Melanie
The Monday Morning Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Esther of IPA Group, bringing premier online promotion to your business, and Melanie of Stump Social Media Training, who empowers business owners to manage social media and marketing for themselves. And welcome back to the podcast. It's Melanie here and I'm afraid Esther's away and busy today, but I have the absolute privilege and honour to introduce you to Ben Lund, who's the founder of Rise Marketing Group and also a former Google employee. Welcome to the podcast.
Ben
Thanks so much, Melanie. Super glad to be here.
Melanie
This is why Esther always does the intros. I'm shocking at them. I always goof them up. Anyway, it wasn't bad.
Ben
It was great, it was perfect.
Melanie
We're going to continue because that's what makes this all authentic. We had a nice little chat before we got started just now, and today you're here to help discuss campaign remarketing. So this is a really big field, isn't it? And a lot of our listeners will understand what Remarketing is, but there'll be a percentage that won't. They're going to be startups and scale ups who are just on the cusp of looking at Remarketing as a marketing strategy. So could you explain what Remarketing is, please?
Ben
Yeah, so Remarketing is an incredibly effective campaign type. And what it is if someone goes to your website and let's say they're browsing around your products or services that you offer, but then leave your website because they're getting on with their daily life, or maybe it's purchase that they have to consider, they pretty much go along their merry way. But with Remarketing, what you can do is you can follow those users around the internet and just kind of show your ad to them to remind them of, like, hey, we're still here, are you still considering our products or services? And maybe you can throw them an incentive to act. And it's insanely powerful because when you take a look at average conversion rates, and by conversion rates, it means of the people that go to a given website, what percent of them will take some action, let's say either transact or submit their contact information? It varies by industry, but it's low, it's maybe 2% to 5%. And some industries higher. Some industries lower. So you think of if 100 people go to your website a day, 95 of them are just going to leave and that's about it.
Ben
And it doesn't mean that they're not valuable and they're not interested. Just the timing wasn't right, maybe they have to talk to their significant other or they just got busy and just timing wasn't right. But with Remarketing, you can stay in front of these users to kind of work them through and really showcase your brand to help capture some of those visitors and turn them into customers.
Melanie
Yeah. So there is typically a huge amount of remarketing happening to everybody every single day. And the first business that comes to my mind when I think of being certainly me being remarketed to is Amazon. Yes, I'm constantly remarketed by them. So I visit looking along for t shirts, books, equipment, whatever it is. And I've maybe bought one thing but looked at four or five other things in the meantime. And then they come back to me with well you looked at this, would this still be of interest? Or then a couple of weeks later, or maybe not as long as that maybe a week later other people bought stuff like this. You didn't buy that, but maybe you'd be interested in this. You're telling us that your average Joe can actually do this with their own business?
Ben
Average Joe can do this. And it sounds very technical. It's really not that hard. And there's varying degrees of sophistication that you can have for your remarketing campaign. So average Joe with a website selling a product or service, maybe they're a landscape company or maybe they just direct to consumer products that they create. You can do just something like very basic of put rules of hey, if they were at my site within the last 30 days, let's hit them up with a couple of ads. Or on the other side, Amazon. I'm sure they probably have, I'm very certain I'm saying this, they probably have the most sophisticated remarketing campaign out there because they're an ecommerce giant. And what they do is not only are they remarketing, they're not just saying hey, buy from Amazon, they will actually put in that exact product that you are looking at and maybe slash prices over time. Or as you mentioned, say hey, it looks like this wasn't a fit, but have you thought about this instead? But any business can set this up. It's relatively easy. And as I say with pretty much all marketing, natural stream marketing, don't go for perfection. Start off, put an 80% product out there because you can always improve. But if you over engineer or you think too much you're like, I don't have the technical expertise. Start with something, you're going to get a return. Because these are users that raise their hand. They're like I'm interested in your website. And the majority of them will move on because timing wasn't right. Maybe they're just looking on their phone on their commute home and then life happened on and that was about it.
