With the NBA and NHL playoffs in full swing, differences among the leagues’ best teams are showcased nightly. Some rely on offensive quickness and speed to wear down their opponent, while others pack their defense tightly around the goal, making it tough to get anything past the big bodies.
Teams play to their strengths. That’s the approach you should take in your digital marketing. Fortunately, advertising tools like Google AdWords give you plenty of options to fit your style of “play” and help you reach a highly qualified audience.
Customer Match
If you have a solid email list for prospects and customers, your game plan might revolve around Customer Match. A relatively new feature from Google, Customer Match gives you more control over which customers to include and exclude for your ads. Armed with nothing more than an email address, you can use Customer Match to serve up the right ad based on where customers are in the buying cycle (provided they are signed into their Google account). As you collect more data from customers – through ad clicks, email campaigns and website visits – you are fine-tuning the underlying algorithms. This makes Customer Match very effective at pulling customers through the sales cycle.
RLSA
If your team’s strength comes more from your website than your email list, you should consider adding Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) to your digital marketing playbook. Another of Google AdWords’ many features, helps tailor your search ads and campaigns to people who already have visited your website, whether or not they made a purchase. Maybe a previous visit was to conduct research that compared your offering with that of your competitors. If you can get your message back in front of them again, your prospects are more likely to make a return visit to your site. RLSA helps you to capture one of the critical tops spots based on previous history.
Customize
But if neither of these approaches is suited for your organization, that doesn’t mean you don’t have a shot at winning the competition. Google AdWords offers many other targeting features. You could, for example, base campaigns on factors such as income or geography or even on combinations of factors.
As Wayne Gretzky, is often quoted, “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” Apply that thinking to your digital marketing. Look not only at the data you have, but also at what you can get, and consider how you want to slice and dice your audience. The more targeted you can be, the higher the likelihood of success.
In my next post, I will discuss some of the ways smart marketers and retailers can use shopping campaigns to gain additional advantages.
[avatar user=”marks” size=”thumbnail” align=”left” link=”/about-us/our-team/” target=”_blank”]Mark Smith True Interactive Co-Founder[/avatar]
