Michael: Hello and welcome to HaBO Village Podcast. I'm Michael Redman.
Kathryn: And, I'm Kathryn Redman.
Michael: And, we're just having a good time here in the studio today. We're really glad you're visiting us. Thank you for coming back if you heard before. If not, thank you for checking us out for the first time. This podcast is about helping leaders and organizations become Passion Provision companies and leaders become Passion Provision leaders. What we mean by that is that you are profitable ... your company is financially profitably and growing and that emotionally it is satisfying and fulfilling work, labor and that there's actually a sense of joy and peace in your life as a leader and in your company.
Kathryn: Joy and peace.
Michael: And, it's-
Kathryn: Who'd of thunk? At work?
Michael: ... I mean that's [inaudible 00:00:46] too but who's talking about this and if you're listening, you'll think, "Who are these mushy mushy feely crappy people?" but we're serious. This is amazing. We strive for it. We've been very successful and blessed at our company to be able to build an environment where we work on a culture that actually increases people's fulfillment and enjoyment in what they're doing partially because we got the right people in the company. We got them in the right positions, but then making sure that our culture is a place where people feel like they're challenged, like they're doing something they enjoy and that's not all the time. We have a 51% rule. We are striving to do that and this podcast HaBO Village and our agency Half a Bubble Out, Half a Bubble Out, you heard that right, is how we spend our days working with our clients helping them develop and build profitable companies where they can build passion and provision organizations.
Kathryn: Yeah. So, some of the podcasts are super, super practical about ways to build your email marketing list or what to do once you have them or today is going to be how to retarget. So, super practical stuff and others are a little more philosophical just about building culture and how you hire employees.
Michael: I'd say that's really practical stuff.
Kathryn: So, all those are practical and tactical too, but-
Michael: They're different. They're more about culture. So, today, we're going to talk about retargeting and actually today's podcast if I were going to title it differently is How to get the most out of your ad buying and when we use the term retargeting, you may hear the term retargeting or remarketing in literature you read about or salespeople that are calling you and telling you it's the next best thing since slice bread and so on and so forth. We're going to talk about what it is. We're going to define it and we're going to talk about how to use it and why it really is powerful, and the obviously we'll probably get to the place where we're talking about how to use it and not use it in that sense.
Michael: So, let's just start out with what is retargeting or remarketing. Retargeting is the concept that when somebody comes to your website, you're able to reach out to them again and communicate to them with ads. That's what retargeting is.
Kathryn: So, you all experience this, right? You go to a website and you browse around and maybe purchase something, maybe you don't, but all of a sudden in your Facebook feed, lo and behold, there's an ad for that very thing you were just looking at yesterday. How did that happen? How did they know you were on their site?
Michael: Did they hear me? Are they bugging my house? Is my Google Home actually listening to me?
Kathryn: Big Brother is watching.
Michael: Well, it's not really your Google Home and it's not Alexis as far as we know. It's not your cellphone but it is retargeting. What happens is there is a technology now, it's been out for a while, and what it allows us to do as marketers and companies to do is when somebody comes to visit your website depending on the type of software you use or whatever, so we're going to use the example of Facebook. If you have a Facebook page and you're a Facebook user, then what happens is you go to a website that has a special code on it and it knows that you ... it doesn't know your name. It doesn't know who you are. It just knows that that computer is at Facebook. Now Facebook knows but Facebook's keeping it private from the marketer. They're not telling them. Then we go to Facebook as marketers and we say, "I want to show people who've come to my website that are Facebook members an ad."
Kathryn: So, what you're telling me Michael is that I can be ... Do I have to have Facebook open when I'm browsing another website or I just have to have a Facebook account and-
Michael: You just have to have a Facebook account.
Kathryn: So, it doesn't matter if I'm on Facebook or not on Facebook. If I just browse to a company and I'm looking at their product, then I can use Facebook to retarget that as a market.
Michael: The only characteristic is you have to on your computer that you log in to Facebook with. As soon as that happens, all the internet gods communicate and talk about things and stuff like that. What happens is it allows me to send ads to people who I don't know who they are. Now, what's powerful about this and what's different about this is before retargeting happened, the only way I could communicate to if you came to my website was if you gave me your name and email. That was the only way to do it, because I had to get you on my email list to send emails to you to communicate. I can get you on my newsletter. "Hey, thank you for coming. Would like to tell you about the specials we have next month. We'd like to tell you about what we actually offer, why we stand apart from our competitors."