Melanie
So the importance thing here is you must have a website to make this work.
Ben
You must have a website to make this work. You must have a website to make this work. And also you have to have some level of traffic to your website. So if I start a website tomorrow and ten people go to that website a month, your audience is way too small to then remarket from. You need to have some level of decent traffic. And I would shoot for anyone who has at least 1000 visitors on their site a month. I think that's a fair enough minimum requirement that you can start remarketing anything less than that. It's just too small and you should really be focusing on getting other folks to your website through SEO or advertising or other means.
Melanie
Yeah, now that's great advice, actually, especially about the minimum amount of traffic on the website as well. So, again, before we started recording, you said you mostly work with service providers and the fact that you're saying that they have to have a minimum amount of traffic, I know as a service provider myself, certainly when I first started, I really struggled to find a good traffic audience on my website initially. And obviously it's much, much easier when you're an ecommerce or a product based business, especially if you're selling more than one product, because then you've got lots of eyeballs coming to you at lots of different times. So I'd love to pin you down and find out what magic formula do you have to increase traffic for a service based business?
Ben
Yeah, definitely no silver bullet. Every business is highly unique, but there's a couple of levers that you can go in and I'm not going to go too in depth on this, but if you're looking for free traffic, which everyone loves free traffic, there is email marketing. If you have some level of email database and actually with service companies, usually that is a good one because a lot of these organisations, they didn't really invest too much in their website, but they've been capturing emails over the past 20 years. That's an excellent way to start to build up that relationship, to send users to your website. That's a free one for free traffic. And really every business should be doing email marketing. Number two is SEO search engine optimization. Great play. It does take a lot of work. So when I say it's free, I mean really, truly nothing is free. So you're paying for it with time and effort and energy. But that is a long term play where you make changes to your site this month, this quarter, and then it's going to start to accumulate over time. But if you're looking for eyeballs now, tomorrow, this week, this quarter, I would probably lean more heavily on advertising and based off of business, it's going to vary whether you're going to go with Google, whether it's Facebook or Meta, which is the holding company for Facebook and Instagram or maybe some other platforms. But I'd probably say start off with Google if you're probably more service based. If you're ecommerce, Google and Meta and across our clients, it's pretty much 60% service based, 40% ecommerce. So hopefully that's a little helpful. But you need to have traffic to your site and getting into the weeds a little bit. How do you know if you meet this threshold? Everyone should have Google Analytics on their site. So look at the last 30 days. Do you have at least 1000 visitors coming to your site. Okay, let's talk about starting a remarketing campaign. If not, let's focus on just getting.
Melanie
To that threshold, such valuable information. And of course Ga Four is coming out very, very soon and Universal Analytics is on its way out. It will be sunseted this July. So to all of our listeners, please add Ga Four, Google Analytics Four as soon as possible to start collecting data. Because once Universal Analytics is gone, that data is gone as well.
Ben
It's true.
Melanie
This is absolutely gold. Now we haven't even really talked about Retargeting yet, but I figured remarketing, sorry, because I figured people need to know where to start from. So you are an absolute minefield of information because you know how to remarket everything, google, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, even more.
Ben
Platforms than that, it's pretty much limitless.
Melanie
Can you do Pinterest as well?
Ben
I'm pretty sure you can do Pinterest remarketing.
Melanie
Pretty much certain you can as well.
Ben
Every platform, every ad platform can remarket and actually if they don't allow it, then they would be silly and they're missing some good catch up there. But even clients like or excuse me, platforms like Crydio, which is another one that we've used a lot, that taps into multiple ad exchanges. So Google, Meta, and like ten other ones. What is it called?
Melanie
Sorry, I didn't hear.
Ben
Critio. It's actually a French company.
Melanie
How do you spell it?
Ben
C-R-I-T-E-O. That's a great company. And they've actually started off actually, I don't want to send false information, but I'm pretty sure they start off as a remarketing platform. Now they do prospecting and a bunch of other things, but anywhere where you can place a digital ad, 99% of the time you will be able to do a remarketing campaign and most of.
