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Find Your Happy Place

Let me be clear that the purpose of this blog is to educate. I really don’t use my blog as a sales tool to attract new clients but as the owner of a digital ad agency in Phoenix I do have to write a self-serving piece relative to what we do every so often to keep my digital manager happy.

Here’s his comment on last month’s blog that I wrote about ZOOM … “that’s a clever blog Ed, but it won’t get us any new clients.”

Offence taken. I would like to think that I was able to passively/aggressively offend the Chinese government while also motivating at least a handful of you to stop using golf course backgrounds on your calls.

Who doesn’t want to hire an agency that can do that?

Sorry, I digress. Back to the blog du mois … (that’s French, not a typo).

Let’s pretend that you have a business and you realize that you need to market said business. You hire some ne’er-do-well ad agency (not us) to create an ad campaign. Could be digital, could be traditional or as we like to do here at ReThinc Advertising, it could be both … doesn’t matter.

The goal of the campaign is to acquire new customers for your business by sending them to your website to purchase your new product offering.

The agency comes up with great creative, negotiates great placement on media, finds relevant sites for a digital display campaign, geo targets, makes social media magic happen, and even sends you a $100 gift card good at any Sam Fox restaurant.

The campaign launches and subsequently fails.

What went wrong?

There are a lot of important pieces to a well thought out and executed ad campaign. The ne’er-do-well agency executed all of them except one of the more commonly overlooked (yet critical) components to ANY ad campaign.

The landing page, or as we sometimes call here at ReThinc … the Happy Place.

Before we go any further, let’s make sure everyone understands that a “landing page” is the specific page on the website you are sending traffic to with your ad campaign. It’s the destination for your CTA (that’s not French … it’s ‘call to action’ in agency acronym lingo).

Let’s also go on to say, that the reason I capitalized ANY was to drive home the fact that both digital and traditional ad campaigns with a CTA that directs consumers to a website must take that consumer to a page relative to the message in the ad. In other words, don’t serve me an ad for a really awesome fly rod only to have me click on it and land on your home page where I then have to search for said fly rod.

Are you paying attention Orvis?

Yes, brands both big and small make this mistake all the time. It compromises their results, impedes the sale, frustrates the consumer, and potentially wards off the acquisition of a new customer. The time it takes a consumer to be served an ad to the time that consumer takes action is critical. If you send them somewhere that slows them down you’ve lessened the efficacy of your campaign.

You don’t have to be radio genius Jim Knapp to make the argument that traditional media typically casts a wider net and it’s therefore acceptable that your message lacks the specificity that you may get with a digital campaign. But, you still will benefit from making sure any CTA in a radio,TV or billboard campaign is readily showcased on the website a consumer may visit to learn more or perhaps even execute the purchase.

My digital manager is a stickler for making sure we are sending people who engage our campaigns to a page on a website that is highly-relevant to the ad they’ve engaged with. Even something as simple as spring training has a multitude of ads speaking to specific audiences in the ways that are most convincing for them to take action. When they do, they land on a page relevant to the ad that was served to them. As much as it creates more work for us as the ad agency it fosters greater success for our clients and keeps people from referring to us as that ne’er-do-well agency over on 44th St.

As a business owner your happy place is when you get a good return on your marketing investment. For us, it’s a well designed, properly optimized page on your site that immediately provides the pertinent information that a consumer is showing interest in. We’ve built plenty of happy places in the past 12 years we’ve been in business. Let us know if we can build one for you.

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