Retargeting Beyond Facebook and Google

00:06

Alrighty. Well thanks again for joining us everybody. We’ll probably still get some more people joining along the way, but we’re going to go ahead and get started. So today we’re going to be talking about retargeting beyond Google and Facebook. I’m Kathleen and I’m going to introduce you guys to some of our speakers today. We have a full panel, so first we have Todd Lebo from Ascend2, Jalali Hartman, Eric Stockton, and we have a special guest today Andrew Flicker from StatBid. You guys can go ahead and say hey if you want. Hey everybody, hey. So I’m gunna go ahead and let Todd start us off.

00:48

Thank you Kathleen. And just a little bit of background on myself, my company Ascend2. We are a research-based company. So today I, one of the contributions I’m going to provide is just a little insight into what we do at Ascend2 and how you can relate that to your retargeting program. We work with everybody from Oracle to Dun & Bradstreet and help them with just what’s working in marketing. We all know that right now we’re going through challenging times and as we kind of start seeing maybe a little bit of light and positive news, and actually we’re doing some research around that area, but some research I want to show you was some Harvard research that showed just what happens when companies are very strategic and a little bit more, I would say, aggressive in their marketing spend. We all that the experience I think over the last couple months where the CFO tells us, put a hold or stop your spend or reduce your spend and then about three or four weeks later now they’re coming back to us saying, how are you gunna hit your numbers? And we see that from a macro perspective. Companies that are on the front of that set themselves up for really long-term success. So moving on to, we know that and we also know that retargeting works and there’s a lot of research out there. And we’ve been keeping our finger on the pulse of what’s working, and retargeting always bubbles up as a very effective tactic economically. You can get a lot more bang for your buck.

02:37

And I think that’s also a very important consideration right now, because every single dollar is being scrutinized on how we’re spending it. So the ability to maximize your spend, be a little bit smarter in what you’re doing just gives you a strategic advantage and just let these slides will be available, so you’ll have all this information. As we move onto our next slide, we see also the direct impact that retargeting has for e-commerce. We have all those people who come to our site, they start the cart process, but then they stop that process. How do you re-engage with them and bring them back to your site, help them complete that process. And the data shows very strongly that retargeting is successful in that as well. So there’s a lot of reasons to kind of, the context of our session today is how can you take your retargeting program and a lot of people look and think they’re doing retargeting solely in the premise of, they’ve clicked the button on Facebook or Google to do retargeting, and that’s a great first step.

03:51

But there’s a lot of other very, I would say, easy and practical stuff, tactics, tactics you can do to ramp up your retargeting. And with that I wanted to jump it over and transition it over to Jalali Hartman who oversees the AI lab at SharpSpring Ads..whoops forgot this important point. Let’s go back to the Google tax, and before I get to, Jalali does do all of our testing, but there’s this concept that actually Eric and I, and I forget this Eric, I put this into the slide before, but it was based on the conversation you and I had about this concept of the Google tax. And the Google tax was something that Perry Marshall had quoted in his book. He’s a pioneer in this area, and it really wanted to have you give a little context to it. But it’s that really that thought of a lot of times when we don’t know what we don’t know, we pay a lot more for the services that are rendered to us.

05:00

Yeah that’s right. I mean I, so yeah. So Perry has been in the space for a long time. He sort of literally wrote the book on the subject in PPC years ago. And there’s been several different iterations, it’s been a best seller. So one of the quotes that he is sort of attributed or that is attributed to him is this one, which it talks about like, and it basically boils down to, if you really don’t know how to get the best out of something, you’re going to end up paying a premium somewhere along the line right? If you don’t know how to squeeze out the efficiency, you don’t know how to use all of the technology that’s given to you, you just aren’t gunna get the kind of performance that you’re going to want. And you’re going to end up paying a premium for that. It’s something we stress pretty heavily and stop it too with all of our clients and teams. And I think it’s true. Not just with Google, obviously with Facebook, or any of these companies and platforms that share maybe goals that aren’t perfectly aligned with you as a retailer, as an agent in the market, they want increased marketing spend regardless of that return. And you want the most bang for your buck right? Yeah.

06:22

And you know, all the small details about your audience, and all the small details about what makes your product unique and special, and so the more you can get your hands into it and refine it, the more efficiencies that you receive. Ao alright, like I said I jumped the gun a little bit with Jalali, but now we do want to pass it over and have Jalali kind of walk through a little, some testing that we’re done, that he’s done, and just kind of what they did and how they did it.

06:57

Yeah thanks guys. So as Todd mentioned, one of the things I’m trying to do here is use basically math and data to drive more conversions, drive more lower cost impressions, overall just help our advertisers do better. And it’s a complex thing when you get into display advertising and retargeting. All these levers are moving, but how do you actually use it to get more business? So this is, this example, this is an advertiser that I’ve been helping for years, friends of mine in Florida, they had started a small business and did the basics. They got on Google AdWorks and we did SEO and we got onto Facebook Advertising, it all worked right? We were able to get more leads than we were before. But what happened was they grew so much now, they’re in 80 locations, they just reached this plateau where they can’t drive anymore or at least efficiently. Like we couldn’t get any more leads at the cost that we needed, so we started looking at retargeting, and this is just examples of the Adworks and so on the left is a Facebook ad, some video streaming of a new disinfection service, they have, and then a banner series that goes along with it. So that’s kind of what we did is we put it out in our own platform, Google’s retargeting engine, and then we used Facebook’s retargeting engine.

