Show Notes
- It is recommended to listen to episode 18, Aligning Content With Your Customer Journey, for reference.
- Different digital media (aka marketing channels) can be used to deliver content to your audience based on their customer journey state.
- The goal is to personalize content based on the buyer journey’s state. Not all media/channels attract audiences at every state.
- Banner ads, video ads, paid social media, native ads, email, paid search and organic search can all be aligned to a buyer’s journey state.
- Targeting methods available to digital media allow marketers to laser-focus their content to the right audience. To utilize that targeting, we must have a segmented database and content specific to a journey state.
- Next week’s episode will explore aligning traditional media with the customer journey state.
Charity of the Week:
We hope you want to join us on our journey. Find us on IterativeMarketing.net, the hub for the methodology and community. Email us at podcast@iterativemarketing.net, follow us on twitter at @iter8ive or join The Iterative Marketing Community LinkedIn group.
The Iterative Marketing Podcast is a production of Brilliant Metrics, a consultancy helping brands and agencies rid the world of marketing waste.
Producer: Heather Ohlman
Transcription: Emily Bechtel
Music: SeaStock Audio
Onward and upward!
►▼Transcription
Steve Robinson: Hello, Iterative Marketers. Welcome to the Iterative Marketing Podcast, where each week, we give marketers and entrepreneurs actionable ideas, techniques and examples to improve your marketing results. If you want notes and links to the resources discussed on the show, sign up to get them emailed to you each week at iterativemarketing.net. There, you’ll also find the Iterative Marketing blog and our community LinkedIn group, where you can share ideas and ask questions of your fellow Iterative Marketers. Now, let’s dive into the show.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Iterative Marketing podcast. I’m your host, Steve Robinson, and with me, as always, is the strong and perseverant Elizabeth Earin. How are you doing today, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth Earin: I am good. How are you, Steve?
Steve Robinson: I am doing great. I want to apologize to our listeners in advance here, because one of my neighbor’s kids has a new toy.
Elizabeth Earin: And what is this toy?
Steve Robinson: It’s a noisemaker attached to their bike that makes a squeaky-squeaky noise every time they squeeze it, which wouldn’t be bad except I didn’t know you could make such a squeaky-squeaky noise at such a large volume. So in my office, I have been hearing squeaky-squeaky all day long for the last two days. And the kids are away right now, but they could come home at any moment, in which case, we might get to share this wonderful, delightful sound with our listeners.
Elizabeth Earin: So, are you saying if I am at the toy store and I find one, I shouldn’t buy it for your kids?
Steve Robinson: Yeah, probably not.
Elizabeth Earin: So what are we talking about today?
Steve Robinson: So today, we are going to kind of pick up where we left off last week, talking about content and aligning content with your buyer’s journey, and this week, we are going to talk about aligning media with your buyer’s journey.
Elizabeth Earin: Perfect. And when we talk about media, are we talking digital, traditional, kind of which aspect, or both?
Steve Robinson: Well, I originally hope to cover both in this episode, but as we got into the meat of it, it’s way too much to talk about, so we are going to address digital this week, and then next week, we will talk about aligning your traditional media with your buyer’s journey.
Elizabeth Earin: Okay.
Steve Robinson: I think it’s also important to note to our audience, if you haven’t listened to episode 18, the one immediately prior to this one, I definitely recommend that you take a moment, pause this, go back, start and listen to episode 18 and then come back to this episode, because if you don’t have a context about how we are aligning content with your buyer’s journey, then aligning media becomes sort of irrelevant. So please take a moment, pause this, go back, listen to that, come back and join us. I promise we’ll still be here.
Elizabeth Earin: So when we talk about aligning our different digital media specifically, we are talking about our marketing channels. And when we talk about aligning our media with our buyer’s journey, what we are talking about is if we have gone out and we personalized our content, then we need to find a way to deliver that content to our prospects at the right time in the right place, and that’s where we kind of get into this making sure that our digital channels are aligned as well.
Steve Robinson: Right. I mean each medium is going to have different targeting mechanisms available to it. And we get into traditional next week; we’ll talk about how some don’t at all. But either way, certain media certainly aggregates or sets expectations around what type of content will be available on that media as well, and so what we’ll do today is we will look through various channels or media channels you can use in a digital context and talk about what kind of content, whether it’s See, Think or Do content, makes most sense on that channel, and then what targeting mechanisms do we have to make sure that when we are sending out See stage content or Think stage content or Do state content that we are aligning that with the audience that is in that given state.
Elizabeth Earin: And I think it’s important to note that not all media channels are going to attract the audience at every single state, and so there are some that are better fits than others. And so that’s what we are going to get into next.
