ‘vintage motorcycles’ that your company wants to pursue. Research and quantify those interest groups on Facebook – called Audiences – and then narrow that audience further by geographic – all of Canada? Or only one province / territory? and demographic ( age and gender) targeting.

3. Create a unique piece of irresistibly good content, written purely for that persona’s concerns, and publish it on your website. Provide enormous amounts of added-value information – imagine content that answers every question unique to that buyer persona, without the pressure of any kind of a sales pitch. Establish your subject authority while assuring the reader of your goodwill.

4. In parallel, create a digital advertisement that promotes the educational nature of your irresistible content, and run it on Facebook – but only show it to the unique interest groups identified in step 2.

5. As your advertisement is shown on Facebook, interested individuals will engage and click through to read your irresistible content, causing your Facebook pixel to activate.

6. However, in advance, you will have made your initial content even more irresistible by offering another piece of even higher added value information – enticing information (perhaps by providing a critical check list, a list of unique resources, a countdown calendar, or how-to instructions?) unavailable anywhere else.

7. That additional, enticing content will only be accessible in exchange for the visitor’s willing, forward movement into the sales funnel – say, in exchange for an email address. However, since most first-time visitors will shy away from giving you that information on the spot, because of the pixel, you can let them go without worry.

8. After an appropriate interval, your marketing team runs a second advertisement on Facebook, only shown to (or ‘re-targeting’) those who visited your irresistible content but didn’t convert to a lead by giving up their email. The second ad will offer a gentle reminder of the fabulous extra content they have missed out on, enticing them back to your content, this time with a higher likelihood to convert to access your higher value content.

9. As you identify the right audiences and use the right creative to entice them towards consideration, the automated – yet more personalized than a mass-media ad buy – process repeats until a lead converts. This allows you to engage with the lead on an ongoing basis through your existing qualification process.

10. As you identify the audiences most likely to convert, Facebook is able to give you access to ‘lookalike’ audiences – other people with profiles and behaviour that match those you’ve successfully converted – that you can now offer your irresistible content to. And the cycle repeats…

To access a lookalike audience on Facebook, organizations need to have a Facebook Ad Account, which provides tools to create your pixel, advertising campaigns, and Audiences, including lookalikes. In Facebook, lookalike audiences can be modelled from ‘source’ audiences including specific on Facebook, people who’ve liked your Facebook page or your own customer lists.

To create these lookalike audiences, Facebook looks at the common qualities of the people in your source audience and then finds people who “look like” your source audience on Facebook for a country. Organizations can choose the size of the Lookalike Audience during the creation process.

This combination of using technology to target the interests of buyer personas you can uniquely help, without even knowing who they are – while using automation to re-target them later – can be a powerful tool to help drive your lead generation efforts.

Although tactically, this ‘silent salesperson aka pixel’ approach may feel very far from how you’ve sourced leads in the past, my hope is that you will consider adding re-targeting as an arrow to your marketing quiver.

Questions? Ask away!

What are the foundations of a company’s digital strategy?

by Kelly Kubrick on January 31, 2015

First published in Marketing Today, the Canadian Home Builder’s Association (CHBA) member e-newsletter, January 2015.

Building the Foundations of Your Company’s Digital Strategy

The digital realm can identify both opportunities (new revenue streams, distribution channels, and operational efficiencies) and threats (shifting customer behaviors, higher service expectations, decreased asset utilization). So much so that, actually determining your company’s digital strategy can feel overwhelming. Don’t let it.

Instead, think of it this way: “Digital strategy is the process of identifying, articulating and executing on digital opportunities that will increase your organization’s competitive advantage.”

Digital strategy leads to competitive advantage

Think of digital as your company’s chance to create value that no other business is capable of. To succeed at digital, there are six process areas – the Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity – your company will need to address as you tackle digital:

Your human resources: Who are the people who will help plan and execute your digital initiatives?
Your technology resources: Which technologies will your business need to use to implement your digital initiatives?
Your data strategy: Data is an output of digital and the differentiator from its offline equivalent, allowing you to drive continuous improvement in your processes. What is your plan for leveraging its available insights?
Your content strategy: Digital demands that companies produce content efficiently and accurately across multiple platforms and channels. Are you ready?
Your channel strategy: Which channels – for marketing, transactions, distribution – can you realistically support, in a sustained, profitable way?
Your social business strategy: Prospects and customers assume your ability to interact and collaborate – are you prepared for the transparency that will result?

Next, assess your company’s capabilities in each dimension. What are your strengths? Where are the gaps? What steps can you take this quarter? Where should your capabilities be this time next year? What will be your competitive (digital) advantage?

