Let’s say you’re a brand manager for Purina dog food. And let’s say your boss asked you to find new ways to use mobile marketing to target your customers. Okay, easy enough.
But let’s say your boss also wants you to improve the targeting of your mobile marketing campaign vs. your last effort. Hmmmm. That might get a little harder.
Then, to make things even more challenging, your boss says, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could serve one mobile banner ad to our Purina customers, then serve a different ad to households that buy our competitor’s brand, and then skip over people who don’t own a dog?
Impossible?
Amazingly, You Can Target Mobile Ads on a House-by-House Basis. In fact, that’s exactly the kind of mobile ad campaigns we’re able to create through my mobile marketing and social media agency, 60 Second Communications.
The graphic below explains how the program works.
This May be the Most Revolutionary Advertising Platform Ever. 60 Second Communications can do this, in partnership with 4INFO, by cross-tabulating shopper data from frequent shopper cards with geo-locational mobile data. The result is the ability to serve highly-relevant mobile ads to people based on their previous purchase behavior.
In the example above, Purina would ask 60 Second Communications to develop a mobile display campaign that served up a specific set of banner ads that rewarded existing customers for their loyalty. (Side note: Purina is not a client of 60 Second Communications. We’re just using them as an example.)
They would also ask us to create a separate set of ads that encouraged Iams customers (or Beneful, Pedigree, Science Diet, etc. customers) to try Purina at a 15% discount.
And they would also ask us to skip over any households that didn’t own a dog (based on the fact that certain households don’t buy dog food).
Amazingly, 60 Second Communications can do exactly the scenario outlined above. It’s revolutionary technology and it has the potential to change the way marketers use mobile display ads from now on.
Why Privacy Advocates Shouldn’t be Afraid of This. For starters, people receiving the ads will have opted-in to a frequent shopper card program, so they’ll be receiving the ads based on a voluntary program that they signed-up for.
It’s also worth noting that the data collected is simply statistical data. In other words, we don’t know that Jamie Turner bought Purina last week, we just know is that a certain percentage of people in a certain area bought Purina and we cross-tabulate that data with geo-locational technology so that highly-relevant ads are served up to the people who will benefit from them the most.
Think of it this way — if you’re a 28-year-old newlywed, aren’t you glad that you’re getting direct mail letters about Hawaiian Honeymoons rather than Florida retirement communities?
It’s the same deal with mobile display ads in the sense that you’re getting appropriate messages from products and services that you’re most likely to buy.
This is Just One of Many Ways to Use Mobile Display Ads. Here are some other fascinating ways 60 Second Communications can use mobile display to spread the word about your products or services:
- Send Prospective Customers a Map to Your Location: If you’re interested in connecting prospects to bricks-and-mortar locations, you’re in luck. It’s pretty easy to use GPS technology to identify where a prospect is located. Once the prospect clicks on your ad, they can be driven through to a map that identifies the store that’s nearest their current location. When they click on the map, the contact information for that location is displayed on their smart phone. This technique is perfect for bookstores, car dealerships, auto repair shops, hardware stores, movie theatres … come to think of it, this technique is perfect for any bricks-and-mortar business.
- Run a Viral Coupon Promotion: Interested in driving a lot of business to your location? Then you can run a display ad that allows users to send an SMS text message to themselves and to their friends with a discount code in the message. Once people receive the code they can keep it on their phone until they arrive at your location. Best of all, they can forward it to friends who will also take advantage of the promotion. Remember to include an expiration date for the promotion so that it caps the length of the discount.
- Run an Email Promotion: One of the best things about digital communications is that, in many cases, it costs virtually nothing to expand your reach. When a user clicks on your ad, you can encourage them to spread the word about your promotion by emailing friends about it. Imagine the impact on your business if you’re a restaurant that wants to drive people to your Cinco De Mayo event or if you’re a music venue that wants to drive ticket sales for an upcoming concert. By encouraging people to email their friends, you’re driving extra business to your company without having to spend a dime more on marketing.
- Add an Event to Your Prospect’s Calendar: What if you’re having special sale that runs a few weekends out? Or, what if you want prospects to mark their calendars for an Arts or Music Festival? Or what if you’re a TV network that wants to promote the season premiere of a hit show? Good news – you can run a display ad that sends a push notification to prospects that can add your event to their calendar. Once they approve the notification, your date is added to their calendar with a reminder notification that pops up a few days or a few hours before the event.
Okay, now that we’ve covered some of the cool ways you can use display ads to connect with prospects and customers, let’s circle back around on the issue of targeting.