Steve Robinson: So our first channel I think is our tried and true. When people think digital, the first thing comes to mind is banner ads, right?
Elizabeth Earin: Um-hmm, it is.
Steve Robinson: And when we talk about banner ads, there’s really two key ways that you can target banner ads based on the state of your buyer in their buyer’s journey, and they really come down to first-party data and third-party data.
Elizabeth Earin: So, our first party data are going to be things like cookies and our CRM, and these are the signals that we have gathered from our audience that’s interacting with us. This is our own data that we are using. When we look at third party data, we are talking more about the data that we have gotten from other people. And a lot of times, this is based on behavioral information, but it’s the big data that we are buying when we place our media buys. And again, it’s based on signals, but instead of us collecting the signals, we are now using the signals that have been collected by other people.
Steve Robinson: And in our experience, first-party data is far more effective than third-party data, particularly when you look at trying to target around the state of the audience in their buyer’s journey, and the reasons for this are really two-fold. One, if you are using first-party data, you know where those signals came from. You know [where] they came from based on the content that they have engaged in on the site or a flag inside of your CRM or marketing automation system that tells what state that buyer is at that moment. And so you can trust those signals and know exactly what they mean, whereas behavioral data, you are getting whatever that third party has kludged together from whatever signals they pulled together. And it’s usually (a) not as accurate, and (b) you don’t really know exactly how they got there. I think the other reason why first-party data is so much more useful is because it has a higher degree of fidelity. You really can nail down exactly where that buyer is in their buyer’s journey, whereas when you get third-party data, you are usually either able to detect whether somebody is in a market or not. And so if they are in the market for your product or service does that mean that they are Think state? Does that mean that they are Do state? It’s really hard to understand where they are and how ready they actually are to buy.
Elizabeth Earin: So taking a look at using first-party data, when you are looking at your own website interactions, it’s actually very clear. This isn’t a scary thing. It’s not hard to figure out. So for example, if you have got someone who’s coming to a let’s say a pricing page or they are in your shopping cart, it’s pretty obvious that they are in the Do state, and so you can then re-target them with that Do state content. The same applies to Think state. It’s going to be content that is demonstrated that they are interested but maybe not necessarily ready to make that purchase. And so in the case of content, this comes down to guides or white papers, anything that they are going to be downloading or consuming that is one step closer to being in that Do stage.
Steve Robinson: A great example would be if you were say a car dealership, if you had published a guide on how to get the most for your trade-in, that would indicate that that buyer is probably in Think state. They are considering buying a new car, but it’s not like they are checking out the individual features of individual models and trying to figure out exactly which car they are going to buy next week. They are just trying to figure out if they can afford to buy a car right now based on their trade-in value or how to maximize that trade-in value.
Elizabeth Earin: And then our See state is basically everyone else who’s not in Think or Do, and so they are pretty easy to identify as they come through the site.
Steve Robinson: And to do that, basically — a lot of these — when you go to place banner ads and you can choose to target your audiences that you have figured out based on their web activity, you can do the opposite as well and exclude them. And so your See state is really just excluding everybody who is in Think and Do. It’s a pretty straightforward process, once you are into whatever tool you are using to place the banner ads. We talked about targeting based on web activity, and that’s kind of the most basic level of doing this targeting of banner ads based on buyer state, but you can amp this up to the next level if you have a marketing automation system and a little bit of technology behind you. And you can use the marketing automation system to figure out what state that buyer is in and then take those signals and pass them out to the ad networks in order to really laser focus that advertising down to exactly the right audience at the right state. That’s kind of crawl, walk, run. That’s more of a walk or run state, but you usually start out just trying to identify the content on your site and retargeting off that content, but if you are ready to go to that level, it could be really exciting.
Elizabeth Earin: So sticking with the basic level because that seems like a good place to start, one key to be able to do this is you have to have a journey state filled either in your CRM or in your marketing automation system. And that’s going to allow you to identify those people as they are interacting with your site, correctly identify them and label them as that state. Another option is, if your sales team is able to identify what state they are in, once you have labeled them, you can then export that list and you can use your CRM retargeting to target that audience along whatever state they are in as they move throughout the web.
Steve Robinson: If you are not familiar with CRM retargeting, this is — some banner systems will let you upload a list of email addresses and then target advertising based on the individuals that they are able to match to those email addresses. So I believe Google rolled out a way to do this as well as AdRoll has a way to do this, and it can be really powerful. You are not going to match the whole list, but you at least know for certain that you are getting the right ads in front of the right people because it’s not based on anything fuzzy whatsoever.
