If you're not using your paid media in more creative ways than simply targeting customers at the buying stage, you've got a world of opportunity awaiting you. In today's Whiteboard Friday, we're delighted to have guest presenter Samantha Noble divulge 10 strategies for using your paid media to get your customers talking about you more and recommending you often.

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Video Transcription

Hi, my name's Samantha Noble, and I'm the Director of Strategy over at Koozai in the UK. We're a digital marketing agency specializing in paid media, SEO, and content marketing, and I'm really, really excited to be here today to share with you some tips on how we can use paid media to basically drive loyal customers and get those loyal customers recommending us to others.

I think what I've seen over the years, when it comes to paid media, is people tend to focus on the buying stage. They think that they're going to put money into a paid media channel and they're going to get return out of it, which is essentially true. But, when it comes to using paid media for loyalty and advocacy, it's something that I don't tend to see very often, and there's lots of stuff that we can do.

So over the next sort of 8 minutes or so, we're going to look at 10 different strategies. So it's five for loyalty and five for advocacy. And I'm hoping to be able to share with you some ideas and some inspiration that you can take away and use with the new paid media campaigns. So let's get started.

Loyalty

To start with, let's look at loyalty, and the first thing that we're going to look at is...

1. Use remarketing lists for search ads (RLSAs) to bid on competitor names

So let's say we've got a customer that has been with you time and time again or even they might have just bought from you once. If they then go back to Google and search for a competitor, you can then start displaying ads to that particular customer, at that moment in time, to try and encourage them to remain a loyal customer of yours by including a unique discount in the advert. So this really works well if the competitor names that you're using aren't trademarked. Otherwise, you will come up with a few sticky situations there that may not work. So it's worth looking to see whether you can try it or not. But it's a great way of trying to capture people at the stage when they may potentially be looking to go off and buy from a competitor.

2. Unique discounts within your search ads

So in the same way that we were talking about remarketing lists for search before, you can do this by either uploading a list of email addresses, so your CRM database of customers, or as a remarketing list for search ads, so your remarketing list of your existing customers. Now, when they go and search, again, for any of your other products or services that you could do, you can start to show them unique offers within the ads to say, "Hey, as a loyal customer, you get an extra 10% off if you buy a second purchase from us." So again, this can work really, really well to drive loyalty.

3. Dedicated landing pages

If you've got a customer that comes into a store that you know they come to you every single week and they buy from you time and time again, you're not going to greet them necessarily in the same way as what you would a first-time customer that you're not aware of. And this should be the same when it comes to search advertising. So, if you've got a unique customer that's bought from you time and time again, why not show them a landing page, when they land on the site, that is targeted to them, that's talking in a language that shows that you're talking to them as a loyal customer rather than as a first-time buyer? So again, you can do this with customer match lists or with remarketing lists for search.

4. Countdown ads with time-sensitive deals

So countdown ads are the ads where you see time is ticking down if there's a unique offer that's going to expire in, say, a weeks' time. If you've got a customer that's bought from you once and you want to try and encourage a repeat purchase, why not show them a limited-time offer, so that it's saying, "Look, if you buy from us a second time within the next week, month, two months..." whatever it is that you want to put in there, and show the offer is ticking down, this can create a real sense of urgency and drive people to buy from you and make a second purchase.

5. Remarketing to cross-sell or upsell to customers

This works really well if you've got a product or a service that people can buy from you again, or it might be that you've got a product — so let's say a mobile phone provider as an example. Somebody might have bought a mobile phone. The next logical purchase for that particular customer could be that they're looking to get a cover or a case for that phone. If you know that somebody's bought a particular model or make of a phone, why not start following them around with remarketing ads, highlighting the fact that you also sell covers and cases? This can be a really good way of driving extra loyalty from people that have just bought from you.

The reason that I think it's important to consider loyalty, when it comes to paid, is there was a study done via Access Development, that basically shows that 80% of customers would actually consider switching brands or stores if they were offered the right compelling discount. So I think that's just really, really important to remember that even though you've worked hard to gain a customer, they can still leave you and go to a competitor.