08:07

And then we used Facebook’s retargeting engine. So this is not meant to be like a definitive, hey PA is better, SharpSpring Ads is better than these other places. It’s just kind of a glimpse into our world of how we, what we’re looking at and how we’re testing stuff. So if you want to switch to the next slide, I’ll talk a little bit about it was set up CC. AND some of you I’m sure are very adept at using Google. In fact, we spend [inaudible] ourselves in our position, but the first problem we have with retargeting is, it’s a relative even though they’re a big conglomerate it’s a relatively small audience size right? It’s not like a target.com or something, so we have a limited amount of customers that we can retarget to. And I just want to use this as an example of their audience going out over time. And the way retargeting generally works as someone comes to the site, we cookie them and then we can remarket to them, you can see they’ve set up some segment’s. They’re fairly basic. It’s all of the people that come to the site is one audience. Their commercial audience is a totally different message. So a big buyer verses like a residential window cleaning or something like that. So we break it up like that. We’re able to kind of remark, but you can see again, the sizes are not that big with six thousand people since we started trying. It’s just not a lot of people to build remarketing, which is why you go to a google or Facebook. I guess you add to that. So one of the first things we do when we set this up, if you go to the next slide Kathleen, is just start adding audiences. So retargeting is generally the people that about sometimes you can kind of use that to create a lookalike or a hybrid or some target people, bring people into the funnel, get them to tag and then retarget to them in the future.

09:42

So just an example we added a general home and garden audience, if you go to the next one, let’s show kind of how the other platforms work. So this is Facebook’s, who a lot of you guys I’m sure have been, they obviously have a great platform, you can see the options here. It’s naturally been tracking their website visitors as well as shoppers, and then in addition if you go to the next screen, I think we have some examples that you can drill in. So this is where, this is again Facebook, in this case they were doing some advertising in conjunction with the gate river run in Jacksonville and the local news station. So we added those audiences which are known on Facebook to the campaign that makes sense. I’m sure some of you guys have done that. You can kind of see it’s 570,000 potential people, plus their own visitors. So that kind of allows us to open it up, if you go to the next one Kathleen, this is similar thing on Google which I’m sure you’ve seen, again Google’s so kind of just pausing you for saying what’s happening. And one of the points I’m trying to make with this is these other platforms are awesome. They have great features and stuff, but you lose visibility a little bit right? You’re kind of dependent on their platform to make it work for you right? And a lot of times it does. The problem with when you’re starting out, and from the perspective of like machine learning or data, you just don’t have enough data right?

11:02

You’re a small company, you don’t have enough conversions, the little platform that’s supposed to be optimized before you can’t figure it out yet, there’s just not enough info. And that’s why on the SharpSpring Ads, as we do a lot with kind of very specific targeting, if you go to the next one I’ll show you kind of some of the some of the results. Oops so on the left is Perfect, it’s basically our tag website because there’s a very weird, I call it pure retargeting, our website visitors seen an ad on Facebook, that’s all it was. So you can kind of see the click through from that, and by incidentally it was a little bit more expensive CPM wise to run that ad. But if you think about it, it’s just the website visitors following them around on their, as they browse Facebook. The Google audience is more of a hybrid, so that it was our website visitors. People have clicked on their ads in the past, plus these additional kind of look up, look-alikes. So again, bigger reach, a little bit lower CTR, same thing with Facebook. So just kind of a smaller comparison, this test is not done, this is just one of the many things that we run. We’re trying to see how do we outperform these channels and what works and how do, what is the difference between pushing a button and hoping it works verses understanding behind the scenes kind of what’s going on.

12:17

And Jalali you were telling me earlier in the conversation before the webinar that, basically as people were coming through, what you were seeing in the, was the CPMs originally threw you off a little bit because you were paying higher on the CPM’s, but you hadn’t seen the CTR sort of catch up yet. If you want you can talk a little bit about that.

12:44

Yeah initially when I launched this SharpSpring Ads campaign on Facebook, the CPM was probably double what the other ones are. And so I said, well this is, it’s not going to work, but when you drill into it, the reason is we are basically targeting on a very small group, I think it was 6,000 individuals that had just recently been to the website right, so we’re not, it was bidding on nothing besides that. And that’s why it costs more. But if you think about, those of you that know marketing, but that might have been the second, third, fourth time they’ve seen that brand in the lats week right? So the click through goes up. So the other systems have similar stuff right, it’s going to try to do that and work through it. But I was able to just kind of say, you want these exact people to see this ad as they surf around. That’s kind of where I think we’re seeing the difference in results.

