'Marketing' Bookmarks

Let me guess, you have a marketing budget and you are spending a great portion of it on lead sourcing. Sure, you are dedicating some of the budget to branding, and after-sale service as you should, because you realise that the customer life-cycle is not all about purchasing in the moment and customers should know you care – all the time.

But, let me ask you, how much retargeting are you doing? How much of your budget are you putting towards trying to capture those people who don’t actually purchase in the moment but who for a moment in time, did actually come to your site to consider your products? Are you spending any budget? If so, excellent, if not, why not? You should be ensuring a percentage of your marketing is targeted towards those who are interested but not yet decided to go ahead. This is the concept of remarketing. 

Essentially, remarketing or retargeting uses technology that shows targeted ads for your business to people after they have visited your website, used your mobile app, or given you their email address. For this blog, we will call them visitors. The concept of remarketing means these visitors will see your advertisements asking them to come back to you, when they visit or shop on other websites, use social media, watch videos, use other mobile apps, or search on Google and other search engines.

In short, it is an ingenious way to connect with visitors who have not made an immediate purchase or enquiry. The technology works to allow you to put targeted ads in front of a defined audience that had previously visited your digital assets to try and get them to convert!

With people being caught up and becoming easily distracted, it is usually a normal occurrence for them to leave your site or abandon items in their cart. In fact, AnnexCloud found that in 2018, depending on the industry, The percentage of abandoned carts ranges anywhere from 50% to 80%. Itmay not be price, it may be time, shipping security of your site, or any other reason, but whatever their reason may be, their initial experience seems to not be enough for them to make a positive purchase decision. It is exactly scenarios like this which make remarketing valuable, allowing you to try and recapture their attention and remind them to pursue a purchase through to completion.

Here are five things you need to learn about remarketing.

Cost-Effective

Remarketing isn’t free - but nothing in marketing that drives effective, real growth is free, because even creating great content which drives traffic (like this blog) takes time to write and that time has a value.

That all said, remarketing offers a low-cost option for winning business. It has a lower cost per acquisition compared to cold-outreach, is targeting those who know your brand and it gives you a way to test messaging to see what drives higher engagement through the sales cycle and at what cost. With simple-to-use third-party tools and services available now like Google remarketing, it is very easy for businesses to set up remarketing campaigns.

More leads and conversions

Chances are you’re spending significant money and effort on getting people to your site in the first place. You want to make sure you’re converting people who are already in the market for your products.

Only a small percentage of those potential clients will actually do what you want them to do, whether it’s to make a purchase or sign up for a newsletter, download and use an ap, a free trial, or something else. A successful remarketing strategy is an integral part of communicating to an interested audience in terms that mean something to them, because after all, they have already showed interest. And because you can choose who to target based on what pages of the site they navigated to, you can ensure that you are targeting the right people, people who are more likely to convert, for example, people who were in your shop as opposed to those who were reading your blog. For a retailer, a person who abandoned a cart is more likely to convert than a visitor who browsed a few minutes and left.

Higher visitor engagement

It’s critical to start converting your audience into more engaged fans and advocates so that you can grow your brand. By crafting compelling, personalised messages and targeting the right people, prospective customer time onsite grows exponentially, leading to higher engagement with your site and products.

The more time they spend on your site, the more they grow familiar with your products and thus, the more likely they are to eventually transact.

Improved brand recall

Brand recognition can be a serious problem especially for small businesses or start-ups.  Investment in SEO might bring lots of organic traffic, but more views can be generated from branded searches. Your business may be ranked well in search and get plenty of traffic but very few will remember you. Remarketing changes all that by showing brand related ads to those who have some familiarity. The more familiarity they get, the greater your chances of them coming back with intent. Plus, the more people who come back via targeted ads, the more search algorithms will work to show your organic ads, as they start to deem your sight as highly relevant and interesting, thus improving direct traffic and people who find you by searching for your brand.

There’s a certain magic to display ads that a Google search just cannot replicate. The right visuals will make an impact — and help people remember you and your message.

Maximise your marketing ROI

If you invest a good amount of money into your marketing — your search, content, and social media — why would you spend all that time and money to get people to visit one time? 