Melanie
The time it's taking like a piece of code, a pixel or something like that, isn't it? It's called different things for different platforms. And you insert this on your website. So do you need to be a website builder or specialist to do this?
Ben
It really depends on comfort level here. Anyone who I'm sure maybe a lot of your listeners, they have their own business and they built their website, they should be able to do it because it is relatively easy to add this pixel to a website. But for anyone who isn't comfortable, I would recommend just pay a developer one to 2 hours. It really doesn't take that long and honestly, just to have it be set up for success, you're going to get that money in return on the long run. So if you're not comfortable and you're having troubles with your campaign, just work with a developer, pay two to 3 hours and kind of be done with it. And even more so if it involves more complex remarketing strategies. Let's say if you're doing dynamic remarketing with a product feed, I would probably loop in someone, either a marketer that's technically savvy or a developer to help out. And that's something that even at Rise Marketing Group, early on, since inception, we just relied on our clients, developers, but since then, we just brought a developer in house just because we just want to make sure that's set up correctly, because once it's set up, the campaigns can do extremely well but you need to have a proper foundation.
Melanie
That does make a lot of sense, actually, because you can only create good value if they've set it up properly in the first place.
Ben
Yeah, sorry, I'm just going to add on this real quickly. Also, it is also very tricky in the ad campaigns. I'm going to talk specifically Google. I'll do this for like 45 seconds or so. But campaign setups, when you're doing a remarketing campaign, google can be very tricky. And I know because I came from Google, where you can have a remarketing campaign targeting your, let's say, website visitors, but then they'll have a little option of like, oh, do you want to expand this audience to other users that look like it or behave similarly? I say don't do that, not for remarketing. Remarketing should only be for past website visitors. Don't include prospecting into that. So there's a few technicalities interesting.
Melanie
Okay.
Ben
Yeah. I mean, by nature, a remarketing campaign should be anyone who's been to your website. Now, if you want to do a look like audience, that's totally fine, or a similar audience, that's great, you should. But that should be in a separate campaign because that audience has never been to your website before.
Melanie
, and they won't know.
Ben
You can't just say, hey, buy now with this offer. They're like, I don't even know who you are. A lot of the platforms like to combine these audiences, and I understand why. Because they just want more reach and more audiences and more clicks, because that's how they're making money. So sorry, I went on a little tangent.
Melanie
No, that happens a lot. Well, not the rent, but you do see it a lot, especially like in Facebook campaigns, you hear people doing their target audience plus a liquor, like and in that circumstance, I think it makes a lot of sense. But when it comes to remarketing, what you're kind of doing is down the digital marketing funnel. They're already aware of you. They know what you look like. They've got a rough idea of what you do, even if they've only glanced at your page for like 30 seconds or less. So you're kind of already halfway down the funnel when you're doing a remarketing campaign, aren't you?
Ben
Yeah, absolutely. And the message and landing page experience should be way different than someone who's like, hey, cheque out our cool site. Offer these products and services, because you don't want to just say, hey, buy now. And people are like, whoa, whoa, hold off then I don't even know who you are. Stranger danger versus someone who's been to your site a couple of times and especially if it's a high ticket item. So maybe it's an ecommerce product, maybe it's something for the home and maybe it's a brand new grill because springs around the corner at the time of recording and maybe it's over $1,000 and they need to cheque it out a couple of times and look at all the reviews before they're ready. And then that message and experience should be way different. So it's a good Practise for any type of digital campaign. Put yourself in the user point of view, what would make the most sense, what would be a realistic outcome and action that you want from that relationship. And if you're just meeting that person, it's going to be way different from someone who's been to your site a couple of times in the past week. Then they're getting pretty serious of actually transacting with that company.
Melanie
Now, you can remarket more than once as well, can't you? So you can grab people who've looked at your website in the last 30 days and they've maybe gone to your home page. Then you can remarket people after you've sent them to a specific page on your website and obviously the audience will be smaller again, but as long as it's over 1000, you can then remarket them to another specific page on your website. So you can do the whole funnel just through remarketing.