Elizabeth Earin: So that’s first-party data. What about third-party data?
Steve Robinson: Well, third party data is much more straightforward than first-party data, because while its kind of handed to you on a silver platter, you don’t have to go and figure out how to detect these signals. Somebody else did that work for you. Now you just need to go and match your creative up with audiences. So when you go to place your banners, depending on what system you are using, there is usually a method to target a third party audience, an audience that somebody else gathered for you. And when you do that you are looking for what they are usually called in-market audiences. These are audiences that other big data companies have identified. These users are in market for a given product or service. The trick is, depending on what it is that you are selling or marketing, there may or may not be an in-market audience to match it, so you are not always going to be able to find that audience. And the other trick is that, once you find them, you don’t know for sure whether or not they are Think or Do state, right? You just know that they are in market, meaning they are not See state. So by excluding the audience, you kind of might get somewhat of a See state audience, but when you target, you are going to have to target both Do state content and Think state content. As we talked about last week, you are going to want to make sure those are two different sets of content as well. So I think this brings us to a good point for us to take a quick break and talk about how we can help some people.
Elizabeth Earin: Before we continue, I would like to take a quick moment to ask you Iterative Marketers a small but meaningful favor, and ask that you give a few dollars to a charity that’s important to one of our own. This week’s charitable cause was sent in by an anonymous listener from California. They ask that you make a contribution to DonorsChoose, an organization helping public school teachers get funding for materials and experiences that will help their students learn. Right now, there are thousands of classroom requests that you can help bring life to with the gift of any amount. Learn more at DonorsChoose.org or visit the link in the show notes. If you would like to submit your cause for consideration for our next podcast, please visit iterativemarketing.net/podcast and click the “Share a Cause” button. We love sharing causes that are important to you.
Steve Robinson: And we are back. So before the break, we talked about targeting banner ads. And I think that was a good place to start, because it sort of sets the stage for a lot of the other digital media that we are going to be talking about because the mechanisms for targeting are actually pretty similar. So what’s our next media here?
Elizabeth Earin: So video ads. And to your point, video ads are much like banner ads. We can use first-party data or third-party data to target them, and again, we really want to just focus on what state our customer is in, in their journey.
Steve Robinson: And video ads usually take the form of one of two types. You have your video html5 ad, where it’s a video that shows up in place of a banner and the user has to click or rollover to get audio. You also have your pre-roll ads, and so I would say that the video ads that are just banner ads follow all the same rules as your regular banner ad, but the ones that are pre-rolled, there’s a couple of special considerations when you are looking at those ads. In particular, you want to look at the fact that it may not be as ideal for Think or Do, but it’s actually kind of perfect for See state. And the reason why it’s perfect for See state is you are interrupting somebody who’s really there to watch something else, and so if you can captivate their attention, you can get somebody who’s not in market for your product or service at all paying attention to an ad because, really, they are trying to get to other content.
Elizabeth Earin: So while it’s good for See state, it’s not necessarily great for Think or Do simply because you don’t have a call to action. And typically, when you are in Think or Do, we are ready for them to take that next step. And so one thing you want to be careful when you are looking at video ads as an avenue for delivering your Think or Do content or Think or Do advertising is keeping in mind that not all platforms allow you to include a link. And so you are (1) you don’t have a way to connect them through, but in the event that you do, you are asking them to either click on your link or to search you out, and you are taking them away from the content that they are already there to consume and that’s disruptive in a way that doesn’t necessarily leave a good taste in their mouth. So, something to keep in mind.
Steve Robinson: And it may not even be possible for that viewer. A lot of people are now watching YouTube on their television, so asking them to take action means pulling their phone out of your pocket or stopping whatever it is they are doing on the phone or they are watching television and going to do something else, and that’s a hard ask. Let’s talk about social media for a moment here. And for the most part, we are talking about paid social, because as we get into a moment, it’s really hard to target organic social at all. But social media is a little bit different from banner ads in that you don’t usually have as much of a behavioral audience to be able to target for in market, at least I haven’t seen that on the various social networks. Usually, your targeting on social is based on what people have put into their profile or the things they have liked or interacted with online, which doesn’t give you a whole lot of signal on where they are in the buyer’s journey.
Elizabeth Earin: It is great for persona though, and that’s something it’s a great avenue to use for that.
Steve Robinson: But it is possible to pull that data in using custom audiences, if you are looking at Facebook or tailored audiences, if you are looking at Twitter. Each network calls these something slightly different, but basically it’s the same as retargeting on the web. You are going to take the signals that you have, either in your database or as people browse the website, and pass those signals into the social network to retarget content, based on their journey stage.
