Consumer Marketing

Assessing Consumer Marketing Performance

When you work with Overdrive to achieve greater success in consumer marketing, our process starts with a comprehensive audit of your current marketing programs and their effectiveness. This includes asking and documenting answers to the following questions:

• For search and media programs:
  • Are you reaching the right people at the right time? Do you adequately understand the intent of your customers?
  • Are you covering the right content and keywords? Are your SEO and paid search programs hitting performance objectives?
  • Are you paying the right price? Do you have enough budget, and is it being optimally allocated?
  • Are you targeting the right devices? Are you using the right CTAs at each point in the customer journey, e.g., download/trial vs. contact vs. engagement?
• For your technology:
  • Is your tracking working? Are you effectively benchmarking performance?
  • Is everything else actually working? Are there glitches that might damage your brand, reputation, or media investment?
  • Is your marcom stack integrated? Do you have marketing automation in place, triggered events established, tags installed, APIs connected, and data fields aligned?
• Persuasion
  • Are you connecting prospects to the right landing pages and destinations?
  • Are you making it valuable, productive, and pleasurable for prospects to engage? Does your customer experience and content exceed consumer expectations?
  • Are you selling the conversation and encouraging sales escalation?
  • Where are the high impact opportunities for conversion rate optimization?
  • Are you building the brand through effective branding activities and demand generation?

With answers to these questions in hand, we can help you build strategy and plan tactics to significantly move the needle on consumer marketing metrics and success.

Essential Tactics for Consumer Marketing

With Overdrive, you’ll have access to a team of highly experienced consumer marketing experts who can help to shape your programs with proven tactics that may include many of the following recommendations.

• Optimize your most popular journeys first. Taking steps to increase conversion rates on the journeys your customers travel most often is the fastest way to increase revenue and ROI.
• Prioritize email marketing. Consumer marketing campaigns that prioritize email marketing have an 89% higher contribution to revenue versus campaigns that don’t.
• Personalize websites and email communications. Personalization is key to delivering a more pleasurable, targeted, effective customer experience.
• Use appropriate CTAs. The offers and calls-to-action that will appeal to someone at the top of the funnel who is just beginning their research are far different than a bottom-of-the-funnel consumer who is ready to buy. Early on, consumers may respond to informational videos and content, while later-stage prospects are more likely to want a demo or a discount.
• Focus on emotion. Consumers tend to make buying decisions based on their emotion and their gut. Messaging that touches on how it will feel to have, use, and enjoy a product are not only easier for consumers to remember, but more effective at conversion.
• Create urgency. Invoking the fear of missing out (FOMO) on a product, a discount or a deal is the best way to get consumers to act quickly.

Moving Toward Direct-to-Consumer Marketing

Many companies are considering the benefits of direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing, raising a whole new set of challenges for marketing teams. The ability to relate to customers from the beginning of their journey through the end enables companies to eliminate middlemen, build stronger relationships, and to focus on long-term relationships with loyal customers.

Here are several tactics that successful DTC companies are embracing:

• Give customers a voice. The direct relationship with customers in DTC marketing can work both ways. Enabling customers to post comments and ideas on a website about products and potential improvements not only provides a steady stream of valuable customer feedback but enables customers to feel more ownership of the brand and the products they engage with. You can gamify the experience with a leaderboard that features the names of consumers who have contributed the most ideas, comments, and likes.
• Champion a cause. Investing in a cause that is close to the hearts of your target audience is an excellent way to gain their attention, secure their loyalty, and let them know they have an affinity and a values connection with your product and company.
• Enable robust search on your website. Powerful search functionality on your site lets customers who know what they’re looking for find the right product easily, while letting you guide customers who are unsure of their preferences to the products that are most likely to appeal to them based on their search queries.
• Say it with video. Consumers love video – from product benefit videos to videos that show how to assemble or start using a product. Incorporating video increases both user engagement and conversions.
• Make the online shopping experience better than an in-store retail experience. From free shipping to virtual tools and augmented reality, the key to direct-to-consumer success is ensuring that customers don’t feel a need to visit a retail store in order to put their hands on a product or get the information in need.
• Generate review content. Consumers today rely on online reviews more than ever. Use tools that make it easier to collect and manage product reviews and seek out opportunities to put your products in front of high-profile reviewers.
• Track and optimize KPIs that are critical to direct-to-consumer marketing.Since DTC envelops the entire customer journey, your KPIs will need to do the same. Metrics that show where your customers are coming from, what they’re looking for, what engages them and what distracts or send them away will be critical to optimizing your DTC campaigns.