Michael: Anything else you want to put together in your messaging, in your marketing copy or messaging and I had to send it to ... if you left me your phone number, I could call you. If you left me your email, I could send you email. If you left us your mailing address, I could mail to you. Unless I had some direct way of contacting and building my list, then I couldn't communicate with you. With retargeting, it allows us to set up things and pay Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter ... I don't know if LinkedIn does it yet or not and what it allows us to do is it allows us to say, "I can pay those people to send these ads specifically and only to people who've been at my website."
Michael: Now the power of that allows us to step into repetition and relevance. Repetition and relevance, these are core aspects of any marketing campaign because we are wired to ignore things that aren't going to ever impact our life again or aren't relevant to the situation at hand. If I hear a siren on the street and immediately I start looking around to see where's that siren. Is it coming up from behind me? Is it coming down the street? Is it coming to the intersection? Do I need to pull over? When I realize that it has nothing to do ... it's not coming in my direction or I can see it in my rear view mirror and it's going the other way, it no longer is relevant to my driving situation and I move on with my day. I ignore it and go on back to my conversation by driving whatever I was doing. I can't tell you the last moment or the last scenario when I describe the scenario where I heard a siren. I know in the last five days I've heard three or four sirens.
Michael: I don't know where they were because there was no frequency to it. There's no repeated frequency. That doesn't stick in your mind. So, frequencies and relevance is super important. Then if it happens over and over again with the same message, then that starts to stick in my mind and when you have let's say 5,000 people a month coming to your website and those people are checking out your website and they're saying, "I want to look and then I'm going to leave." You just know they came and visited because you can see the analytics but you don't know who they are. Well, how are you ever going to get repetition? How do you get them to come back? How do you get them to pay attention again?
Michael: With this tool of retargeting, we can now send ads and be in front of people and create that frequency because we know that you've ... if you came to my website, you voted at some level, at some even minor, minor level you said, "This is somewhat interesting to me, somewhat relevant to me." Now you may decide that it's not, but what we have seen with this type of frequency and everything else is you can increase your responsiveness for creating leads or customers by anywhere from 50% to 300% or 400%.
Kathryn: Ultimately the goal would be to take those people who visited but haven't left you information to a place where they visit again and leave you their information so you can begin being more specific about what it is that you're trying to get them to do to move them into your email marketing campaign for example.
Michael: So, let's use a common term for people [inaudible 00:09:12] what's your funnel like? So, whether if you sell products you have a sales funnel although you may not have defined it well or clearly or articulately or it may just be like well they walk in and they look at it and they buy. To lead generation where you know that whatever you sell takes a while for people to consider, they consider different options and you would like to get them in for a conversation, so what you want to generate is conversation. You want to generate a lead, somebody who's interested and would like to talk to you. In that sales process, I need to make sure that I'm communicating. So, what I'm saying is this type of retargeting allows me to engage that and move them down my sales funnel more, right?
Michael: I get to move them one more step towards them considering ... and here's the way the sales process works, right? We talk about this all the time in Half a Bubble Out is somebody starts with they don't know they have a problem and they don't know that there's a solution. They don't know there's a problem. Sometimes the sales process, the marketing process articulates to somebody you actually have a problem or a need that you weren't aware of. Now, sometimes that need comes up because all of a sudden I just saw the cool new XXX car and I didn't know it existed or the cool new Mac product. I didn't know it existed and now I have a need for it. We would-
Kathryn: I cannot live without it. I must have this.
Michael: I cannot live without that. If you're a tech geek or a car geek or whatever or a shoe fanatic, all of a sudden, there are these shoes. I was living fine without them and I walked into that store and I saw it, now I cannot live without those shoes. So, if that's the case, you became aware of a need. Marketing and sales oftentimes marketing and advertising can help you be aware of the need. Then somewhere you become aware of a need. You need a new employee. You need leads. You need something in your company. You need more revenue. You have a need. So, how are you going to solve that? So, if you want more leads or more customers, you're going to potentially either do more marketing or you're going to call a company like Half a Bubble Out and we're going to sit down and say, "Okay, what is your need?" You're going to say, "I need more customers and not enough people know about me. We're the best secret out there."