More Targeting Options for Mobile Display Ads. In doing research for Go Mobile, the book I co-authored with Jeanne Hopkins, I asked my friend Raphael Ravilla to share his insights on the fascinating world of mobile display ad targeting.
Raphael says that there are so many options for targeting people with mobile media that it’s often hard for marketing directors to figure out where to start.
Do you want to target people who only visit the top 100 websites? Sure, you can do that. What about targeting only people who are AT&T customers? That’s no problem. How about targeting only Android users? Yup, that’s easy.
But it gets even better. Do you want to target by WiFi usage? For example, do you want to send an ad to business travelers who are accessing the mobile internet in airports across the globe? You can do that. Or what about wealthy individuals who are vacationing in high-end resorts? You can do that, too.
You can target by time of day, you can target people who have recently switched mobile service providers and you can even target people who are within a very narrowly-defined geographic location (which is perfect for restaurants, bars, coffee shops and other small businesses).
And That’s Still Just the Beginning. What if you were interested in targeting people who have exhibited certain behaviors? For example, what if you wanted to target only people who were reading an article on CNN’s mobile site and who had previously clicked through on an ad for a red Chrysler convertible? You could do that. No problem.
In my interview with Raphael, I asked a tough question – “What if we only wanted to reach doctors, who owned Mercedes-Benz automobiles, who lived within 5 miles of the seashore, who make more than $250,000 a year and who have downloaded the Food & Wine app to their iPads? Would that be possible?”
Surprisingly, Raphael’s answer was yes, that by combining mobile targeting techniques with data available from companies like Experian and Trans Union, you could target those individuals.
(What Raphael was kind enough to gloss over was the fact that there are probably only 20 people in the U.S. who match those exact criteria, which would make a campaign that tightly-defined unpractical. But you get our point – you can get very specific with your targeting using mobile display ads. And the more tightly-defined you get with your campaign, the more interest your prospect probably has in your product, which improves the ROI of your campaign.)
Buying Mobile Display Ads. You can buy mobile display ads in a variety of ways: CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions), CPC (cost-per-click) or CPA (cost-per-acquisition). Let’s take a look at which type of mobile display ad might work best for your company.
- CPM: When you buy on a CPM basis, you’re basically buying a guaranteed number of impressions. By impression we mean the number of times your ad is displayed to an individual. So, for example, if you’re buying ads on CNN.com and paying a $3.00 CPM, then you’re paying $3.00 for every 1,000 people who see your ad. (Before you run out to CNN with $3.00 in your hand, please remember that there are minimum spends and that you have to show your ad to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people before the economics of a CPM approach work out.) Buying on a CPM basis is good if you’re interested in creating brand awareness for your product or service. It’s not as good if you’re interested in driving people to a mobile site where they could buy something there – like a book, a song or an event ticket. For that, you’d probably want to use CPC or CPA.
- CPC: Buying on a cost-per-click basis is good if you’re interested in paying Google, Yahoo or Bing only when someone clicks on your ad. In other words, you can run an ad on Google and agree to pay them 25¢ for every person who clicks through on your ad. It might take 100 people to click through on your ad to make a sale, but if it costs you $25 (i.e., 25¢ x 100 clicks) to sell a product for $250, then it’s a no brainer – fire away. Interestingly, CPC is also good if you’re not expecting a lot of click-throughs on your ad. Why would you want to run a CPC ad that doesn’t get a lot of click-throughs? Because you’re still getting the brand imagery associated you’re your ad. In other words, tens of thousands of people are still seeing your brand name on the ad and, assuming the don’t click through, you don’t pay a dime. It sounds crazy, but it’s true.
- CPA: Cost-per-acquisition (also known as cost-per-engagement or cost-per-download) ensures that your mobile marketing campaign will deliver the exact action you’re seeking. You only pay when someone actually buys your product. Now, before you jump out of your seat and run off to find a CPA deal, understand that there’s more to it than meets the eye. Companies that will run CPA programs for you will often need to charge set-up costs, which can be tens of thousands of dollars. So, it’s not as simple as it looks. After all, nothing is free. Well, except air. And love. But other than that, most things cost money.
Mobile marketing provides an amazing variety of ways for business like yours to connect with prospects and customers. If you’d like to find out more about mobile, send me an email or visit the 60 Second Communications website.
Better still, if you know of anyone else who might benefit from this article, please feel free to forward it to them or share it via social media. It’s an exciting new world out there and there are plenty of opportunities to grow sales and revenue from it.
Jamie Turner is the CEO of social media and mobile marketing firm 60 Second Communications and is the Founder of the 60 Second Marketer. He is the co-author of “How to Make Money with Social Media” and “Go Mobile” and is a popular marketing speaker at events, trade shows and corporations around the globe.