To help you get traction, we developed a self-assessment tool; a way to score your company’s digital efforts. The lower your score, the more opportunity there is to improve. The higher your score, the more you have optimized a given digital process. Interested in learning more? Take our dStrategy Digital Maturity Benchmark Survey to add your insights.

The result? You have a more concrete idea about where to prioritize digital efforts and investment. Once you have your scores, you can “map” your results to visualize a digital maturity road map. Stop feeling overwhelmed and begin building your company’s digital foundations today.

Homebuilders and Renovators: Stop Overcomplicating Social Media

by Kelly Kubrick on February 28, 2014

First published in the Canadian Home Builders Association (CHBA) membership email newsletter, February 2014

Ever tried to do business with an unlisted phone number?

In 2007, I met with a group of Canadian Home Builders Association members to talk about making the most of the Internet. I suggested trying to do business without a website was like trying to do business using an unlisted phone number. Seven years later, the analogy holds true for social media as well.

Think of social media as a channel

Stripped down, social media is simply a channel. Like all the other technologies you’ve adapted to over time – phone, email, web page, blog posts, texts – social media is simply another way to communicate with prospects, customers, suppliers and employees. It’s another way to answer questions people have on their path to conversion:

What homes do you have available where?
How much does a bathroom renovation cost?
How do I get to your sales centre?
What floor plans are available?
Can I change them?
Can you give me some design ideas?
Is the upfront cost vs. energy efficiency trade off worth it?

Name the home-owning topic and someone is looking for information about it through social media. And yes; as with commercial search engines, you can quantify demand through social networks.

Why do we support different channels?

It’s simple. From a demographic perspective, different prospect and customer segments prefer different channels. We all know that some people are phone people, others are email people, and others are in-person people. Now, some are social people. For now, put aside which kind of person you are and think about what your prospects are. By demographic, how would they prefer to get information?

Different social media networks support different types of people

Similar to preferences by channel, people have preferences by content type. Some are text people, some are picture people, and some are video people. Think about social networks the same way:

Please note that although there are many other social media networks, the first four listed above dominate from a market share perspective (Facebook in particular). Although research indicates Google Plus has low adoption right now, it may have a significant influence on search engine visibility later.

I included LinkedIn as I firmly believe that creating your LinkedIn profile is critical for each of you to test the waters of social media for yourselves: if you’re unwilling to put your own professional history online today, how will you lead the way for your company’s larger presence in social media tomorrow?

Social media excels at the new way to sell: content marketing

Added bonus: every year, more data emerges that social media, in conjunction with your website, can allow you to provide critical information at a much lower cost per conversion than traditional media. Why? Scale. Social media excels at assisting home builders and renovators to shift from traditional sales methods towards ‘content marketing’.

What is content marketing? What your best sales folks have always done: provide educational content at the right point in your prospects’ moment of information need. Only today, social media lets you do it at scale. Find the right combination of content type for the right social media channel for your prospects and customers, and the data will prove an exponential impact on your reach.

Biggest Challenge: Feeding the Machine

Regardless of which social network(s) you choose to participate in, be aware that each one demands ongoing care and feeding. You’ll need to allocate resources to creating content, curating content, responding, replying and measuring the impact of your efforts. Ask yourselves:

–   Which types of content could we shine at producing?
–   How could we adjust resources to produce that content on an ongoing basis?
–   Is it possible, from the start, to produce our content for multi-channel distribution?

For now, don’t let your internal discussions to get tangled up in the “which social media network” question. Instead, talk about whether your prospects and customers might need you via a different channel than you offer today. And always, always, remember the generation coming up behind you. Don’t let them dismiss your expertise at answering their questions as they cross the threshold into becoming home owners themselves.

Is your web marketing MIA?

by Kelly Kubrick on February 3, 2008

Calling all Ottawa home builders, renovators, designers, trade contractors and suppliers! Have your Internet marketing efforts gone missing in action?

If so, GOHBA (The Greater Ottawa Home Builders’ Association) invites you to get your Internet marketing on track. Learn how to use the Internet to your advantage through improved customer service that remains accountable to the bottom line.

Join Kelly Kubrick of Online Authority for a web marketing breakfast workshop on Tuesday February 12th, 2008 from 8:30 to 11:30 AM at the Cleo Banquet & Convention Centre located at 156 Cleopatra Drive, Ottawa, Ontario.

To register, please contact Stephanie Norbury, Event Planner / Office Manager at GOHBA at events@ochba.com or call (613) 723-2926.

Making The Most Of Your Internet Presence

by Kelly Kubrick on May 25, 2007

Many thanks to the National Marketing Committee of the Canadian Home Builder’s Association (CBHA) for the opportunity to discuss Internet performance measurement. In particular, thank you to the members who volunteered their web site for public analysis during the meeting itself!