Digital direct response is big news these days, no matter what business you’re in. Direct response is making huge gains in ad spending and marketing ROI, and with good reason. By leveraging big data, direct response advertisements for mobile can now be better designed to produce higher and higher returns.
The numbers don’t lie – more than $8 billion will be spent on direct response online ads, with over $17 billion to be spent on mobile advertising campaigns overall. These are big increases year over year. If you’re not focusing your efforts on mobile direct response ads driven by big data, you could be missing out on a valuable trend and marketing strategy for your business.
Getting Started
This is a good starting point for brand, agency and digital marketers looking to take advantage of these three components. If you’re a small business just getting your digital direct response off the ground, we recommend this Digital Marketing Strategy 101 post as a good place to start for your online endeavors.
But first, a simple glossary of terms, from a marketer’s perspective:
Digital Direct Response is any advertisement that is designed to drive an immediate action from the consumer, like the sale of an app, a purchase from an online store, or lead capture through a form. This type of ad is best practice when it comes to most Facebook advertising for Ecommerce.
Big Data is the umbrella term for the use of multiple data sets, large or small, to draw more helpful conclusions and engineer better outcomes for a business. Examples of this include matching your CRM collected data with 3rd party reverse IP lookup, or mapping customer behavior to identify those ready to buy (see these predictive analytics case studies for details).
Mobile essentially refers to the growing trend of accessing and consuming content on a mobile device. A combined strategy of social and mobile marketing is the most effective way to reach mobile users.
Big Data in Action
Pulling all three of these marketing elements together into one highly-effective strategy can help you see the huge ROI that others are already seeing for their businesses. To demonstrate how, the following is a relatively simple example based on retargeting – in this case, a mobile-based direct response campaign primed with big data.
Phase 1: Asking the right questions.
A small business marketer looks over her analytics and notices only 12% of users are accessing the company site via mobile. Yet, she knows that their customers access the web on mobile devices all the time (just like she does). She asks, “How can I get in front of mobile users who are killing time on their smart phones?” This is the right question to ask; juxtapose it with the wrong question – “Why should I worry about mobile marketing when only 12% are accessing our site via mobile?” Smart marketing is spotting the best areas for improvement, like integrating mobile and social, and not just sticking to the status quo.
Phase 2: Testing out a social ad strategy.
Our small business marketer thinks of how she uses Facebook on her phone – waiting in line at the airport, killing time at a boring company function, or just checking in to see what friends are up to. Logically, she assumes that others are using their phones in this way as well. Considering that Facebook gets over 60% of its revenue from mobile devices, she’s not too far off. She decides that the best way to get in front of mobile users is to meet them where they spend the most time – on Facebook. So, she sets up a Facebook Ad campaign to test out her theory.
Phase 3: Retargeting for better results.
After a few weeks, our marketer realizes that she doesn’t have much to show for her efforts, other than a decent number of impressions. With no direct response or leap in conversions, she looks at what went wrong.
The missing key in her strategy is the big data element. By tying website visits to her Facebook Ads, she can serve ads specifically to Facebook users who have viewed her site. This means she can retarget website visitors to remind them to download the new app, or return and make a purchase. Retargeting through Facebook Ads is simple – setting up a cookie is as easy as inserting a single line of invisible java script on the backend of her site.
Phase 4: Leveraging big data for increased conversions.
Results at last! Our marketer is seeing response rates many times higher than any of her previous ads. Flushed with victory, she pauses to consider how she could make her Facebook Ad campaign even more effective. Wisely, she turns again to big data, to leverage it for more specific ads that can increase her conversion rate further.
Using big data’s behavioral targeting derivative, she starts to serve webpages to mobile users dynamically, based on the dynamic Facebook Ads that lead them back to her site. By retargeting specific ads to those who visited certain product pages, she can get the right ad in front of the right mobile users. Then when they respond to the ad directly, she can present them with the custom page that will most tempt them to convert.
Strength in Numbers
Our example marketer is using big data in three ways here – to match the mobile user with the product or page they liked, to target them (with help from cookies) with relevant Facebook Ads, and then to match IP addresses to serve the right final page to that mobile user. With all that leverage, it’s no surprise that her conversions are soon up 200%.
Digital direct response marketing can certainly be an effective way to reach mobile users. But without the specificity that marketers can gain from big data, response and conversion rates will never be truly optimized. With all three elements in one strategic ad campaign, your return on ad investment will increase dramatically.
Questions about leveraging big data and retargeting as part of your marketing strategy? Find out more in this class from Dax Hamman, CRO of top search retargeting company Chango.