13:36

And to your point earlier about how long it can sort of take on these smaller audiences. If you’re doing something on Google like that where the click-through rate is that low with a smaller company, it might take it quite a lot of time before you’re able to get results and know exactly where it’s working and what the return on your spend it. Exactly, yeah yeah. That makes sense. And I mean, and that translates to cost per lead, cost for acquisition whatever your key metric is right? So at the end of the day, I don’t know exactly what your data had shown as it went further into the test Jalali, but my guess would be that over time even though your CPMs are a little bit higher on certain channels with that kind of CTR. Your cost per lead is going to go way down. And then how that sort of ties in, it’s interesting to me, like you know, and we talked about this a couple of times in different types of conversations with larger advertisers or maybe even once or twice in some of these roundtables or webinars, is the fact that I sort of equate retargeting to what you see in like basket recovery in email marketing right?

15:04

So there’s this activity where you were able to capture somebody who’s in a specific buying cycle and retarget to them at the different stages that they’re in. So somebody is like, they’ve entered something, they’ve added to their cart, and you’re building an audience around just those people that have added something to their cart, you’re going to show, you’re like if you’re doing basket recovery and email marketing, you’re going to be firing out an email sequence to do you know, hey come back, here’s a maybe that’s a 10% off coupon code or something that’s going to get them to come back, click back to the site to be able to complete their order. And it’s funny, like I talk to a lot of people and I draw this, and not like this connection or what we do with retargeting, it’s very similar right. So if you are, if you create an audience around a retargeting audience, around just people who come in and hit the cart, there’s a significant amount of opportunity to be able to send them an ad or fire off a particular offer to do the same thing that sort of mimics the email campaign that you’re running.

16:20

And so you know, from a retargeting standpoint, that’s pretty powerful right? I mean it gives you a second or third or fourth shot at getting them to come back and complete that transaction. And I think the same thing really could be said for the B2B side of things, right? So on the B2B side, you have scenarios where you’ve got, I don’t know, so it’s you want somebody to fill out a lead form or something to that effect right, or in this case actually a good chunk of the people that are actually on this webinar now probably saw a decent number of our ads, and came back to register for the webinar because they saw a retargeting ad from us and so we sort of like, there’s a lot of different ways to be able to take an audience and sort of like, and where I see people sort of making mistakes or ways to improve would be, like they come in and in whatever platform doesn’t have to be PA, but in a platform where they come in, they create a general audience and they retarget, they upload their ads and they start retargeting against that. Maybe they tweak a few settings, but what ends up happening is, maybe they get less than stellar results.

17:47

And i think that goes back to that quote from Perry earlier in this conversation right, because you know what’s happening is you’ve got opportunities to be able to sort of meet people where they are in the buying cycle. So you create different types of audiences based on where they’re at and then you serve them ads or messaging that is specific to them in that particular mind from. And the goal again, sort of equate it to email marketing, but the goal is really just sort of you’re not trying to sell them in ad ad. What you’re trying to do is just sort of move them along in the decision making process, and that’s a really powerful way of being able to bring people back and get them to convert.

18:40

Your point about it, similar to an email campaign, I think is really spot on. I’ve got a client that’s a B2B, very very long buying cycle. And it has been very successful to kind of segment out these sort of retargeting so that you’re providing the correct message. It’s sort of each step in that buying cycle so they get a different message maybe when they’re beginning their research, and a little bit different after they’ve went through some lead generation or have read some additional educational material, and then a third one when they’re actually closer to that final conversion. And yeah it was very similar to a sort of email drip campaign style approach. Well and I mean this actually I mean, I think that’s right. I mean there’s sort of this idea of being able to connect, and I don’t know Jalali if you’ve done this in particular test, but being able to connect an ABM style approach for prospecting new leads right, is also something that if we talk about retargeting a lot, but really I mean, if we’re talking about advertising in general and we sort of open up and sort of work out way up the funnel, what we’re talking about is driving leads from sort of the right audience. And you can do that with the audiences that you’re building.

20:06

Build a lookalike audience on top of that right, and then go out and prospect and drive new leads. And I’ve seen campaigns, I don’t know if anybody else can speak to this, but I’ve seen campaigns that actually outperform PPC in the traditional sense just by making, having really nice dialed in audiences that they have build out. So you know, it’s fascinating to me, we talk about how we’re all working from home in this environment right, we’re all sort of in this new place or working. But ABM is actually in my opinion, more effective today right because you’re out of the office right, you’re at home now. And so how do you target people now that have switched, picked up their laptop and left the office two or three months ago and planted it back down in their home office. It’s a useful tactic for a lot of different scenarios like that. You know Eric I was just going to say that you upcoming in a couple months we’re going to be doing some research on account based marketing. And we have actually next month of research on lead generation and it’s interesting, especially, you spoke about the B2B marketer, but all these different things like interconnect. So we start talking about account based marketing, this will be I think our third year of surveying audiences about what they’re doing. Account based marketing, you see how marketers are really getting much better at or needing to get much better at the strategy of how everything interconnects right? So your account based marketing, looking at your lead generation and the various levels of the funnel, and you know where you need to focus your messaging to increase conversion, maybe top of the top, middle, or bottom of the funnel, your advertising program and they’re just trying to be much more strategic about how everything flows together because there’s there’s big problems or not. There’s big questions or solutions that marketers have, but it crosses over into all these different areas.

