FAQs About Digital Marketing

What Can You Really Do for Us?

We have some of the best digital marketers in the world putting together digital marketing campaigns based on experience and results. We can show you how to utilize the latest technology to target the best, qualified prospects based on extensive information about the potential customer. We can give you a web page and landing pages that convert visitors to buyers. We can get that website to the first page of Google. We can develop static ads and display ads and distribute them to the people most likely to buy. We can create awesome TV commercials and post them all over Social Media. We can manage your marketing and advertising as your marketing department.

Our goal is to make you more money than we cost. We do that by having the best messaging, the best branding, the best media, the best education, and the most advanced targeting on the planet.

How Much Does it Cost?

I want to answer this question but it is not an easy question to answer accurately. It depends on so many factors. Do you sell a product or service? Do you sell to consumers or other businesses? Are you a one-office dentist and you only want to reach people within 20 miles of your office or are you a law firm with 23 offices all over the state? Is your website a simple, display site or is it a large eCommerce site with 500 products in your catalogue? Do you want to limit your advertising to static banner ads or do you want video ads?

Here is the fundamental philosophical point. Are you willing to spend enough to make your marketing effective and successful? "Successful" in our dictionary means we generate enough increase in revenue to pay for the marketing. In many cases, we say the minimum marketing spend needs to be $2,000 per month for three months. Many people in this business say you have to spend $3,000 per month for three months.

I like to explain it this way. Imagine your overhead without marketing/advertising is $50,000 per month. You struggle to make that gross revenue each month. Now, we spend $3,000 per month on marketing and advertising. At the end of three months, you are now making $60,000 per month gross revenue. You are spending $3,000 per month more but bringing in $10,000 per month more for a net revenue gain of $7,000 per month.

If I said, "Write a check for $3,000 and next month I will give you $7,000" you would say that is a good deal and do it all day long. Who wouldn't pay $3,000 to get $7,000? Obviously, there are no guarantees. Well, there is one guarantee. If you spend too little, you are guaranteed to fail. It would be like me saying, "Write a check for $1,200" and next month you only get $800. That scenario would feel like a fail. Not really because you would still get $1,200 of branding, top-of-mind awarness, etc. But we like to define success as generating more revenue than we cost.

This chart is like one of those investment commercials. Results vary. Your returns may not match this chart. The point of the chart is to illustrate the general principle that you have to spend enough to see results. For example, if this chart were real and you spent $1,000 in advertising, you could expect $800 in increased Revenue. It is not until you spend $4,000 per month in advertising that you realize $4,000 in increased revenue. Spend $5,000 per month in advertising and the chart shows about $6,800 increased revenue. Again, who wouldn't write a check for $5,000 to get $6,800? $6,000 on the chart returns about $10,000 in increased revenue. Our job is to get you gains in revenue with as little cost as possible.

What is Geofencing?

It should not be news to anyone that we are all tracked by our smartphones. What you are about to read will make is seem real. This is the stuff of nightmares when it comes to privacy and tracking. Everywhere you go with your smartphone is recorded.

Geofencing is defining a geographic area - like a store, law office, car dealership, booth in a convention center, etc. - and then digitally marking everyone who walks into that area. Marketers use where you have been in the last 30 days as buy indicators. We assume people who walk into a car dealer's showroom (not the service area) either work there or are shopping for a car. We can eliminate the people there for eight hours because they are most likely employees. Now, we have a list of people who are probably shopping for a car. Those people get static banner ads, display ads, animated ads or video ads to be educated on why they should visit another showroom.

What is Retargeting?

Only 4% of people who visit websites are ready to buy and complete the purchase in one visit. Most people are researching. They want to look at reviews, compare pricing, see the offeres, see if there is free shipping, etc.

We can put ads for your website all over the Internet and on streaming TV to remind those people who visited your website, to come back and visit again. This is called retargeting your visitors and it drastically improves your conversion rates.

Think about it. Let's say you have 1,000 visitors a month to your website. Given average statistics, you get 40 sales from the 4% who buy on the first visit. All of a sudden, the most likely buyers on the planet are the 960 people who visited but did not buy. Certainly, some of them went to a competitor and bought but most of them did not. This group has already expressed an interest in your product or service and are more likely buyers than the general population. Of course we want to put ads in front of these people.

