When Site Strategics CEO Erin Sparks spoke with special guest Susan Wenograd, VP of Marketing Strategy at Aimclear, for episode 316 of the award-winning EDGE of the Web podcast, main topics included why a focus on DATA is so important as well as upping your game on the CREATIVE side. Here’s what we learned:
Data and Retargeting
A lot of people shy away from LinkedIn advertising because it’s so expensive. This is one platform where you must shift your focus away from sales results to see it’s true value. If they engaged with your content but didn’t buy your product, there is so much opportunity to still turn it into a big win. You’ve got to re-market them elsewhere! The key to doing this is to use UTM tags on everything. If you paid LinkedIn $30 for someone clicking through to your website but they don’t buy anything, don’t focus on the lack of sale. Instead, focus on the fact that you just bought some very valuable data. And it’s data you won’t get from Google Analytics. You know their industry and their job title. Use the UTM tags to show them just what they need to see in Facebook and other platforms. This is the way to think about it – valuable data you can use for retargeting. Yes, Facebook took a lot of retargeting away, but it’s still available in programmatic. Here’s the most important piece of advice in social media marketing today, in two parts:
Your job is to build remarketing tools.
Some of your ad spend is about buying data.
Upping Your Game on the Creative Side
The problem with some agencies is that they’re so heavily into media buying that they aren’t paying nearly enough attention to creative. It’s easy to see how this happens. Media buyers are awesome at the numbers and the technical aspects, but might not be good at the creative aspect. If the creative is off, the campaigns won’t be effective. The media buyers will be asking if it’s not the right platform or if their targeting is off, when in reality what’s off is that the messaging and creative is not compelling. You have to get both aspects right – the numbers around media buys AND the compelling creative side.
A great video that people watched 100% of did its job, even if it didn’t result in a sale. Don’t expect more from creative than what it can deliver. The video did its job because you got their attention, and now you have to follow-up in the right ways that eventually lead to a sale. Remember, the buying cycle is longer now. You have to ask several times. Again, this is why the UTM tagging is absolutely critical. Take the people who watched your Facebook video and retarget them in Google Ads. Voila!
What’s harder is when various aspects are handled by different teams or departments, such as one for search and one for paid social. If those folks aren’t working closely together, you’re in trouble. You’re in even more trouble if they’re competing within your organization for the same budget dollars. You have to break down those silos and integrate because that’s when the true power of digital marketing leads to a brand firing on all cylinders.
Instagram Stories Are Getting Results
Instagram stories are still getting great marketing results. But it’s not for the faint of heart! It’s very time-consuming to put them together with good creative, and then they burn out very quickly (like after 7-10 days), which means you have to be ready to push another one out sooner than other kinds of social advertising.
Some Tools Have to be Custom-Built
The kind of reporting you need to make the most of UTM tagging and so forth isn’t easily available. Most of the platforms simply don’t have robust cross-channel analysis. And the buying cycle for B2B SaaS products can be 8-10 months, and most platforms just don’t handle those kinds of timelines very well. Aimclear has a data scientist and development team to build great reporting to meet their clients’ needs. They make use of Looker for report-building, and can literally plug into any API. For example, modeling off of Sales Force, understanding how long it takes to get from lead to MQL, then from MQL to SQL by each product line. And backing that into the math to figure out, okay it might take eight months, but here’s the math to know that way back, in the beginning, this is how much you can afford to pay for a lead. No platform can do that, which is why Aimclear builds its own tools. And it’s different for each client. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to this kind of analysis and reporting.
The problem at a lot of agencies is that the development team and the marketing team don’t really interact. They often don’t even speak the same language. This is the big challenge: To get the creative team and the data team working together. And you can even have silos that happen around different platforms. If your Facebook team isn’t talking to the other paid social channels, you’re missing out. They should be talking to each other regularly, using each other’s UTM tags and so forth to get a holistic picture of the brand and get everyone moving in the same direction.
Connect with Susan Wenograd, VP of Marketing Strategy at Aimclear
Twitter: @SusanEDub (https://twitter.com/SusanEDub)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susanwenograd
Website: https://susanwenograd.com
AimclearWebsite: https://www.aimclearblog.com/home
Aimclear Twitter: @Aimclear (https://twitter.com/aimclear)
Aimclear Facebook: @Aimclear (https://www.facebook.com/Aimclear)
Aimclear LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aimclear
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