22:31

Yeah I just want to chime in and say here really quick, if you guys who are listening have questions for anyone, for Jalali, Todd, Eric or Andrew go ahead and put them in the chat and we always go through at the end and try to get to as many questions as possible. So I just wanted to throw that out there for you guys. Yeah the sort of the concept of retargeting in general has been like you know, it’s funny to me, there’s this, it’s been around for a while right. And people sort of, the whole concept of, I click the button in Facebook or clicking the remarketing button and Google right. And you sort of have this concept of, false concept I think, I’ve done all the things right, that I’m supposed to do like, I’m doing the stuff and really sort of like, Jalali sort of like here, but you know I can look at case study after case study, and that’s just not the case right? There’s just not the, that’s not the truth of it because what happens just like with any other type of marketing that you do, email marketing or paid search, yeah or you know any direct mail, I mean any kind of marketing that you find that, it’s not sort of the set it and forget it kind of mentality.

24:16

There are many things that you can do that are data driven decision making sorts of paths that you need to go down to be able to sort of squeeze out as much of the opportunity as you can.

23:34

Yeah I think with just listening to this, even you can kind of get a sense that marketing is a complicated thing to do right? To tie your, track your consumers and give them the right message at the right time. Like I probably manage a dozen campaigns or a dozen accounts as part of the AI lab, just hands on trying to do it. And even using the best technologies that we have access to it’s a hard thing to keep track of everything, like this one’s going up, this one’s going down. And so we need automation right, like we have to have these tools. And I for one welcome any kind of machine learning or automation that can help me just solve some of the stuff. But the problem is this, those applications, and I know this for a fact, just trying to build them myself, is they require a massive amount of data right.

25:18

So if you come in, you’re new and you have 10 conversions on your campaign, that thing can’t figure out what to do, and they do a lot of stuff to try to make it figure out like they can look at past campaigns and other people and model and do all these different things, but by its nature, this automation is based around massive amounts of data. Self-driving cars, perfect example, it’s very, it’s they kind of have self-driving car with a human involved already done, getting that thing fully automated long ways off still right? There’s a, the last 5% is always the hardest part of it.

25:53

Yeah it’s, and if we were to change, and there’s a thing even with something we changed the height of a car, the whole model breaks right. Like you can’t figure out, so marketing is actually very mature in that perspective uses data, has been doing that for a long time, we’re kind of there. But the marketer themselves still has a really important role right, you have to know which buttons to push, you have to know what data means when it comes back, is the data valid? How many on here have gone after a false positive where you think oh this is winning, it’s winning, it’s winning and then like a month later it’s not winning. So it’s like you have to still use your brain a little bit. There’s this huge opportunity for us to have been in marketing to move from business intelligence, like looking at graphs and making decisions to understanding how to kind of move the levers on these automations in an efficient way. And I think that’s really what this is about is I actually love the stuff that, like at Google does, it’s great if you have a lot of volume, it’s you can’t bear some of those things right, but when you’re trying to craft a campaign and tell the story to your consumer step by step in a way that’s very efficient, it’s nearly impossible to do with full automation seats. It’s a mix right, you have to be able to understand what’s going on. And even with the larger volume I agree, it certainly works a lot better. The Google automation or Facebook automation, when it’s these larger accounts or larger volume, but you still get into the problems that Eric was bringing up, I think about kind of handing over the keys of the kingdom to a system that’s optimizing for slightly different things. And it’s going to drive up that spend whether or not it’s maybe helping you as much as it could. You know a smart marketer will be able to shepherd those robots and kind of guide them in the right direction and draw them back when they need to be that kind of thing.

27:40

Yeah it actually goes back to I think what Todd was saying at the earlier part of the conversation too. He said something to the effect of nobody’s gunna know your audience as well as you do. Nobody’s gunna know your product as well as you do. And if you’re an agency on this webinar, this is exactly the truth right, every single beginning of any engagement because it begins with like a discovery process and you’re sort of getting up to speed on what you know, what the perfect prospect is, and what the perfect opportunity is and who the perfect audience is in front of you. Sorry, no pun intended. And so the idea of being able to take the power of machine learning and AI. And the things that we sort of have under the hood and coupling that with experts right, coupling that with people who really know what they’re doing and they sort of are eating and sleeping and breathing programmatic advertising retargeting allows you to be able to say, okay here are the guardrails that I’m establishing. And I’m going to be able to leverage and take advantage because we’re in, I mean we’re in a day now where, and Jalali and I talk about this all the time. It’s like, it’s not the same as it was three or four years ago. Three or four years ago I could beat ML based platforms with my own campaigns right, and I could go and I could do that today. It’s harder to do that right, I mean there’s still like some time, but it’s becoming fewer and fewer kind of times where I can beat out some sort of AI platform based approach. But when I couple what I know about my customer or my prospect with the power of something like that I’ll win every time. Maybe not every time, maybe like a lot, most of the time I will win. And you just can’t, it’s not one or the other anymore. You have to put them together and you have to join them together in a way that allows you to be able to sort of push forward in a way that you couldn’t do before.