We don’t live in an ideal world where a customer would search for you, visit your site, spend time exploring your content or product pages, sign up, buy, and become a loyal customer forever. Yet many businesses fall victim … doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Retargeting is the most leveraged ad spend you can possibly allocate, and it maximizes the value of those initial visits from your amazing content they found via search or social in the first place. It simply makes everything work better by tying it all together.

If you are ready to improve your lead generation and sales, contact us, we have experts who are ready to build you a campaign which works.

When to Hire a Digital Agency

Let’s state the obvious. This is the Internet age, the age of connectedness; an age defined by people being online more than ever, of demanding access to information at any time, anywhere. As a business, if you are not online, providing meaningful information and access to your products to your audience you are missing a huge opportunity.

Search engines, websites, social media and other digital channels form part of a digital network that we need to leverage if we are to connect with our audience. Digital connectivity needs to be ubiquitous for everyone, at every touch point. Thus, you need a marketing strategy which give access to prospective and current customers.

While the benefits of digital marketing to a business are obvious, not everyone has jumped into the bandwagon (yet) – no really there are those who still hold off from updating their website or their search presence or who are yet to get online.  There are still people or companies out there who spread themselves too thinly – juggling between content writing, website design, SEO, social media or email marketing on top of daily business concerns.  Sure you can do that yourself, but are you able to achieve the economies of scale you need, or do you have the time to do it, or should you be concentrating on what you do best and relying on others to connect you to more people, more of the time?

Maybe you will benefit from help you think, but maybe you won’t. How can you tell if it is time to look around and invest in a partner who works to put your business out to your market.  Here are four tell-tale signs that it’s time to hire a digital agency for your business:

1.  You lack the technical skills.

Let’s face it, to effectively carry out a business’s digital strategy, you need to have strong knowledge and expertise in digital marketing.  Changing algorithms, nuances in your audience profiles, market segmentation and thus campaign segmentation, let alone the development of content and creative all require more time and knowledge than just a cursory 15 minutes a day.

This may mean using the right graphic design and user experience to support your branding strategy; writing search-engine-optimized content; and/or creating and curating a strong social profile that marks you as an authority, among others.  If you lack these skills, you would find it hard to get website traffic; rank in Google; develop deep connections with your audience, or test, track, and analyse your results.

2. You don’t have the luxury of time.

Development of content, let alone working out how to get your message in front of your market will eat up a lot of time especially when you are learning it or trying to stay on top of the aforementioned changes which occur frequently.  This is time time that you are unnecessarily spending on something which would undoubtedly be better spent on more important things that really matter in your business. 

If you are short of time, struggling to tick things off your daily to do list, speak to digital marketing experts to work out how they can collaborate with you, develop strong strategic plans and ultimately take care of implementing, nurturing and growing your presence while you focus on what you do best.

3.  Business is growing.

A growing business equates to growing needs.  In the digital marketing arena, this translates to a growing reliance on generating fresh ideas, writing relevant content, updating website(s), regularly monitoring results, building your online reputation, and implementing digital advertising without delay. 

As your reputation grows, you will need a team of professionals that are able to help get your voice or message across your target market because you will need a growing list of items to be developed. Not just content, but experiences, social media content, replies to commentary on your digital assets and so forth.

4. You don’t know what you don’t know.

In the last 10 years the digital landscape has evolved rapidly. Ten years ago who knew Instagram would be the content powerhouse or that influencer marketing would be this big? Agencies exist to be on the cutting edge, so it is our job to see these things coming and prepare clients for it. It is our industry, so we need to be prepared and ready.

Similarly, you are focussed on your industry, why should you focus on the digital landscape. How can you predict what is happening? You don’t know what you don’t know. That is why we are here. We see it coming and prepare you for it!

There are many more reasons we are sure (share with us some of your thoughts) but these are just a few of the main reasons why companies need to hire a digital marketing agency.  Deciding to employ a digital marketing service may be a big decision (emotionally and financially) but the results will likely surprise you.  That feeling of “letting go of control” might put you off from hiring an agency but if you find the right one, you will surely appreciate them partnering with you.

The smallest change, something which can effectively go unseen, can support you in ways you never realised! That’s our aim, to help lift you up when needed and make a difference to your marketing, making it cost effective so you can spend more on doing what you need to in your business. So, if you are keen to learn more, speak to one of our specialists at Three Piece Marketing today.