Our country is coming to grips with a kind of operational shutdown and lockdown that we have never seen before. Millions of Americans young and old are being advised and, in some cases, required to shelter in place for the time being. Restaurants are mandated in most states to only offer carryout dining options, while most other forms of “non-essential” businesses have been advised or required to shutter their operations until further notice. Needless to say, most small to medium-sized companies are confused about where to go from here for their brand and market strategy. No one could have possibly seen this coming, and now that we are here, it is time to come up with a plan and to execute.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Most of my conversations with clients have touched on several strategies for identifying and targeting specific audiences. This step is key when beginning a digital marketing campaign. The goal is to target users based on historical data that we can pull. No matter if your business focuses on B2B or B2C sales, our tool CADI can reach back in time 90 days or more when customer traffic and employee trends were more predictable. We can also cross-reference the report with your targeted job titles, company demographics, and all manner of identification metrics based on their mobile traffic and demographic properties. This allows us to build you an ideal client matrix that will focus on the kinds of users that are going to be beneficial for your business to focus on.
For B2B clients, you will want to focus on companies that meet your expected client verticals. At the same time, you can choose to narrow your user list down based on their likelihood to be a meaningful contact. All these decisions are based on the data that CADI can pull based on how prospects spend their time and whom their character profile deems them to be. The advantage to your business is that you can target specific job titles or levels of management.
For B2C clients, you can use CADI to reach back in time to the holiday shopping season when everyone was going to malls, restaurants, shops, etc. and grab actual foot traffic info. Just a couple of years ago, we wouldn’t have been able to dream of capturing this information after the fact without having known in advance. With the way that information is captured and stored now, we can use CADI to help to shape customer purchasing profiles and predictive analysis. From there, we build you a targeted list that is incredibly catered to your market and your desired consumer, not just everyone that walked down the street. In much the same way as we can for our B2B clients, we can build you an ideal client matrix based on that data. No matter if you are targeting high-end retail or discount shoppers, we can create a list around that for you to execute on with display ads that work across platforms.
Don’t Use a Single-Channel Approach
The most important thing to understand with this type of audience targeting is that it is not a platform-specific solution. It is not focusing solely on Facebook ads, Google Adwords, or any kind of single-channel approach. Platform-centric approaches aren’t going to be able to have as wide of reach as a solution like CADI. That’s because we can provide display ads that can reach any form of open network applications (i.e. Not Facebook or Twitter). Right now, you have a captive audience that is cooped up at home, working, and trying to live life as normally as possible. It is possible, and hopeful, that a worldwide stoppage will never happen like this again. People are going to continue to work. But, as I am sure you may be experiencing, we will all eventually be incredibly bored and much more susceptible to marketing than ever before. So, whether your business is currently operating or is waiting for the all-clear to resume business as usual, now is a great time to start building your brand awareness and create demand. Think about it this way, when we get out into the world again, I will need a haircut, some new clothes, and I am sure a litany of other products and services that we have all had to put on hold for the past month.
Moving Forward
The recovery from this will be exciting to see take shape. I hope that you and yours are taking great care to be safe and making the best of your time at home with loved ones. As I said earlier, the business implications are plain and simple. You have a captive audience at home doing their best to work through this incredibly trying time for our nation. Everyone is waiting with bated breath for our opportunity to return to normalcy. I, for one, cannot wait for all of my favorite “non-essential” businesses to re-open and the more essential businesses in our lives to resume regular operating hours. And gosh, I would really like a haircut.
Give Element 502 a call, and we can talk through your marketing plans for now and strategies for once we return to some form of routine. Because the truth is that we might be in for an incredible boom once we can all leave our homes and resume business as usual.
