How to Make Remarketing Work

 

Before beginning any remarketing campaign, there are a couple of things that need to be in place.  Make sure that your website is optimized and easy to use.  Nothing is worse than having a great remarketing campaign where customers or potential customers click on links to your site and they can’t find what they are looking for.  All of your work to get them to your site just went up in smoke.  If customers and prospects can’t easily find what they are looking for, they will go to a site where they can.  There goes a lost opportunity.

I recently visited a website that has nice flash animation, but the designers sacrificed functionality for glitz.  It was cool, but after clicking around the site for 5 minutes, I still didn’t know what the company did or what products and services they sold.  It was too much work for me to dig on their site for information about them.  A well-designed website makes it very clear what they are selling or offering as soon as you land on the home page.  In the age of split-second decision making, you have to capture their attention immediately. If the site is designed well, it also needs to be optimized so Google searches can bring up your site as a search result.

Rule 1: Make sure your website clearly defines who you are, what you sell and make it as easy as possible for your customers and prospects to use your site.

Now that your site is in good working order and optimized for Google indexing, now you need to drive traffic to your site.  There are a variety of ways to drive traffic to your site.

1. Email marketing with promotions 

2. Banner ads on other high traffic sites

3. Free white paper downloads

4. Social media contests

5. Press releases

6. Print promotions that tie-in to your website

7. Free enewsletters

8. Good SEO with targeted keywords for organic search results

9. Well designed Google Adwords campaigns

And the list goes on.

Rule 2: Make sure your website is optimized for Google search including proper tagging of pages, links going to the correct location (no broken links), solid meta-data, good, rich content, and URL rewrites so the URL matches what’s found on any given page.

Now that you have a functional, easy-to-use site that is optimized and you are driving traffic to it, now you can deploy remarketing programs.  You need to determine what products you want to remarket on your website.  If you sell blue widgets and want to “follow” visitors on your site with your remarketing ad, then you need to design a compelling ad that will get the customer to return to your site. 

Rule 3: Make your remarketing ads are compelling with a clear call to action.

Remember, remarketing is only effective with a clean, well-designed and optimized site that has solid traffic going to it and ads that have a clear call to action.

Clean Customer and Product Data – Your Pot of Gold

You can have the best marketing plan with powerful social media, outstanding print and online advertising, great press releases, a speedy ecommerce website, but if your customer and product data isn’t clean, you’re wasting your time. If you don’t know who is visiting your site or placing orders, it’s difficult to market to them. Think of customer data as your pot of gold…your treasure. Without your customers, you have nothing.

I have worked at several organizations and even our own customer data was outdated in large corporate databases like D&B. We were doing some data hygiene and I asked my colleagues to look up our own company information on D&B. The President listed hadn’t been President in several years. Every one of the executives listed weren’t even employed there anymore. Unless you keep customer data up-to-date, contact information and addresses might be wrong. I have worked at organizations that have undergone corporate acquisitions, moved physical locations, had subsidiaries bought and sold. I have yet to find any organization that is totally accurate on their company databases.

As marketers, it is our responsibility to keep our customer databases clean. It is extremely important to have the correct company name, address, city, state, zip, contact information, phone numbers, fax numbers and if possible email addresses. I worked for a company that had very poor data cleansing practices. When asked to de-dupe a 600K record database for a mailing, over half of the addresses were either duplicates or undeliverable. Keeping customer data clean is a ton of work, but it’s a necessary evil.

The same holds true for product data. If a Customer goes to your website, but can’t find what he or she is looking for because the keywords and product descriptions are weak, they won’t waste their time and they will leave…often never returning.  The cleaner your product data is on your website and in your catalogs the better. Put yourself in the shoes of your customer. Try to find a specific product on your website using a keyword that a customer would use. This is a trap that many marketers fall into. Just because a marketer or a manufacturer calls a product a certain keyword, that doesn’t mean that’s what the customer calls it. Kentucky Fried Chicken had tried to market themselves as that for years, but their customers kept calling them “KFC”. I was working with KFC during this transition time. Instead of trying to change customers’ behavior, KFC smartly changed their advertising approach. Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC. Packaging, signage and advertising all adjusted to what the customer wanted. Learning how the customer finds your products and what they call them is critical. If you can’t find your products easily, neither can your customers or Google for that matter.

It has been my experience that having a team dedicated to keeping your customer and product data clean and accurate is critical to future success. It’s an investment well worth the money and time.

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile and my website.

 

 

Building a Marketing Plan: What To Do First

 Putting together a marketing plan is much like putting together a puzzle.  You have to lay out all of the pieces, make sure nothing is upside down, put “like” pieces together, then start to assemble.  It’s the same in building a marketing strategy and plan.

Step 1: Lay out all of the elements of the plan.

• Do you know who your target audience is?  What do they like?  What don’t they like?
• How do you want to “touch” your customers, prospects and leads?  Remember, this isn’t a “one size fits all” marketplace.  You will probably need to touch each group differently.
• How many marketing dollars do you have to spend?  There’s nothing more frustrating than pouring all of your marketing dollars into one channel or another, then find you don’t have enough money to continue your message throughout the year.  Blowing all of your marketing budget on a 30-second Super Bowl commercial may not be the best use of your money.

Step 2: Make sure all of the pieces are going in the right direction.

• I’m a big proponent of synchronized marketing where every element of your marketing plan works together: email, web, social, trade shows, print (brochures, catalogs, fliers), customer service, sales, advertising and press releases.  Various marketing channels should complement each other, not work against each other.
• If you have a marketing element that doesn’t work with the other channels, don’t do it.  In other words, if it doesn’t fit, don’t force it.

Step 3: Put “like” pieces together.

• When I put together a puzzle, I put the pieces that look alike together, especially the corners. Corner pieces are unique and can be separated easily.  It’s the same with your marketing plan.  Look at the elements that work well together like print and email marketing.  Make sure they work well together.  All pieces will fit together, but you need to leverage the ones that consistently work well together.

Step 4: Assembly.

 

• Now you can start putting the pieces together.  Lay out the master plan for the year or several years.  Identify how all of the elements will work together to get you the desired outcome: additional sales and profits.
• Put together a calendar of events and adjust as necessary.   Make sure you keep to the calendar as it should correspond to your marketing budget.  Staying on schedule means staying on budget.
• Monitor your strategy.  If something doesn’t work, stop doing it and do more of what does.  It’s sounds simple, but often marketers keep doing the same wrong things and expect a different outcome.