30:21

You guys ready to take some questions? Sure alrighty. So we have a bunch in here and if you guys think of stuff as we go, go ahead and send those in as well. So our first question is from Kunal. So how much data do you feel is enough before you start running a retargeting campaign on Facebook? Yeah well you want to take that great thing, how much is enough? That’s always a question. So the technical answer is, it’s a function of how different the two results are right? So you could have one campaign that’s going crazy, otherwise not. Short story, Facebook in particular is doing a very good job of just like trying to supplement your data with their own data. But one thing you have to remember is those companies, these are math problems that are designed to make them profit right? That’s ultimately what advertising is for them is, we dial it in so you’re making just enough so that you keep spending right? nAnd that’s their prerogative, and that’s what they want to do. But yeah, you have to be careful with this kind of stuff because those algorithms can’t fully work. I don’t, there’s no number, there’s no like magic number or you need 100, you need 200, but you certainly, I certainly never do anything without running for a week. I certainly never did look at anything with a couple hundred clicks. It’s because you just get all this weird stuff, but you have to let things run, you have to let those things do their job, and you have to be paying attention to kind of what they’re doing in the back end. Make sure you don’t send them off in a wrong robot direction, I guess that’s kind of what you’re trying to do along with, you answered in the beginning there, I think it’s important to point out that the more successful the campaign, the less data you really need.

32:01

And he’s sort of alluded to that, but if it’s an unsuccessful campaign it could be something that could run for a very very long time before you provide any sort of significance that it’s really doing anything. If it’s a highly successful campaign, that week that Hartman’s discussing might be enough. Yeah yeah yeah good question. I don’t know if you wanted to add on there Eric.

32:26

No note really. I mean it depends on what kind of campaigns you’re running I guess too. If you’re doing a lookalike campaign, you’re gunna need, I mean bare minimum, maybe a thousand visitors or something like that that are uniques. But I would say that I guess just to sort of add on to what Jalali and Andrew were saying, they’re, it’s not just anymore. Anyway, it’s not just about how many, what my audience that I own today is right in terms of website traffic or whatnot right? So there are plenty of other ways to sort of augment your existing audience. You can do that through, like we have just actually in the next, I don’t know month, month and a half, we’re going to be able to take email and create audiences out of your email list right? We’ll be able to target various audiences based off of whatever you have segmented in your either your marketing automation platform or your ESP, like MailChimp or something else right? So we’ll be able to take all of those, ingest them, and then create audiences out of those right? So if they, if you have different types of behavior, we’ll be able to serve just like we would any other audience. And I love what Jalali says. He says this all the time. And he’s basically like, you spend all this money on creating a following on Facebook and a following on Instagram, and you spend all this time and money building an email list and cultivating that. And really that’s exactly what this is right? I mean when we’re talking about building a retargeting audience or a prospecting audience, you know it’s they’re all audiences. They’re all groups of people that have been put into a specific segment or bucket that you can go and get your product, your service in front of, and so that to me like sort of changed the way I thought about programmatic in general right, was the fact that I never really sort of connected in my head.

34:55

Okay well, so the audience I’m building right now on my website is just as valuable as the audience that I’m now building through my LinkedIn profile or my Instagram page or whatever right? So these are all audiences with, as a group so they all have, sort of again, it’s being able to meet people where they are. Sorry Kathleen, I like completely diverged. Oh I think all of that’s good, I think that’s all important that people need to know, but with that we’ll go on to our next question. So Paulo has asked aside from email marketing which other channels we can use, which other channels can we use to increase re-marketing conversions. Yes, so there’s a number of ways to remarket and, as Eric was kind of talking about you’re basically setting up audiences any way you can. The most common one is to cookie someone when they come to the site. So like SharpSpring Ads does that automatically, put a little pixel on there, that’ll start building that audience. Then as Eric alluded to, you can also remarket, find your people on the web based on email addresses. So there’s this magic technology that will hash the email and follow them around that way. You can also do those phone numbers and different things any kind of thing that identifies, so those are the two big ones that you start with is your cookies and your actual visitors. What am I missing? There’s a lot, there’s definitely other ways to do that, there’s geo tagging, so put a fence around that area and treat that as an audience. Lookalikes look alike, so audiences based with similar attributes, the one you just created, that’s kind of how you can kind of multiply it out.

