Online Marketing Strategy

Pieces of the Online Marketing Puzzle

You should consider what marketing actions can have the biggest impact.  When discussing your current marketing effort, we are looking for the low hanging fruit which can have a great impact on your bottom line quickly.  So we typically follow this order of operations:

A logical way to define your audience: a layered pyramid

We explain potential audiences for your business using a layered pyramid example.  As you progress down the layers, your conversion rate goes down and your cost per lead/customer goes up.  This means that the low hanging fruit is higher up the pyramid, and the audience is smaller.

  • Top layer (smallest audience) are the HOT folks who already know about you and are going to convert without the need for marketing.
  • Second layer (a larger audience) is the WARM layer of people who know about you or your product and are Searching for the right place to buy/convert.  The best way to engage this audience is through Ads on Google Search.
  • Third layer (even larger audience) is the LUKEWARM folks that may know about your product or service and may or may not want to buy.  These folks have been exposed to your offering, but have not become a lead or customer for some reason.  Businesses best reach these folks via retargeting, newsletters, follow up calls etc, Adwords Display.
  • Fourth layer (everyone else) people are a COLD audience.  These folks are the hardest to convert, but that doesn’t mean they are not your perfect customer.  We just have to work harder and spend more on ads.  This is where the power of Facebook interest targeting and layering of Geo and segmentation can work magic.

Online marketing metrics that matter

Our methodology also includes client education about what marketing metrics all businesses should monitor:

  1. Cost Per Lead
  2. Cost Per Customer

While these metrics are not groundbreaking or new to marketing folks, they do allow business owners to understand and start to make logical decisions on how and where to spend marketing dollars.  Tracking these metrics are not easy, especially when your marketing funnel includes incoming phone calls, but the insights gained are invaluable.

Funnel marketing is part of the methodology

Finding the magic formula is important, but then you have to create the correct messaging and engagement funnel to create interest, generate the lead, cultivate the relationship, educate the lead and then convert the lead to a customer.

Each type of business has a different funnel.  Some funnels are very short with a quick buy decision, while others are long term with a lot of education.  We build and optimize funnels that are appropriate for each type of business.

The power of retargeting on Facebook & Adwords

Part of the new methodology is to integrate retargeting of visitors who have been to your site, but have not converted.  Facebook allows us to create custom audiences of not only site visitors, but also previous customer lists to create “look a like” audiences based on algorithmic matching of customer data based on their interests, demo and geo graphic personas.  This allows us to create powerful targeting options that lead to qualified “cold” leads that are actually now warm leads because of this persona information.

Facebook Interest targeting explained

Facebook has a persona of who it thinks you are.  Because of what the algorithm knows about you… (think lots of data points) it creates your online persona.  Granted the persona algorithm is still in its infancy… but it gets better every day.  Facebook allows us to use this information anonymously, no personal data is ever shown to us.

For marketing purposes, we as marketers create an example of what a (businesses) perfect customer looks like.  Based on what this business persona’s targeting interests are, we can translate that to targeting options on Facebook.  On top of the persona information, Facebook has outside data sources where they tie your information of more demographic and interest data points.

So our job is to match the businesses perfect customer to real people based on options we choose within the the targeting options in the campaign creation tool.  Finding the correct match is where the magic happens.

In Our Toolshed

Our Team uses Basecamp for project managment, Adwords for PPC advertizing, Analytics for yup... you guessed it, Belle Portraits for Photography, Media Temple for Hosting, Jaguar PC for Hosting, Wordpress (almost exclusively) for Content Managment, and Google Partners for our customers advertizing needs!