INBOUND 2015 HTT: Niti Shah "How To Use Paid Retargeting to Nurture Leads"

I'm glad you guys are all here for the last one. Hopefully I can keep you energized right before the end of the, you know, before the end of the conference, before we go to the keynote. So, like Lauren said, I did paid retargeting and lead nurturing. I've sort of come from the organic side. And so I was a big skeptic when it came to paid, but found a way to make it work and make it very inboundy. So that's what I want to talk to you about today. I'm just going to skip this one except that I want to let you guys know that I am going to become a pro surfer. I'm not very good right now, and if you want, you can follow me. Eethifromboston. So the first thing I want to do is go through the basics. What is paid retargeting? Raise your hands if you know what paid retargeting is. I would hope so since you're in this session. But, you know, there's also people that are looking to learn that and move past just lead gen for paid ppc. So I just want to make sure we cover all our bases. Then I want to talk about how retargeting works in the funnel. How do you actually do it start to finish? How is it like inbound marketing, but just on different channels? And obviously you have to put money behind it. Then we're gonna just talk through some tips and tricks to optimize your campaigns. These are little hacks that we've learned along the way. And as long as you check these boxes off, you'll be at minimum, you know, just like the minimum place you need to be just to have a successful campaign. And if you can just remember to do those things, it gives you time to actually innovate and try new things. And the last thing I'm gonna talk about are two hacks that we recently did at Hubs that helped us take our retargeting to the next level, and we wanted to share it with you. Hello, stragglers. Just kidding. Hi. Okay, so the basics. First of all, were any of you thinking, why is there a paid session at an inbound marketing event? That's my reaction when I was like, wait, you're gonna make me do paid retargeting? I do email marketing. I nurture leads down the funnel using marketing automation. Why am I doing paid? How is this part of my job? But it's not this. It's not some gimmicky ad. It could be ugly but we're going to talk about how to not make it ugly. But, you know, we're not talking about like shitty paid. We're talking about retargeting, which is, you know, something that actually is human and it's something that makes sense. It's not going to interrupt your day. So here's a scenario. Let's say we have Lauren. Lauren's boss recently told her, hey, Lauren, I want you to start doing some paid advertising. Why don't we try Facebook? I notice there's a lot of following there and I'm seeing that a lot of people are liking our organic posts. So Lauren goes ahead and she looks up the basics. How do I Facebook retarget? What should I be doing? But then after a little bit, she gets more advanced, right? She wants to know, how does targeting work? What should I be looking for? And so she goes to Google, like all of us do, and you know, she types in targeting and distribution Facebook ads. So she chose a long tail keyword in this case, which was lucky for us. And she clicks on the first, she clicks on the first link and it's about revenue, targeting and distribution. And she goes over to the HubSpot blog and you know, at this point Lauren's like, okay, cool. She starts reading it, takes a couple notes, maybe flips around and goes to a couple other articles on the stream and then realizes it's lunchtime and she leaves no conversion. She did not click the subscribe button on the top. She did not bite the subscribe pop up. That came up for a second, nothing. Have we lost her forever? Damn it, Lauren, come back. So here's what we could do, right? We don't have her email address. How are we going to reach out to her? Maybe she follows us on social. But let's just take it a step further and maybe reach her where she is during her lunch break or after work or during work, depending on how your company is. So let's see. Hey, Lauren, saw you're on Facebook and that you were looking up stuff about Facebook. So why don't I give you an ad that's related to that? So because I knew Lauren was looking at my blog post that was about Facebook, I grabbed it from the URL. It had that keyword in it. So now I can retarget her. And she's like, oh, well, that's interesting. I was just thinking about that. But maybe she's not ready to download a whole offer. So we could take a step back. Why don't we say, hey, Lauren, I see you're on Twitter, why don't you hit one button and we'll subscribe you to our blog. Right? Because now we can email her and get her more engaged. See what I did there? I'm using retargeting to just put people into an inbound funnel. I'm supplementing inbound with outbound methodology traditionally, but in an inboundy way. So we're just going to say retargeting is inbound from now on because paid retargeting is just like any sort of nurturing, right? You're serving relevant ads on external channels to people who are already engaged with your brand. Lauren came in, she went to my blog and so when she gets an ad, she's like, oh yeah, I like that content. Maybe they have more useful stuff. So that's what you're trying to do. You're building a relationship in places where you normally can't get. But in the reality of today, people just have the attention of my favorite Harry Potter quote, you know, like a teaspoon. So like here it is and there it's gone. And Lauren's so busy with her day that she's not going to have time. But if we could just remind her and nudge her a little bit, she'll come back to us. So where do you retarget your audience? You can do it two different ways. You have a couple of social media platforms, so we have Facebook and Twitter right now. And then you also have display banner ads on third party sites. So raise your hands if any of you have heard of Google Remarketing or Adroll Retargeter. Good, good. So there's a bunch of different places, there's a bunch of different companies that do it. And depending on what your needs are, usually you'll end up picking it or I hope it's not just whatever's cheapest. So either way, you basically have a couple different ways of getting in front of your audience. And what I want to talk about is when do you use each one and which ones do you decide to use? Because you're going to have a limited budget and you have to figure out what you want to do with it and where to put that money? Because that's the thing that's a little bit different. Right. As inbound marketers, we have to worry about allocating our resources in terms of time. But with paid, there's an extra pressure to get the money aspect. Right. So you do really want to think about where am I putting my money, where am I going to get the Biggest ROI for my goals. So let's talk about that. The first one we want to talk about is Facebook. There's a couple different places you can put it, right? You can put it on your desktop and this is great. It has the best cost per click metrics. Just because it's the biggest ad, its size does matter and you do need to get in front of people. But it can be more expensive or it can seem that way, but you're going to get more clicks. So if you're trying to go for conversions, you know you're gonna go there. Now you also have a mobile newsfeed, which I did not include in the screenshot, but you know you're scrolling on the app. If you're trying to get somebody to fill out an 11 form lead gen, like an 11 line lead gen form like we do, you don't want to send them there on mobile. They're just gonna bounce right back. So think about that next step before you do an ad. Right. Where am I sending them based on that? Work backwards and choose your ad. And the last one is the desktop right column. So these have high impressions but low clicks. If you're going for brand awareness or maybe you want to say, my company just won this award or here, read some third party reviews. Over time that can build an impression. But again, usually as marketers we try to solve for that ROI that's more measurable and you will be able to do that more probably with conversions. But just wanted to put it out there in case any of you are really trying to build your brand. Next, we have Twitter. Now, Twitter is a faster medium, right? How long does a tweet stay in a little mobile stream? Not very long at all. We're going to go through it maybe on our way to work, maybe in between even meetings, depending on how addicted to Twitter we are. So there's a couple ways you can make it blend into the right hands, right? You can choose the devices to show your ad. So there are some devices based on what your sophistication of the audience is. That wouldn't work. We personally don't really go for Windows Phones, sorry. If anyone here has it, we choose.