Retargeting works by putting a cookie-like pixel on your website that can be tracked by our marketing networks. When you visit a website that makes money by showing you advertising, that little pixel cookie screams, "show me an ad from this specific website that was visited yesterday."

What is OTT Advertising?

OTT advertising stands for Over-The-Top advertising and refers to how TV commercials are delivered now. In the dark ages of Television, there were three big network channels and a few local TV stations. They carried "linear programming" that was broadcast on a schedule. If you wanted to watch Gunsmoke, you had to be sitting in front of your TV on Sunday night when that show was broadcast. The TV stations made their money by selling ads that we call TV commercials.

Then came cable TV with 127 channels of nothing to watch. It was still linear TV but you could "DVR" or record your favorite shows and watch them later. You could also fast-forward through the TV commercials. This did not make advertisers happy. There was a decrease in revenue from ads but part of that was made up by the subscription price of cable.

Two things happened. The cable companies got super greedy and kept raising the monthly subscription price to over $200 per month for nothing to watch and the Internet got fast enough to deliver movies and TV shows. "Cord-cutting" became a thing. All of a sudden, the dream of content on demand became real. You could binge watch a whole season of Game of Thrones in one weekend. People could watch programs on their TV but also on a tablet, laptop, desktop computer and on their phone.

In terms of marketing, two amazing things happened with content delivered over the Internet. First, you could not fast-forward through TV commercials. Second, you can be tracked. Not only do we know who logged on to watch Game of Thrones, we know your age, gender, level of income, level of education, whether you own your home or rent, where you are, what device you are using to view the content and 1,250 other parameters. We can combine the demographic details with where you physically went this past week and deliver "TV commercials" based on what stores you visited. It keeps me up at night. It is why we are majore proponents of privacy rights. Like doctors who are really working to make everyone well and put themselves out of business, we would like to reverse the tracking and put ourselves out of business. I doubt that will happen.

The point is, OTT ads are the sexy, new way to deliver TV commercials. They are not delivered based on programming. They are delivered based on interest indicators. If you did something this week (like visit a car dealer's showroom - not the service area) we can deliver competitor car dealer ads to you hoping to motivate you to visit their showroom. These ads might appear on YouTube+, Hulu, Sling, Amazon Prime or some website. They might be pre-roll ads meaning they appear before the show or they might be during the show at a break. The point is, you see them because you did a Google search for that product or visited a store for that product. Gone are the days where everyone watching the Wheel of Fortune gets a Preparation H ad. Now, you may see an ad for a BMW while I see an ad for chef's knives. We can hyper-target your best prospects.

What is Your Marketing Strategy?

Like everything else in marketing, it depends on your business and your target market. A lot of our marketing strategy depends on the sales triggers for your specific target customers. This involves understanding why people buy your product or service. Some products are more like impulse buys and other products take a lot of research. My wife is researching gas ranges for the kitchen we want to remodel. This is more of a research project than I ever imagined. Days of research are going into this purchase. This means the marketing strategy for a gas range can involve more ads over time than if this were an impulse buy.

Another major component of our marketing strategy is to look for signals that indicate a purchase is imminent. For example, people who walk into a car dealership either work there or are interested in buying a car. We can geofence the sales area of every car dealership in an area and exclude the service area. That eliminates most of the people who visit the dealership just for service. Now, we have people who visited the dealership and most of those people are there looking to buy. Some may have bought. We try to eliminate those. We can cross reference hits to their credit score and eliminate those who got that far. The rest are people looking for a car. We want ads for cars and car dealerships in front of those people.

A famous example is Burger King. Burger King used Geofencing to send a coupon to the phones of people who were within 600 feet of a McDonald's. The coupon offered a Whopper for 1 cent. Burger King stole a significant number of customers from McDonald's and the campaign was hailed as one of the best marketing moves in history.

Uber used Geofencing to send notices to phones showing up at the LAX airport. The notice said, "Would you like us to pick you up at the LAX airport? We have three cars close by." One click and the person was on the Uber app making arrangements.

A marketing strategy must be tailored to the specific business. One size does not fit all. That is why your marketing team must be brilliant. My marketing team is the best there is.