Elizabeth Earin: And you’ll do that by uploading a list from your CRM based on that journey state, which goes to reinforce why it’s so important that you do have a cell in there or field in there that is capturing that data. One thing to keep in mind is that social is interruptive, and that’s good because, again, when we are talking about our See state audience, we want to get in front of them and Think and Do. If they are already receptive to our message, then we can get in front of them again, but keep in mind that we are interrupting their user stream and we are getting in the way of whatever other content they are consuming, what they are interested in that moment, and so it’s very important that the content that we put out is — it has value to them, and it’s very quickly clear what that value is. Otherwise, they are going to tune us out or ignore us altogether.
Steve Robinson: So coming back to last week, if it’s See state content, it can’t be just your generic branding-type content where you are trying to just get a logo in front of someone. It has to imply value or you are not going to have any engagement, any dwell time, any real impact of that particular advertising. So you have to offer that utility of the See state. And then if it’s Think or Do, it can’t be too salesy, because you have got to pull somebody in. Even if they are in that state, they might not want to interact that way when they are in their social stream if it doesn’t immediately compel value to whatever their context is.
Elizabeth Earin: So we have just talked about paid social. What about organic social? Is there an opportunity here to target based on buyer’s journey?
Steve Robinson: It’s very, very limited, I believe. And I apologize for not having researched this before the show today, but I believe there are mechanisms, at least on Facebook, to be able to target a custom audience when you are releasing some organic content. We have never used it, because it’s hard enough to break through Facebook’s algorithm with your organic content anyway. If you narrow your targeting down to a subset of your audience, then you are just limiting yourself even further. And so when it comes to organic content, we generally advise our clients to stick to your See state content, because it’s going to be the most broadly applicable to your audience and most likely to get shared and really, really help boost that algorithm. Your Think and Do is better reserved for paid.
Elizabeth Earin: And again, that See audience, that’s going to help you build that first-party data within Facebook and so that’s a good thing. Even if we can’t talk to Think and Do necessarily, we are still building up our See audience and having the opportunity to talk to them in the future.
Steve Robinson: Exactly. So jumping into our next medium here, we are talking about native ads. And this is kind of new territory for a lot of marketers. But when we talk about native ads, native ads can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. Here, we are using it in the more literal sense of these news stories that show up in news feeds on certain apps, or more likely, at the base of certain news stories as other things you’d be interested in, right? And those are usually placed through one of two networks, either Outbrain or Taboola are the two biggest ones, there are some other niche ones, but for the most part people are using those two networks.
Elizabeth Earin: So Outbrain just released retargeting. So it allows you to use a lot of the same strategies that we have talked about above in terms of content targeting. Taboola doesn’t have it yet, but that’s not to say that it won’t come soon or be something that they are working on. One thing to keep in mind that — when we are talking about native advertising is that this doesn’t necessarily work for Do state content, and that’s because Do state is typically salesy. And when you are interacting with these types of native ads, a Do state message, even if you are receptive to it, a Do state message on a different site is going to turn you off. It’s not something that you are expecting. It’s not in line with what your experience is going to be and what you are hoping that experience is going to be with that site, and so by using one of these platforms for Do state, you can actually turn your audience off. Instead of Do state, you should really be focusing more on the See and the Think audiences.
Steve Robinson: Absolutely. It’s a matter of trust. I mean if I am on a news site, if I am on cnn.com, I am expecting the content that I am going to be interacting on cnn.com to be newsworthy. I expect it to be adding value. I expect it to be informative. And when I run across something that’s trying to sell me something, it’s out of context. It’s sort of sleazy and I think it’s trying to pass itself off as news, and that immediately kills any authenticity or any trust I would have for that brand. So absolutely stick to your See or Think with native. What about email? Where does email fit?
Elizabeth Earin: Email is great. Email is probably one of the easiest ways to target, given that you have got either your CRM or marketing automation system in place that has that accurate journey state field. And again, coming back to — we really can’t hit on this enough. It’s very important to have that journey state field in either your CRM, your marketing automation or both. But it’s effective at all journey states. And based on either your email abilities or the marketing automation system you have, you can really hone in on — very targeted message to not only each of the journey states, but other factors that are going to allow you to provide really relevant and timely content to this audience. And so email is a phenomenal way to talk to your audiences along all of the states.
Steve Robinson: This can come from drip emails, this can come from segmenting your newsletter. Any time you are sending an email, you can make sure that it’s contextually relevant to the state of that particular buyer based on, again, having that field. Paid search I think is a good channel for us to talk about here. And paid search is a very unique animal when it comes to targeting media. Why is that?