36:48

I think the big thing that then the aha moment for me, and actually when you start first talking about this couple years ago or whatever, I was like retargeting, yeah I’ve done that, like I’ve tried it, I get it, and it didn’t even really click to me then even then when he was talking about it. I was like, no why would we ever advertise to a new prospect when we haven’t lit up the first ones again, right? Like we all deal with these 98% abandonment rates on our websites and we’re like, we’ve come..

37:14

Oh that’s pretty good right? Like oh, I’m up one, I’m up one from 99% to 98%, it’s great, but then the vast majority of our dollars are just wasted right? Like we send these clicks and they’re gone. And this happens to me a lot. I don’t know if some of you, I actually was interested in, I came out for the lift of me remember what it was, like okay I saw this product or this thing, just can’t remember anymore. And they’re like oh I see the ad, so it does work. It’s not I think where people get it wrong, is it’s not just spam to death everybody with ads right? Like there is an art to it. Like Todd was talking about of sequencing and telling a story, but it’s different, it’s different than putting a banner out and hoping that some new visitor on craigslist or wherever that banner is showing is gunna find your stuff interesting right? It’s I’m gunna follow Eric today, just went to my website. For the next three weeks I’m going to follow him everywhere he goes with different messages right, which is a degree where he, it’s not obtrusive, he doesn’t even care, it’s just kind of keeping it from mine until some point where it long tails out and we decide we’ve lost them, we can’t get them back. Like you said it’s almost like human nature right? You just forgot about something, you’re busy, there’s a million things going on on the web and then the ads kind of like follow you around reminding you of things that you had previously looked at. So it’s not always, like you said, it’s not always spam, sometimes it’s helpful even.

38:38

Yeah I think it’s even more crucial when it’s the long buying cycle product when they aren’t going to finish their conversion in that one sitting. In any event they’re always going to take a couple of days, and it keeps them kind of locked into the process. Yeah the long sales table we get so used to quick leads and quick sales, but some things just take time to educate people the knowledge of how we do campaigns. Now like you talked about email, but like sales people are great at this, where they always want to just go and have a subtle reconnect with somebody. So you know, finding a reason to, I talked to Andrew last week, but now in my case we have some new research, so I’ll send that to him with a note that will align well the same kind of concept I think happens with your retargeting. How do we just find that art of staying with them without being obnoxious maybe. And I think part of that is because we’re still serving up value, we’re still making messages that will resonate with them. That will help them along that journey.

39:54

So kind of on a separate topic, Pat has a question about real estate marketing specifically. So I’m running a real estate Facebook campaign, should I do very detailed targeting or leave it more open and blank? As far as I’m assuming we’re talking about audiences here, but I’ll let you guys take that and run with it. So I’m not a real estate specialist but I think the obvious answer is, you should probably test both. Testing is really critical to understanding what areas and retargeting, what sorts of campaigns and audiences are most successful. We can make a guess and maybe that guess can be a very well informed guess based off of previous knowledge and other accounts or test results. But both, for any business it should be, let’s test a few different approaches, a few different audiences, see what the data says and move from there.

40:47

Yeah I would probably, I would agree with that. We have a lot of real estate offices, agents, independent agents, professional services, doctors offices, that sort of thing that you can use SharpSpring Ads, and I would say where we see the success of these types of campaigns, especially in real estate, there’s a geographic area. So Jalali was talking a little bit about geo fencing earlier and just making sure that you know, as people are coming, you’re building this audience. I would say, if I would, if it were me and I were in your shoes, what I would probably do is I would open it up as much as I could knowing that it’s geo, like you’re gunna have a certain limitation just geography based. And then as you get data, you start tightening that in, you may make different types of controls around your bidding and optimizing your bidding differently than maybe you did right out of the gate.

41:55

So there’s bid maxes, that sort of thing to help you figure out how to dial in the campaign. So you might be reaching the right people and you might be driving new leads. But where we see the most success in situations like yours is where people have said, okay, now I have my baseline, and now I’m going to iterate on that. I’m going to make it better. And the way I make it better is by having the kind of control and optimizing the campaigns around certain types of inventory that’s showing up on maybe, maybe you don’t need to be in the 970 by 250, maybe getting the same kind of performance on some of the ads that cost you a lot less right? So you know, being able to dial those things in and giving that control is really, I think what sort of sets you apart and drives, and it helps you to take your, maybe your cost per lead is x right, and this could be significantly below that with a few small tweaks. So anyway, and we see that, we say that a lot, we haven’t, we see it a lot yeah thanks Eric.

43:10

So this is more back to the what we were talking about towards the beginning of this about account based marketing, but you can kind of define that more and explain what exactly account based marketing is Eric.

43:24

I mean I guess in short it’s marketing around an account. Todd you want to go like a profile of a person right, I mean it’s looking at, if you’re trying to sell into, and I’ll just use like Oracle for example, there’s, it’s going to be a large B2B type sale has a larger price point and has multiple people involved in the sales process, so you might have the person who actually is going to be using the product managers, IT, there could be ten different people involved in that sales process. So account based marketing identifies your largest, your best accounts and then within those accounts you try to find all the people who would be involved in that process. So the Oracle example would be, they’re a target of yours and you probably have maybe 10 or 15 different people that you would have in that account based marketing process, and you could have different tactics and messages for each one.

