AdWords and Banner ads can certainly get a name on your radar – but how do you break past the point of initial introduction and educate consumers enough to engage with your brand?
At last week’s CMO Summit, Eric Vreeland sat down with Yext’s Amin Makhani and Digital Ocean’s Mitch Wainer to understand what’s worked (and what hasn’t) for them.
Make one sale, once. Makhani discussed the importance channel partners. Yext, which offers geo-marketing solutions that helps build digital presences for businesses with physical locations, has seen phenomenal success from aligning itself with channels that target like-minded customers.
Get a little help from their friends. Digital Ocean’s new referral program currently drives 26% of the company’s sales. Wainer, admittedly taking queues from the acquisition expertise of foursquare and Uber, worked with his team to instate an double-sided referral program, wherein customers share deals with friends and are then rewarded those friends redeems their offers. The results? An 8% increase in acquisition-driven sales. Just last Thursday, the company launched its new email share feature, to complement its social plug-ins.
Click-happy consumers could be your next customer. “Someone who has clicked on your ad is someone who is most likely to click on your ad again,” the two agreed. Just because someone clicked on your ad and didn’t convert into a sale buy doesn’t mean it’s not worth targeting that person again. In fact, that person who clicked on your ad is exactly who you want to remind and retarget in the future.
Hire a people who can do it all, but don’t do it all yourselves. “We hire marketing people who are a jack of all trades,” shared Makhani, emphasizing the benefit of having a talented individual on your team who can both create the content and analyze it. That said, he admitted that initially, “We built too much in-house software,” noting outsourced technologies such as Optimizely as a great analytics go-to’s.
Keep up the customer retention momentum. Existing customers adopt new products in cycles. Makhani and Wainer suggested re-engaging customer by producing and presenting each new feature upon launch with both paid and organic methods of promotion.