Michael: We're going to say, "Okay. Well, it sounds like you have a need. Let's talk about it if we can help you fill that need and we talk about that." Every time we step into one of those next phases of now you know you have a need, now you want to solve that problem. It may be a need where you assess it and you go, "It's not a big enough need." So, you know you want to solve it and then you know you're going to start looking for a company that can help you. When you start talking to Half a Bubble Out or somebody and some other companies, we want you to know that A we're worth talking to because we can help you solve that problem, and then we want to talk about the fact that we have the experience. Then we want you to consider us as a solution to your problem and then we want you to choose us over the multiple organizations you had to solve that. That's that sales funnel, right?
Michael: Now I know it sounds maybe a little mundane to be talking and describing about the pieces, but unless we articulate the pieces, we don't understand the power of retargeting, because now when so much is done online, when 60% to 70% of a sales process now happens online before they talk to a salesperson, when e-commerce is so huge that we buy tons ... as the human race, we buy a tremendous amount of product without ever talking to a human being. Amazon actually accounts for 34% of all sales online. As far as I know, I've never talked to somebody who said, "How can I help you, sir?" at Amazon. It doesn't exist. Even when you're doing business with them, it doesn't really exist.
Kathryn: Even when you really need to talk to somebody, it don't really exist.
Michael: So, at each stage of this process, wouldn't it be wonderful if I could had some control over what their messaging was and retargeting allows it. We haven't even stepped into strategy for retargeting that which I want to talk about today at a high level. What do you think about that, Kathryn? What do you think the obvious questions are in the midst of-
Kathryn: Well, what I think you're saying then if I'm hearing you right is that there's this sales funnel that you're trying to get people into where either they don't know you exist and they're doing research and they discover you exist to moving them down into considering potentially the solutions that you're offering towards conversation towards a decision. This retargeting piece is really taking those folks who are a little bit more cold. They're not really a warm audience but they visited your website. They've shown at least a speck of interest and it is an opportunity to actually move them into your sales funnel which didn't use to exist and if they didn't give you their information. Now we have mechanisms and methodologies and technology that allows us to actually create a strategy to reach those people even if they didn't leave you information, which from a user can feel a little Big Brother and a little creepy, right?
Michael: Absolutely.
Kathryn: Like, "Oh my gosh." From a marketing perspective, that's exactly what we want to try and do is make sure that when somebody shows interest, that we remind them of our existence and of the problem that we're solving.
Michael: Yeah. It's important. Let's talk about that attitude of Big Brother for a moment and all that perspective because it can ... if this is brand new to you, this sounds really creepy and maybe even Machiavellian.
Kathryn: 1984.
Michael: It's that idea that sign up for ... you come to a store. It used to be you sign up for their drawing and now they can put you on their mailing list. Well, they know it's good for their business because they keep top of mind and there's a couple of things that really successful marketers, salespeople and business people think about, couple of attitudes that I think are worth talking about. One is not that assuming that buyers are actually intelligent people, instead of just mindless fools, I think it's really helpful because we realize that there's times when I say no to a salesperson and it's not because I don't ... or somebody who's introduced a topic. "Do you want solar?" "No, I don't want solar."
Michael: Do I really want solar? Do I really not want solar? Well, I'm open to it. I'm learning. What I don't want is a high pressure conversation, but I do want somebody to consider me, ask me questions, not try and push me and force me down their funnel but be helpful and I want them to continue to come up with a relevant conversation. I would love it if most companies would find out why I ... why their product or service would be helpful to me and establish if it is and then be able to communicate to me why they think their product or service would help my business, would help me achieve my goals in my life. What I find is a lot of times people don't ever care and listen.
Michael: Okay, why am I saying this? Here's the assumption for a business person. That people actually when they say no, they don't always mean no.
Kathryn: Sometimes they mean not yet. Sometimes they mean I need more information.
Michael: Sometimes they mean I need you to show that this is more relevant to me and you have to do that. Now, another thing that happens is people, we are all ... many of us are busy and there's times when you don't get me to call you back and when you don't get me to respond in an email or something and I'm not talking about cold calling where people just are hammering me and they're strangers. I'm talking about people who have some kind of a relationship with me at some level. They're saying ... they're calling and I'm not getting back to them because they want to sell me a service, another service or something like that.
