But back in the 1800’s, John Wanamaker didn’t have email, paid search, social media, mobile devices, or even radio or TV. With the explosion of channels, techniques, and devices, marketing seems to get more and more complicated… unless you go back to the basics.
The Path to Purchase begins with awareness. Someone hears a radio ad, watches a TV ad, reads a newsletter promotion, or drives by a highway billboard. This initial point of contact can lead directly to a purchase, but more often does not. After you grab someone’s attention, but before you make the sale, your prospective buyer is in the consideration phase. Now it’s time to keep in touch, using relevant channels to share value messages, information, product updates, and special deals. The challenge is to choose the right channels, deciding among email, postal mail, online remarketing, outbound phone calls, and others – depending on who you want to reach and what you want to say.
The purchase might take place in a store, online, on the phone, or even by order form through snail mail. And the more you understand the people who buy – and why they buy – the easier it is to optimize promotional channels that lead to more sales.
The Trouble with Competition
The biggest mistake companies make is to run Digital and Traditional advertising in separate silos, or even worse, in competition with each other.
Instead, we rely on interdependent, synergistic media strategies. For example, radio campaigns that drive branded search traffic from which we capture IP, screen resolution, operating system, zip code, time-on-site and other data points for analytics and remarketing decisions. The more information we collect and connect across various channels, the easier it is to improve results from your ad spend. Let’s take a look at our approach to various channels:
Direct Mail
Once we understand the shared characteristics of your best customers, we find the rest of them… at a household level.
Why is this important? Here’s a quick test: Walk outside your front door. Look at the house across the street from you. Then, the one to the left, and the one to the right. Now, look at your neighbor to the left, and then right. If you did this correctly, you just looked at five different addresses. Now ask yourself this… of your five neighbors, how many of them have the exact same age range, marital status, income level, net worth, number of children, ethnicity and education level… as your household?
When you send direct mail to a ZIP code, block code… or even carrier route level, you are spraying and praying! It’s a waste of resources, you’re just not sure how much money you’re throwing away. Kristalytics Customer Profile Segmentation identifies the top 20%-25% of customers that drive 50%-90% of revenues… and the 75%-80% of prospects that make up the bottom 30% of revenues. It’s not just about identifying the right people…it’s about not contacting the wrong people.
With the entire 253 million U.S. Consumer file in-house, we’re able to generate targeted mailing lists for all campaigns. We also accurately match respondents from any mail campaign back to the mail file so we can track to evaluate the campaign’s performance.
Many marketers make the mistake of thinking email is free, so it doesn’t matter what you send to which people. But list fatigue, fake email addresses and the good ‘ol delete button are pitted against you in the fight for your customer’s attention.
We have the resources to match an email address to a physical street address up to 65% of the time. And the longer someone has been on your list, the better that percentage gets. Why is this important? When you convert an email to a physical street address, there is an enormous amount of targeted information we can learn – even if you never intend to use postal mail.
The more you know about individuals on your email list, the better you can communicate with them, and the more likely they’ll open and read your message. Previously, an email address was a generic, faceless piece of data. We turn that data into a real person you can talk to.
Paid Search
Our goal is 100% impression-share. That means your ad is shown 100% of the time for an exact match keyword within a given geographic target. By contrast, most local campaigns struggle to achieve a 25% impression-share, meaning that they are not seen by 75% of the people searching for that keyword. Even national campaigns often struggle to get above a 50% impression-share.
How do we dominate? We don’t use Excel, that’s for sure! We use robust systems and software to analyze millions of impressions that create thousands of clicks and hundreds of conversions.
Oh yes, we should also mention that 100% impression-share forces our campaigns to be profitable. There’s just no other way to sustain the resulting high volume of clicks and costs.
You should also know that we are a Google Premiere Partner, a status earned by only the top 3% of agencies. Our campaigns successfully and consistently outperform other agencies’ campaigns on several important Google metrics, including client satisfaction and revenue growth. Our techniques are proprietary and often challenge conventional wisdom.
Display and Social Advertising
When targeting, we use our predictive model to identify email addresses associated with people most likely to buy. These people then become the marketing universe for all digital campaigns. Whether we’re using AdWords, Display, Facebook, Mobile, or others, this not only prevents a lot of unqualified traffic, but it also almost entirely stops bot fraud.
Our messaging changes based on people’s on-site behavior, most notably that we exclude those that have already become customers. For the others, we use a time-based persuasion sequence that nurtures the prospects over time by changing the messaging in the remarketing ads and landing pages. This helps us identify the emotional trigger that is going to close the sale for an individual prospect.
Our approach is more efficient and usually less costly than relying on external or third-party data to drive this targeting.
Mobile Device GeoTargeting
With mobile devices, we use our predictive models to hyper-target individuals by device as well as geography. Here are some examples:
- Send an ad for a new medical device to all attendees at the trade show in the convention center.
- Collect the device ID of ski resort visitors so we can implement a year-round nurturing campaign once they’ve returned home.
- A store usually has many competitors within a shopping mall. We can target smartphone users from your target audience who enter a tight radius of your store… OR your competitor’s.
To give you a better idea, here’s how we target your ideal prospects while they attend a trade conference:
- We pinpoint the location of the trade conference
- Using our database, we identify IP addresses for the conference center, surrounding hotels, coffee shops with Wi-Fi and nearby cellphone towers.
- We serve display advertising for your product or service to these locations on top-shelf websites.
Radio, TV, Print, Outdoors
Did you know… Reach “Tells” but Frequency “Sells.” 80% of buyers require at least six exposures to a message before purchasing (and that number may really be closer to 12).
Over the course of 30+ years we’ve bought over a half-billion dollars of traditional media like Radio, TV, Cable, Print, Out-of-home, and Sports marketing. We’ve bought for everyone from mom-and-pops to Fortune 100 companies, mobile homes to funeral homes, BMW’s to Buicks, fast food to steakhouses. When used correctly, these channels can cost-effectively attract targeted leads from a much larger universe than online channels.
We handle negotiation and placement, ad production, research, and strategic planning. Just let us know your target and spend, and we’ll take care of the rest!