Ben
You can it's so valuable. And remarketing came into I mean, I've been in the industry since 2005 and even when I worked at Yahoo, this was in the mid 2000s when people actually went to Yahoo to access the internet and it was pretty valuable. I remember when remarketing came on, this was probably 2007 when it started to catch on a little bit and even as an account manager for my clients was like, wow, this thing's really powerful. You can target based off of what they're doing on your website and the performance was amazing and that hasn't changed. The performance is still amazing because you're only reaching a very specific audience that is interested in your site. And it even works better when you can hone in on like, oh well, this cohort is way deep into my website. I want to remarket to them and there's so many rules that you could do based off of how many times they've been to your website, how long that they're on their website, pages that they've been on, and if you're on social, it doesn't even have to be they've been to your website. Maybe they just really engage with your social profiles and then you can remarket off of that. So it's a lot of fun. But you need to have visitors engaging with your brand digitally.
Melanie
Now, like most things, there's going to be an actual physical cost to all of this. Now, I know again, it varies on the size of audience you're going for and social platforms. But is this something that you can just do like once a quarter or once a month or something? Or is this something like a lot of things you have to keep doing to make it effective?
Ben
Yeah, So with Remarketing, any business that's serious about or even remotely serious about advertising, this should be an evergreen platform or campaign because your audiences will be dynamic. That's always going to cycle out and you can change the threshold if you want to target people. Last 30 days on your website, last 90 days, if it's like a very considered purchase, I e. Automotive, and then that audience will always be dynamically changing. So people who graduate out of that list because maybe they purchased or maybe they're just out of that consideration set because someone hasn't bought that pair of shoes after 30 days, maybe they're not going to buy it. So just make peace with that and that's going to be okay. And then it's going to be on the next I would recommend just an evergreen campaign that's always on. And in terms of cost, it's actually going to be one of the least expensive campaigns that you run because you're limited to how many people go to your website. And the return is actually going to be one of the highest digital advertising campaigns because you're only reaching people who have previously been to your website and they're very interested. So the conversion rate will be very high relative to a cold audience play. So that's what I would recommend. But budget, I mean, that's really dependent on what each business feels comfortable with. And then obviously you have to be data driven to see what the return on investment. But generally speaking, it should be very.
Melanie
Can you speak up, Ben? You're getting quieter.
Ben
I'm sorry, let me go a little closer to the mic. How's that?
Melanie
That's better. Thank you.
Ben
Okay, sounds good. Did you miss anything that I said?
Melanie
No, but you were getting quieter and quieter, so I hit you off before you did.
Ben
Okay, thank you. But yeah, no, in terms of cost effectiveness, it's probably one of the most cost effective digital advertising campaigns that you can run.
Melanie
I hadn't thought of it like that before, actually. The fact that you only are targeting people who are aware of you. So could this be a way of saving on social ads if you're using Retargeting instead, do you think?
Ben
Yes. So there's nuances to everything, right?
Melanie
Of course there is.
Ben
At the time of recording. So this is March 2023. Economically, there's just like a lot of things happening and businesses are concerned of like, oh my gosh, are we going to go into a recession? Is this a global recession? What does this mean for my business? So natural tendency for business owners is to say, hey, I got a full budget. And then when they're looking at their marketing campaigns, they might say like, oh, remarketing is awesome, I'm only going to invest in remarketing. Now I see that logic and that makes sense. But if you only focus on remarketing, then you're not getting the traffic to your site that's building the audience in the first place. So the first couple of weeks you're like, wow, I'm so glad I made this move because performance is off the chart. I'm saving all this money and getting these sales. But then your remarketing audience is going to deteriorate literally every day until you don't really have that much. So be mindful that you're always filling up the funnel. It doesn't have to be with ads. It could be SEO or email or speaking. Yeah, or speaking, anything like that. Make sure that you're filling all areas of the funnel.