Michael: Air conditioning repair people are perfect example. They want my air conditioner in here to work at home but they call for servicing twice a year and they may have to call me four or five times because I don't get the phone at the right time. I get the message after their closed. I forget to call and if they can call ... and I want them to call me five or six or seven times until they connect. I don't want them give up because I really want that service. I just can't seem to remember to connect it in my daily schedule. I believe that that repetition when people ... when we're going into a repetition mode like retargeting, if you just start to believe, people aren't saying no or saying not yet.
Kathryn: So, there's a mentality about it. That's what you're saying.
Michael: A total mentality, a mindset, right? Okay. So, here's how we use retargeting as a tool now that you know that you kind of there's this piece of code on your website. It's very simple to put on, very easy and then it tracks it. Then you can have Facebook tracking you or Google tracking your website and helping you tell you how many people came and how many people are registered in of those social medias. What happens is now I can set it up so that I can figure out what page you came to. Was it just my website or was it to a specific page or product? Did you come to my service page? Our second most popular page on our website is our services page. Which service are you looking at? Are you looking at advertising? Are you looking at business consulting? Are you looking at coaching?
Michael: If I knew and I do to some extent, but if we had set it up where we were building it out that much, then you could come and say, "Well, I visited your coaching page." So, now what I start to show you is coaching ads and start to talk about the value of coaching, the benefit we bring at coaching and everything else. I classify people as cold, warm and hot. So, cold people have never been to our website and that's where I may just buy ads on YouTube or Facebook just to get people to come to our website. I may point them to a blog, a content or something like that, so that they just start to get aware of our company and get aware of some of our helpful materials, our information, maybe even come listen to a podcast. That's cold.
Michael: Once they show up, I have that trigger so I can see and I never send those people the same type of ads again, but now they're warm. They visited. Now the next thing I want them to do is I want to nurture them so I can move them one more step down my sales funnel so that they're inclined to leave their email for a piece of information that we have on our website or they want to call us to find out more information. That's warm. Then what we do is we believe that those couple stages of warm, because warm is they've been to our site but that's lukewarm. Really warm is they've asked for something and they've given us their email. What we found is when this happens, we can actually give content that's much more relevant to the visitor. We increase our percentage of people that are connecting. We increase our percentage of leads, increase our percentage of customers because of this and we do that for ourselves and for our clients.
Kathryn: So, the more that you are able to from the get go, from the moment somebody visits your website, the more than you're able to give them through this retargeting content that is specific to what they're looking at, the better chance you have of converting those people. Higher percentage of this people will actually end up coming back and beginning to move through your funnel.
Michael: Absolutely. So, imagine this. Let's talk about real numbers. They say that on average 98% of all people who visit our website generically on average across the internet never come back to our website. They visit once, they look, they leave, there's nothing there to engage them enough, they go away, 98%.
Kathryn: 98%.
Michael: So, if I can send you ... if you've looked at certain things and I can send you ads, the potential for you to think about that product or service or think about filling that need or maybe you're thinking, "Do I really have a need? Is it a big enough need?" I can continue to trigger you to think about that a little bit more. If it's a real need and you're really seriously looking at our service or product, then we could say, "Hey, we're here for you." Because, I want to be there with our solution in your time of need. So, if I can do that and I can be more specific, then if 98% of the people never come back, that means only 2% people come back to my website on average.
Michael: If I can increase that by 1%, I just increased the traffic to my website, the returning traffic to my website 50% just by 1% and that 2%. I'm telling you, what? Those 1% and 2% and 3% are completely possible to get. This could easily move you to doubling your revenue in three years. These kind of techniques, they're not tricks. These kind of secrets, these kind of tricks, we're talking that comes from another podcast we did on trigger words but these type of ideas and techniques are really useful to drive it.
Michael: When you start driving more people into your funnel and then you are strategically helping more people that have a need for what you have, then you start moving them down your funnel and then you get more opportunity to have a conversation and quite frankly, most sales it's, how quickly can you get somebody to have a conversation with you through online chat, through a phone call, through an email, how can you have drive through conversation so that you can better understand their needs and see if your solution is a good fit for them. That's what we're talking about with retargeting.
