Advertising and Lead Generation

First of all, publishers and platforms are advancing their ad products sometimes monthly. Take Facebook for example as one.  Another, Google finished its Google Marketing Live event and released new ad products for its advertisers.  

Do you need to know about every product? No, but you should be aware of the high performing products in your vertical.   Example, Google released Bumper Machine on Youtube.  This product creates a short video from your overall video to place it in a 6-second ad spot to gain more frequency for ad recall and purchase intent.  While it sounds great,  if you do not have the expertise or resources to build videos, your company is not ready for it yet.  Good to know, not worth executing.

Next, know that Facebook is pulling back on its targeting.  Furthermore, as part of our advertising and outreach of new tech, this is a significant change impacting a few industries specifically:  Real Estate, Mortgage Lending, and Builders. See our article on the impact and how to work around the changes.

Google Discovery Ads

Google’s new ad products are exciting and need to be tested.   Discovery Ads, in the Google Discover feed, is compelling.  It can have an extensive reach for your brand.   Additionally, Gallery Ads provide better brand awareness but might be lacking in performance in lead generation.  We’ll have to see how they perform.  Gallery ads will show between 4 to 8 images in a carousel.  They are expected to sit at the top of the search results pages.  Coming soon, they could be an essential ad product to know when and how to use it.

Targeting New Audiences

Similarly, not an ad product but related as with Facebook is targeting.  Ad product plus targeting equals enormous gains.  Google is rolling out custom audiences, combining its custom affinity and custom intent audiences into one audience tool.  Additionally, Google is releasing a lookalike audience tool (similar to Facebook) called audience expansion tool.  Companies can grow their audience with the same consumers who have seen offers before.  

Local Marketing Improvements

As a result of early local marketing tests for foot-traffic, Google is rolling our local campaigns that promote brick-and-mortar stores across Search, Display, Maps, and YouTube — aimed at maximizing foot traffic to local stores.

Lead and Information Capture

Lead generation starts with the ad driving the consumer to call, click, or walk-in.  Now that you get the traffic, converting it is essential.  A few new pieces of tech are improving conversion rates and allowing companies to get the most out of their web traffic.

Web Visitor Lead Capture technology takes the IP address or Mac address of consumer’s device (mobile phone, desktop or tablet) and matches it to a database of over a billion people.  Capturing information is not hard; it becomes interesting when you think about how to use it appropriately.  

Having this information, name, address, email, and phone (land-line), companies can easily retarget, mail, and even begin to introduce email campaigns appropriately.  Consequently, when information is captured without a form fill, which is an intended action, a consumer takes for more information. Companies need to be careful of the complexities in using the consumer data.  Mailing is worth testing, and retargeting is a great way to extend your marketing outreach.   Just know this new technology has a match rate of 50-95% and appears to be very accurate.

Making Contact with Leads

While companies spend time advertising and testing for conversions. Communication for the final sale is critical for most B2B and certain B2C companies.   In the past few years, better-automated dialers and connected systems have paved the way to be the first touch. 

Companies now need to be thinking beyond the call and looking to text, messaging through social media and applications.  Custom messaging for contact is less intrusive, highly visible, and often drives a response.  Pounding the phones is not a viable strategy anymore, initiating a relationship via messaging or social media can set the stage for a one-call-close.