Advocacy

So, moving on from here, let's look at some ways that we can use advocacy, and what I mean by advocacy is you've got a loyal customer base. You've spent all this money and time and resource growing that audience. What we want to do now is help them to market you, help them to do that word-of-mouth marketing and actually recommend you to others. And there are five ways that we're going to look through in terms of how we can drive advocacy using paid media.

1. Gmail ads

Gmail ads are really good if you are using them and targeting them at the right people. And I've seen this work really well if you're trying to promote like forward to a friend discounts. So if you've got a list of all your customers, whether it's again a remarketing list or a customer matched list of email addresses, upload those. When those particular customers are looking at their emails on Gmail and they're not using a business Gmail account, and they're in the Promotions tab, they can see various ads at the top. So you're typically seeing two ads at the moment at the top of Gmail.

And in here, what we can do is we can show an advert that's saying, "Hey, as a loyal customer of ours, why not recommend us to others?" You can show them and you can give them a unique discount code to pass on to their friends or family. So you can do this and try and encourage people, when they're opening up that ad, you can make it look like a nice HTML advert, a nice HTML page, and try and drive them to say, "Hey, forward this discount on to a friend, and your friends or family can benefit from this unique offer," that we're offering to them.

2. Remarketing for reviews

So similar to what we were talking about before, in terms of using remarketing to generate upsells and cross-sells, you can also do remarketing to try and encourage your existing audience base to go and leave a review of your product or service. And whether that's on your own website or whether you're using a third-party review site, if you are using a third-party review site, I'd recommend that you make sure that it's a site that Google can aggregate that data from, because that's going to come on to the seller ratings that we're going to look at next. But you can follow people around saying, "Hey, how did you find your experience with us? What was your product like? What was the service like?" And try and encourage them to go and leave you a review so that other people can then experience what your existing customer base had kind of experienced from their product or service they've purchased from you.

3. Seller ratings

So seller ratings are the ads where you see the stars in the listings, and these can be really, really good especially if your competitors aren't doing this. There is a stipulation. I think it's 120 reviews you need in the past 12 months, so you need to make sure that you're getting reviews frequently enough. But Google will then aggregate that data and pool that within your search ads. And as I say, if your competitors aren't doing it and you are, and you're seeing that you've got a four or a five-star rating, that really entices people to click through and it gives that sense of, "Yeah, they're a good company to buy from, so I'm going to go and investigate them more."

4. Gmails ads – cashback sites – referral scheme

If you've got a recommend-a-friend scheme or refer-a-friend scheme that you're wanting to try and promote, people that are signed up to recommend-a-friend-type schemes are kind of looking to get something in exchange for what they're doing. So the idea here is what you can do is you can upload a load of cashback site domains. So it could be all of the different cashback sites in a particular niche or just the cashback sites that you want to go after. Upload all of those as keywords, and if somebody is receiving an email from a cashback site, your ad can say at the top, "Hey, we've got this great refer-a-friend scheme. You can earn money for doing X, Y, and Z with us." So it's a way of tapping in to not necessarily your existing customer base, but trying to tap in to a new audience and get them referring you to others as well, and this can work really, really well.

5. Reviews + testimonials on landing pages

Final idea that we've got here is making sure that the same, what we were talking about before, about using dedicated landing pages for our loyal customers, what we also want to do on the landing pages for new customers that are coming into a site, is make sure that we're talking about testimonials from our existing customer base, making sure that we put the reviews on there. People buy from people. I'm hearing the term "human-to-human" bandied around a lot recently. So rather than B2C, B2B, it's H2H. And this is really, really important because people do buy from people, and people like to feel that the product or service that they're buying has helped somebody else or somebody else has enjoyed that particular product. So making sure that you're using reviews and testimonials on landing pages can really help boost your conversion rate.

Now the reason that advocacy is really important, again, another study that was done via Bright Local, this basically shows that 92% of people that they surveyed said that they regularly read online reviews. So it's really important, in this day and age, that we focus on driving reviews and getting our existing customers to recommend us to others.

So, as I said, there's lots of other ways that we can use paid media to target loyalty and advocacy, and I'd love to hear what you guys are doing, what other ideas have worked for you, what strategies have worked well for you. If you can leave those in the comments below, that will be fantastic. If you've got any questions or you want to run anything past me, then you can get me on my Twitter handle, which is @samjanenoble, and thank you very, very much for having me on Whiteboard Friday.

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