No matter your goal in marketing, whether it’s generating brand awareness or driving conversions, it’s always been important to have the right message to make an impact. Let’s say I have a 15-year-old car that needs a brake replacement. An auto body shop may deliver a special offer on brakes to drive an immediate conversion, while a dealership would instead deliver a branding campaign to keep their company top-of-mind when I decide I’m ready for a new vehicle. But with new technology emerging for both marketers and consumers, we have the opportunity to move beyond just the right message.
Think about the new channels available to us (like mobile search, mobile app display ads, beacons, wearables) and new ways to target our audiences (like programmatic, hyper-local, geo-fencing). Your message needs to be as concise and direct as possible in order to reach the right customer at the right time. Not to mention that mobile devices are creating smaller moments of time in which we have to make an impact and influence people. Let’s discuss four elements and key trends that prove it’s all about being “right” in marketing.
The Right Audience: Make Your Message Relevant
Key trend: Only 42% of U.S. marketers currently use customer data collected online for targeting purposes. However, 92% said they are in the process of increasing their use of this data (eMarketer).
More content online, more Internet users, more smartphone users…there’s more and more for marketers to wade through to reach their audience. But this also includes more opportunity to create relevance for customers. In fact, it’s now critical to both the effectiveness of your campaign and your budget. Why waste marketing dollars on people with no interest in your offer? Target specific demographics, search keywords, website content, and more to create relevance for your customers and drive more conversions for your business.
The Right Platform: Mobile, Mobile, and Mobile
Key trend: 64% of U.S. adults now own a smartphone, and marketers are following suit (by 2017, 72% of digital budgets will come from mobile marketing).
I know it and you know it: mobile has invaded everything we do and everything we search for in our daily lives. And it should also invade every marketing campaign we create as marketers. When there is a marketing medium (hint: smartphones) within arms reach of your audience 92% of the time, it’s time to take full advantage of that. Luckily there are marketing opportunities primed for mobile, such as using extensions on mobile search results. Google, for example, let’s you add a call extension that searchers can click on to immediately trigger a call to your business. And location extensions allow you to add your business’s location to a search result, and when clicked it will send you to the right store location or can trigger Google maps. While not exclusive to mobile, location extensions are a complement to mobile and help create relevance for people on the go. And this leads us to another “right” element in marketing: “near me” searches.
The Right Place: Increasing “Near Me” Searches
Key trend: The search term “near me” has doubled in the past year, with 80% coming from mobile searches.
Not only do customers look for contextually relevant content delivered conveniently to the device they’re using, they need to find the right information in the right place. That’s why Google research shows more and more people who include terms like “near me,” “closest,” and “nearby” in their searches. It’s also of note that convenience may win over brand loyalty with these types of searches, since they tend to be more generic, such as “salons near me.” Instead of getting lost in the shuffle of your competition, marketers who target based on location-specific data will more effectively reach people looking for products and services in their immediate area.
The Right Time: The “I Want It Now” Mentality
Key trend: 50% of consumers who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit a store within a day, proving that not only do we have immediate access to information at all times via our smartphones, but we will also act immediately on that information.
The elements I’ve mentioned above underscore our need for immediate information – and mobile helps us accomplish that. If the goal is to drive conversions, marketers taking advantage of data can specifically target customers at the most opportune moment. And after customers are reached, make sure they are seamlessly connected in conversation with your business – whether that’s online or offline. For example, I mentioned call extensions above. Mobile search is driving more calls to businesses than ever before and call extensions make this even easier for consumers. They have immediate and easy access to call your business. And with the right tools (like call tracking software) you can know where the call came from, ensure they’re a qualified prospect or customer, and route the call efficiently to drive more business and get the most out of your marketing.
The Right Data: Insights Power Being “Right”
Right data is less an element and more what powers every other element of “right” marketing. The insight we gain from collecting data is what enables us to shape our targeting, shape how we know which devices our customers use, and shape how we know where and when to reach people.
Learn more about the numerous touchpoints in the customer journey, and how to think about mobile and cross-platform optimization in this on-demand webinar, “The Role of Mobile Conversion Optimization in 2015.”