44:30

Yeah I think, yeah that’s right I mean I like to sort of, I like to sort of describe the traditional marketing funnel right, so traditionally what we have done in the past is we have said, here are the leads that we want to drive, and we’re going to take those number of leads and we’re going to sort of filter out hand raisers, and they make their way into the next stage of the process that are people who have attended a webinar or some other sort of opt-in, interest-based approach. And then of those, there’s a certain percentage of them that make their way further down into the funnel, and now they’re in sort of a comparison process. And you know maybe they downloaded an e-book or piece of content from you know, hand raised in a different way. And then you know of course, then there’s a little bit further down the funnel where they’ve sort of made some of their decisions, and now they’re on a phone with one of your sales reps before the ultimate close. So account based marketing sort of flips that upside down, and you really sort of, at the beginning really what you’re doing is you’re going, you’re starting with the end of mind and you’re saying this is my perfect prospect that I’m trying to get in front of. And it’s at this company and it’s got this job description and this role that’s in the decision making process.

46:01

And you’re trying to get in front of that person or that small team of decision makers and that really, like when you start sort of with the end in mind and try to get in front of that person, that’s much more, again I think Jalali said, it too it is sort of like profile driven. One example that was just fantastic, and I don’t know what platform they’re using, a while back I was looking for a new apartment. I clicked on the website that a banner of the apartment followed me around for like a week. Then they started showing me the place I was looking at right? So that was, I could see in the ad, like the place that I’ve actually seen. And then they started offering me escalating offers right. Like so first it was like a month off, and it was two months off, and now it’s two months off and six hundred dollar cash right. So they somehow identified I was looking, they’ve tied it to the thing that I was looking at. And then their little machine just started kind of hitting me stuff to the point where it was actually coming from the rep. Like I thought this lady’s emailing me. No, it’s just their re-marketing was really good. And to them it makes sense for the average lifetime values, what thirty thousand dollars a year or something, so it’s worth finding that person that took the time and came off the search result. And make sure that you kind of are doing a good job of profiling, following, that’s well worth the month to them.

47:25

So yeah, thank you. So we can take maybe one or two more questions. So this is from Anthony. Can you guys kind of speak to exclusion-based audiences and best practices for that sizes and use cases, and specifically as it relates to what we have coming up, down the road as far as email list, audiences?

47:59

Yeah so I think this is where, I mean this is like one of the most effective ways to be able to sort of dial in your campaign right? I mean if you think about it through the lens of email marketing, you don’t just, well I mean ten years ago maybe you did, but you don’t just blast out to 100,000 people and hope right? You’re getting in front of the right ones. So what you’re doing, well I guess you could get blackballed that way, but you can do it. Probably wouldn’t recommend it, but what we’ve done since is we’ve said okay, well we’ve gotten more sophisticated as we’ve gotten more tools in places. And we’ve got more control over our campaigns. We’ve been able to say okay, there are certain auditors, like certain audiences or certain segments, certain lists that we wouldn’t want to send an email to because it’s not relevant to them anymore. Or maybe it’s based on age or some sort of RFM modeling or something right? So we’re not gunna talk to those people anymore because this isn’t gunna serve them well. I’m gunna have a different offer for a different time that’s gunna be relevant to them, but I’m not gunna send that this particular offer to them today.

49:12

And so that’s the same thing here right with targeting. You’re able to say okay, these are people that, I’m trying to think of a good example, like these are people that have visited my website but they have not yet converted, or if they have converted, I obviously want to be able to place a burn pixel and exclude those people because I want to send them something completely different right? I’m going to exclude them from offer, try to get them to buy because they’ve already bought. But now what I’m going to do is I’m going to come in and I’m going to say to the people that already bought, I’ve got an audience for them, I’m going to send them something different. Maybe it’s a warranty program or it’s an after market up-sell offer or something else. SO being able to have the granularity of being able to say yes, these people but not these people for this particular offer gives you a lot of control. And therefore it really makes your campaign a lot more efficient. You’re wasting less money on stuff that you’re, and frankly you’re not annoying people right Because if you’re sending somebody the wrong message that’s not relevant to them, it’s just a turn off. And so we’ve all been sort of plagued by that.

50:42

The idea that we preach here is saying, let’s make sure that we’re getting in front of the right people with the right message at the right time. I think there’s an example of this webinar, so some of you would have seen if you’ve logged in and you’re already customers, you’re gunna see an offer for up to five thousand dollars matching that credit. If you’re new you’re gunna see an offer for a hundred dollars right? And so we’ve done that, not that we won’t help people with their ad spends, and then they can talk to us about that, but it’s that we don’t want to taste the ad budget on the activity that is designed to drive people through and get them active with the one that’s designed to introduce it the first time right? It’s a little bit different message. Actually we have different teams that handle different things. So we want to sum it up, we just don’t want to blast everyone with the same thing, doesn’t make sense. So in that case we use an exclude list of people, cookies that have been inside the dashboard alright. So if you’ve come through and you’ve used us, you’re going to see a different set than the new person.