Melanie
Because I didn't want our listeners to sort of go, well, that's it. I'm stopping Facebook ads. I'm stopping LinkedIn. It's like most things, you really mustn't put all of your eggs in one basket. As much as I always will swing for social media, it's amazing. It's valuable, can be free. I don't do it in isolation and nobody should.
Ben
Yeah, absolutely. It's always about a portfolio, and all of the channels support each other. So you can't just be like, oh, I just do Google Ads, all channels. Your SEO is going to help everything. Everything just works off each other. Now, that can be daunting. For a business that's just starting up with digital, I would say take it slow, start one channel at a time. Don't get over your head, but over time, you are going to see they all play together very nicely.
Melanie
So we are coming to the end of our time here, Ben, but I would really love to hear about this performance sheet that you've got to tell us about. Yes, please.
Ben
Google has made a very big update over the past 18 months and a new campaign type that they rolled out. It's called performance, Max. And as the name alludes to, it's a very performance driven marketing campaign where it's very much driven by AI and machine learning. Where you say, Google, this is my target. So in this case, I want to focus on transactions or leads, and this is my cost per transaction or lead that I'm looking for. And then you give Google a bunch of assets. So that could be text assets, image assets, or even video assets. And then you upload different audience signals that Google could say, okay, I'm going to be mindful of these, which can include remarketing audiences.
Melanie
Very dynamic, doesn't it?
Ben
Yeah, very much so. And then you let Google's algorithm just figure it out. How do I get these leads and how do we get these customers for you? And they'll survey the ads across all of Google's network. So if you're ecommerce that's shopping, and then it's search, it's YouTube, it's Gmail, as well as their display network, and it works really well. And it also includes a remarketing component to it. Now, as always, you need to have a solid measurement foundation making sure your pixels are all set up. But to help advertisers, we created a checklist. When setting up performance. Max this is a very detailed checklist. I want to say it's around 2021 points deep of all things that you should consider when setting this up. And I tell you, if you're a business and interested in setting up Performance Max, follow this checklist. If you follow this checklist, it will really, I don't want to say make or break a campaign because that's a little dramatic, but it will definitely put you in a much higher level of success than not going through this checklist. So I would recommend it. We have on our website, I believe you have the link or you'll share the link in the podcast.
Melanie
Yeah, we're going to share it into the podcast. It will show up on all of our socials and it will be in our show notes as well. This is a very valuable piece of free content, guys. I would snap this up because really quite a powerful resource. I'm very pleased that you were able to share this, Ben. Thank you.
Ben
Absolutely. And so if you go to the site, at the bottom of that page, there's a form, just fill out your name, email, and then you'll get a copy of it automatically emailed to you. And this is actually new content. This is published within the past, I don't know, four months ago. So this isn't a dated piece of content. This is very fresh.
Melanie
And of course, AI is everything now. It's just creeping into everything.
Ben
Everything. Yeah.
Melanie
Chat GPT literally opened the door to so many things. I mean, it's been around a hell of a lot longer than that, but the Joe public didn't really understand that it was there until Chat GPT.
Ben
Yeah, it's very interesting what's happening with that, and super exciting. And it's really this AI war between Microsoft and Google. And Microsoft threw down, I mean, threw down pretty hard. Now Google is like, oh shoot, I got to catch up to this. And maybe it's leaps and bounds ahead, but from a public perception, it seems like Microsoft really took the reins on this. Now Google's throwing barred out. So it's very fun to watch. And that's one of the many things I love marketing, why I've been in the industry since 2005. It's always changing and it's so much fun.
Melanie
So, yeah, it's definitely going to be fun watching them duke it out over the next few months, that's for sure. Thank you so much, Ben. This has been so valuable. Thank you so much for speaking to us all the way from Boston. And we will be back very soon with another podcast. Guys, say bye there.
Ben
Appreciate it all.
Melanie
See, I always wave. I don't get that. I always wave podcast. Seriously, guys.