Michael: Hopefully by now you're starting to realize, "Well, we've been doing stuff like this in forms for a long time, but this is a whole new level with internet marketing and it's really powerful." People will say well ... none of my customers are on Facebook. Well, there's 1.5 billion active users, active being they're on once a month, and the people over 50 are the still for the last several years the most active and growing population.
Kathryn: So, your people actually are on Facebook. They really are.
Michael: Your customer really are.
Kathryn: You just have to believe it.
Michael: If the leader isn't on Facebook, if that customer isn't on Facebook, I guarantee you that a significant influencer in their life is because I have met ... when I poll leaders, I get plenty of people who go, "Do you have a Facebook?" "Yes, I have a Facebook." "Are you active on it?" "No." "Is your spouse?" "Yes."
Kathryn: Which is why I don't have to be because he shows me everything that matters.
Michael: Right? What happened last week, oh this happened on Facebook, that happened on Facebook. I don't go looking but they go look and it's men and women both. I've seen it across the board. I had one executive woman that was in our office or we were in their office and I asked ... she was one woman in the leadership staff, head of HR and she said, "I am not active on social media, but my husband is active a lot." Her husband was a chef and he was especially active on Pinterest. So, these places are places where even if they're not doing business on Facebook, even if they're not doing business stuff on YouTube, the fact that you could reach them because even in their social time you can have impressions for them and be much more strategic. That's really valuable.
Michael: Kathryn, I wanted to really just talk about this. Make sure that our listeners today were educated on this and talk more. Is there anything else you want to talk about with retargeting ads just so they're educated about it?
Kathryn: Yeah. I think it's like a need. It's like any new ... and this is not a brand new obviously. Retargeting is brand for a little bit but in the world of marketing, the opportunity and the technology to do this has really grown. If I'm a business leader and I'm getting terms thrown at me, one of the questions I'm asking is, "How important is that?" So, we just want to be able to say, "You know what? If you aren't investing in retargeting and actually trying to optimize the traffic that's coming to your website through retargeting, you're missing out on some opportunities." So, I think that's the biggest message of today is that if you see the term retargeting, remarketing, very important, very key way to begin to grab some of that swirling traffic that doesn't ever do anything and potentially move more of that traffic into actual conversations down the line. So, that's the point of retargeting.
Michael: Yeah. If you're not using retargeting or you're not using it well, you're leaving money on the table.
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: Yeah. There's money that could be yours that you're just walking away from. That's that valuable and that important. So, it's important to be educated. It's important to have a partner or vendor with your organization that's helping you figuring out the best strategies and ways to use that.
Kathryn: Well and realize that part of the question usually on something like this is, "Is it expensive?" You can spend as much or as little as you want but you should be investing something.
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: You can sell limits. You can test it, but you just need to be setting aside some of your marketing budget for retargeting.
Michael: Well and what percentage of that? We can't tell you. It's really you've got to start with, do you have a marketing budget? A lot of clients that walk in to Half a Bubble Out, I'd say a good half of them walk in without any marketing budget at all. They don't know what their marketing budget is. They want to figure out how do it. Another set of folks, they have a budget. They're just not sure if it’s the right amount and if it’s being well spent. You need to understand you start there and there is no hard and fast answer except for you should be ... it's a good thing to be using and doing and then you just need a partner, a vendor like Half a Bubble Out who's going to have the discussion with you and talk about how it works in your B2C or B2B organization and are you selling a product or you selling services and do you need leads or are you just selling the product, do you have salespeople involved. Either way, all of those situations are useful for retargeting.
Michael: So, hopefully, that was helpful today. Today was really a definition of a term that's becoming more and more thrown around and we want to make sure you're equipped and educated on it and understood more. If you'd like to know more information, please go to our website halfabubbleout.com. Go to the show notes page for today's blog. You can put comments there and respond. You can go to Half a Bubble Out's Facebook page and talk about today's podcast. That would be great. Then if you'd like to give us a call and contact us and talk to us, please send us an email at info@halfabubbleout.com or go to our website, fill out a form or call us.
Michael: I think that's it for today. It's a lot of education. Hopefully, this has been helpful and you've appreciated it. I'm Michael Redman.
Kathryn: And, I'm Kathryn Redman.
Michael: This is HaBO Village Podcast. Have a great week.
Kathryn: Bye-bye.
