We have a little change of pace for you today.
If you are a digital marketer, the following story, shared by one of our Account Managers, may ring true (at least the part before the red Cherokee).
My day started like many others. I set my coffee down on the desk and started analyzing the metrics for my client’s digital campaigns. It’s all there, KPIs, impressions, clicks, pageviews, keywords, form fills, calls, store visits, conversions, geofences, targeting demos, and the rest.
At DSG, even though our campaign software is built to automatically optimize performance, we know the difference between good and great campaigns happens at the margins. So, operating under the increasingly trite notion that our slow moving, low performing, human brains possess the insight and intuition needed to boost our campaigns, we always look for which dials we can turn to find that edge.
With that in mind, I started digging deeper into the performance… by geo, offer, keyword, creative iteration, hyperlocal variation and more, searching for patterns we could leverage to improve conversions. If you’re in this business, then you know that the data is a deep river and it’s very easy to get lost diving down into its depths.
I randomly looked at the clock on my laptop and noticed it was almost 3pm. Time for a break. Maybe take a walk outside and catch up on a favorite podcast. Stepping outside I noticed something under the red Jeep.
I picked it up to get a closer look and here is what I found:
Hmmm. Annoying nuisance or savvy marketing?
As I walked around the block, I noticed that many (but not all) of the neighbors had a bag on their driveway as well. Interestingly, the neighbors with the nicest looking yards did not. Clearly, I was on the prospect list due to the bushes on the front lawn that could use a trim and the tree stump that we had been meaning to remove for some time.
When I got back to the house, I grabbed the bag and walked it over to the trash bin. However, standing there with the lid open, I could not let it drop in.
There was just something very authentic about this simple bag of stones with a card that resonated with me. Here is a small, local business without a big budget using their creativity and ingenuity to market their company. I imagined the business owner and perhaps his family up late sitting around the kitchen table preparing the bags.
Instead, I brought the bag into the house, set it on my desk and went back to work. Then, I started thinking about it in terms of the more “sophisticated” campaigns we run and how it compared. It actually checks many of the same boxes we recommend to our clients:
Unique, clutter breaking creative – there were certainly no other marketing materials under the car!
Include An Offer – Free Estimates
Prospect Targeting – Hyperlocal, micro-targeting refined down to the level of which home likely needs your services right now. I imagined being able to offer this depth of targeting on our digital campaigns. Of course we would come up with some catchy jargon like “observational household targeting” !
Reach/Geotargeting – 100% efficiency in the exact neighborhoods where you want to grow your client base.
I then began to think about this in terms of our campaigns and what their analytics might look like.
CPM – or perhaps more accurately we would need to create CPB (Cost Per Bag).
CPC – How many calls did they receive and at what cost per call?
Conversion Rate – what percentage of calls converted to new customers? What is the lifetime value of these new customers?
ROAS – How much revenue did they generate from this drop?
I suspect the ROI here is likely very strong. Whether that was the case or not, I could not help but admire the entrepreneurial, bootstrapping effort.
All in all, while the ad bag may not have been the most aesthetically pleasing marketing piece I ever saw, there was a certain elegance in its simplicity and clarity in its purpose. Beyond that, it serves as a reminder of the basic marketing principles we can sometimes lose sight of when navigating through those deep rivers of data. Finally, for me it is also a prompt to always think outside the rocks…I mean box!
If you need a rock-solid marketing campaign for your SMB or multi-location business, please call or email us here.