Elizabeth Earin: Paid search has the power to identify intent among unknown audiences better than any of the other channels that we have discussed or tactics we have discussed. One of the downfalls is paid search is more expensive, and so that’s something to keep in mind, but the ability to identify the intent and really understand someone who’s in Think or Do and target them is something unparalleled to what we are seeing in any of the other options we have.
Steve Robinson: And then the way you identify that intent is that you are very selective in the keywords that you are bidding on. And so if you really want to nail down that Think or Do audience, then all you have to do is take your product or service and tack on a keyword at the end of it that would indicate that intent. So these are things like “pricing” or “price,” “cost.” Things like “best” or “list of,” right? Or “alternatives” or “comparison.” If you are in that Do state, you are going to be shopping actively for that product or service, and so you are going to be looking these things up online. And if you can get an ad in front of somebody who’s in Do, it’s a great opportunity to capture that individual right at the time that they are looking for your product or service.
Elizabeth Earin: As someone who’s in the market for a car, I am in the process of this and I have done Google searches that have Buick Enclave Vs. Toyota Sequoia. I hope I just said those right, and I did not totally butcher the car makes here. But comparing features of. And so again, I am getting ready to buy a car. This very clearly indicates to whoever is on the other end hopefully analyzing this that I am someone who is in the market.
Steve Robinson: Where you want to avoid is trying to put See or Think state, or even early Think state content in front of a paid search campaign, because you are paying a premium to drive that traffic to your site. And if you are paying a premium to drive traffic to your site, that’s still very early or not even in any sort of buyer’s journey, then that’s really hard to get the ROI out of it. Let’s flip to organic search, because this is a little bit different. When we look at organic search and we talk about organic search today, we are really talking the context of content that you are creating to try and drive up your organic traffic. But really here, you are trying to — you really want to take all three of the See, Think and Do buyer’s journey states into mind when you are coming up with your organic search strategy. And you do that by creating content that aligns with keywords at each individual state. The beauty of organic search compared to paid search is now it is cost effective to go after that See and Think audience, because you are developing this content once and then you usually have to pay, put some money behind promoting it once in order to drive up some links and some activity around that content. But once that’s done, it will continue to produce returns over a long period of time, assuming it’s evergreen content. And so if you build up a large repository of evergreen content that’s of interest to your See audience, you can do a lot to build up some great first-party data for targeting other content, as well as dangling some Think state content alongside of that See state content, or Do state content alongside of that Think state content, and really drive some activity on your site in a very cost-effective manner.
Elizabeth Earin: I do want to just to hit on one thing, though. That content is not necessarily a magic bullet for increasing your search engine rankings. It really — there is a correlation to how much effort you put in, both in the quality of the content, the research that you are doing beforehand to make sure it aligns, but then also, as you mentioned, to promoting the content because just putting it out there isn’t necessarily enough. You have got to get it out there for people to see.
Steve Robinson: Absolutely. We should probably do a whole podcast episode on SEO at some point.
Elizabeth Earin: I think so.
Steve Robinson: A lot of misconceptions out there that could stand to be adjusted. So I think we are coming up towards the end here. I’d like to sum things up. It seems like we really ended up harping on two points as we went through all of these, and the first is that digital is a beautiful space, because within digital media, we have the ability to really nail down our targeting using first party or third-party data down to individual states. We don’t have to worry about overlapping states when we are doing our media targeting. It’s focused, but — and this is the big but — in order to be able to do that, we have to have good signals. And to have those good signals, that means having that field in your CRM or marketing automation system that indicates that buyer state and having content that you can use to detect the buyer state of your audience as they are bouncing around on your site. And so if you don’t do the homework, it can be challenging. I want to thank everybody for making time for us this week and invite you all back. Until next week, onward and upward!
Elizabeth Earin: If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube on your favorite podcast directory. If you want notes and links to resources discussed on the show, sign up to get them emailed to you each week at iterativemarketing.net. There, you’ll also find the Iterative Marketing blog and our community LinkedIn group, where you can share ideas and ask questions of your fellow Iterative Marketers. You can also follow us on Twitter. Our username is @iter8ive or email us at podcast@iterativemarketing.net.
The Iterative Marketing Podcast is a production of Brilliant Metrics, a consultancy helping brands and agencies rid the world of marketing waste. Our producer is Heather Ohlman with transcription assistance from Emily Bechtel. Our music is by SeaStock Audio, Music Production and Sound Design. You can check them out at seastockaudio.com. We will see you next week. Until then onward and upward!
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