April 10, 2014

The Who, What, Where, and Why of Advertising- and the surprising conclusion why marketers must reinvent themselves

First is search, where you target WHAT they are searching.

The keyword represents instant intent, which translates to WHEN they want to buy

but you don’t know WHO they are.

Second is contextual. You know WHERE they are.

They might be on the New York Times reading an article on iPads.

So you serve an ad for iPad accessories. But you don’t know WHO they are.

Third is remarketing, such as Facebook and Google remarketing.

With Facebook ads, you know WHO they are, but not necessarily WHEN or WHAT.

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You might have the right person, but they might not be buying for months.

You are reaching them before they begin the product search for a particular model number or the discount code.

Facebook is remarketing.

Email is remarketing.

Any time you hit somebody because of a cookie or user-level identifier, it’s remarketing.

So this leads to some surprising conclusions:

All social and display, when properly done, is remarketing.

It doesn’t have to be a pixel. It could be a fbuserid, phone number, or email.
If you are using remarketing to solve cart abandonment or mid-funnel engagement, then you’d use ALL retargeters at each step.
After all, it’s about reaching a particular set of people when they didn’t complete the action you want. So who cares where you serve the remarketing message?

Thus, there is no such thing as a Facebook ads expert, LinkedIn ads expert, or other channel-specific expert anymore.

Because you’d have a smart sequence of content to feed to your audience at each stage, remarketing is no different than smart email marketing.

You’re doing precise segmentation and message delivery. Thus, the team in charge of your remarketing should be the team that runs your email.

Channels are now offering remarketing in their mix.

Google has remarketing now. Twitter has it for advertisers spending $25k or more per month. It’s coming on LinkedIn.

So with search, you have what they searched on and who they are. That means search marketers must understand retargeting.

And social ad folks must understand search.

Marketers must reinvent themselves or get left behind.

The research that Adobe Analytics put out recently showed that most marketers wanted to reinvent themselves, but didn’t know how.

“The shift to digital requires new technology, new approaches and, in many cases, entirely new roles for marketers,” said Ann
Lewnes, chief marketing officer for Adobe. “The good news is that marketers see the change in front of them, and understand
they need to embrace data, focus on creating personalized experiences and work across their social, Web and mobile
channels. They just need to take the plunge.”

Marketing executives must understand how this affects their strategy, and they must get their people to add new tricks to their bags.