51:41

You kind of see it as, you’ll see it as you’;re surfing around, you’ll see our ads, and they should be kind of match up to where you’re at in the decision processing, your decision process. Yeah that’s right. And that’s actually like sort of a good segue, I think, so we’ve talked a lot, I mean you’ll know this if you talk to anybody here or if you’ve listened to any of our webinars or seen any of the case studies that we do, we talk a lot about testing because that’s really the only way to sort of maximize the opportunity that you have right, whether that’s driving more leads, closing more deals, increasing your sales, squeezing out inefficiency and being more efficient with the dollars that you’re spending.

52:29

Because we’re all sort of in that place like we have to do it with data and testing and results. So one of the things that we did, and I don’t know where the slide is there Kathleen, but one of the things that we did if Jalali and I were talking I don’t know a couple of months ago probably at this point, when especially when all this stuff was happening with Covid-19, we just said okay well you know, we kind of have to bak that up a little bit, we have to, like we’ve been practicing test, tests, tests, and then we’re not giving people the ability to, we’re not really helping them any other, I mean we’re giving them advice but we’re not helping them, like putting our money where our mouth is for lack of a better word. So what we decided was, we’re going to start doing a matching program, and this matching program basically, so it’s up to a million dollars in free advertising with the AI lab, and so what we do is, we basically, if you go to perfectaudience.com/match, what we’ve done is we’ve set up this program that will match your campaign spend up to five thousand dollars.So very simply, you spend five thousand dollars on a campaign and in a month, and then we’ll come along and we will match that with another fie thousand dollars. And what that does is it basically, you know I mean you can sort of see how it works right? I mean we actually cut your budget in half. And, well cut your risk, allows you to be able to test new things, new opportunities, your dollar goes twice as far.

54:16

So especially in sort of this time where everybody’s budget has been affected over the last couple of months, we felt like this was sort of a way for us to say look, take a little bit more of a risk, go and test some things that you wouldn’t have otherwise, and we’ll help you by taking the campaign and cutting it in half. So yeah, just kind of close that out there because so basically you can, people are always asking how much do I need to spend on this right? What’s the minimum? There’s no minimum, we want to work with, we want to help you get that funnel working right? Where you send it, click through and it results in revenue at the other end. And so what we’re doing with the AI lab is, since I get annoyed, AI is such an over-hyped thing and everybody’s doing it, this is, take your business that is sort of working, or maybe you have a funnel that is working and you want to grow it right? Let us plug it into the system Eric’s giving you, the ad budget to test it out right? All the training algorithms if you will get it kind of working and then we just come behind and we just have a series of tools, we have a team of people, we’re trying to drive more convergence for you right? We want the end results to be bigger and we want you to add dollars, go further, and that’s all. There’s no catch. We don’t charge you for anything, there’s not like a minimum. We’re just looking for people that kind of have got their funnel sort of refined.

55:43

They want to grow it, they want to scale the daily volume in a way that’s profitable for them, and that’s kind of what we’re offering with this, so like for Microsoft it’s a great opportunity if you’re, if you want to get behind the scenes a little bit and really understand and get some growth, this year would be a good opportunity for you if you’re interested in checking that out right now, I’ve dropped the link in our chat box so you can just click on it through there and visit out landing page for that. And also we have some more great content coming up in a couple weeks and I’m gunna let Todd kind of introduce you guys to our next topic.

56:21

Yeah, two weeks from now, June 4th we’ll have our next webinar and actually SharpSpring Ads and Ascend2 have joined together to do a research study on programmatic advertising and we really wanted to do the research now in this current economic state to kind of see, you know what’s the data, I mean the data six months ago is not nearly as relevant as the data we just collected and so we just closed the survey and we’re tabulating the results right now. And we’ll have research to share on June fourth, I think some tests and case studies again that will align with helping to take maybe the research, you know the research is great because it takes you like what other people are doing. But then we’re gunna take the next step and get some practical tips and advice on how you can make adjustments to your program based on the research. Yeah if you guys wanna, if you’re interested in that, if you wanna go ahead and register so you don’t forget, I just dropped the link in the chat as well. So both of those links are there for you guys and of course go ahead and throw any last minute questions in the chat we always do a follow-up question and answer session after every webinar on the following Monday. So we’ll get to any questions that we didn’t get to today on Monday and we’ll email that out to you guys as well as a recording of today’s webinar. But I just want to thank everybody for joining us today. We have a great amount of engagement, lots of great questions. I know everyone on the panel enjoyed you guys today and being here. So we just want to thank you guys and thank you everybody on the panel, Jalali, Eric, Todd and Andrew thank you guys so much for all your knowledge and time. You are welcome. Alright. See you next time. Thank you.