How do you get new prospects and customers even when prospects are pulling back on spending?

Many CEOs, CMOs, and advertising managers are asking themselves this question for their marketing strategy.

My ad agency, CDMG, was asked to help a company with a very specific niche network, a cost-conscious, and skeptical audience with an older demographic.

The marketing challenge was how best to persuade and motivate a 65+ target demographic to get an app through digital marketing—with apps and online forms.

That’s where my creative team introduced the most advanced direct response strategy and tactics for the audience.

Our client, Family Radio, has a national radio network as its core product. They needed to build their database and product offerings and drive more response.

The Family Radio audience is a Christian audience, 65 and above.

Our Primary KPIs

• Generate more listeners with a new radio app
• Obtain an untapped user base outside of the current radio audience
• Setup tracking and tagging to be able to evaluate what works and what doesn’t work accurately

Our Strategy

To achieve these goals, we used a five-point strategic plan – five steps to succeed.

Step #1 — Use Advanced Direct Response Copy and Graphics

 Copy is the foundation of your marketing success.  But not any copy.

It’s not traditional ad copy.  Or editorial copy.  However, direct response copy has been proven to drive response.

You need to make sure your copy grabs your prospect’s attention, powerfully positions your company and product, identifies your unique selling proposition, and overcomes your prospect’s skepticism and objections.

Among other rules, your copy should: 

• Focus on one “big idea”… this is the unique advantage you are selling.
• Stress the benefits, not the features, of your product or service.
• Create urgency… your prospect must want to buy
• Approach the reader from a position of authority… people will only buy when they feel that they’re getting the best of what’s available.
• Zero in on reader action… your prospects need to act for you to sell.
• Vary paragraph lengths… keep paragraphs short, but make sure they’re not all the same length.
• Be preemptive. Address any fears or concerns about prices, stress discounts, and guarantees, and make a powerful, irresistible offer.

For some of our highest performing copy, we pushed the simple message of “Block out the noise and focus on God,” highlighting Family Radio as the best, comprehensive platform for spiritual connection, music, and community.

Again, realize that the list above is only a small sample of the essential rules and strategies for maximizing your copy’s performance.

For the complete list, please see my book, The New Multichannel, Integrated Marketing: 28 Trends For Creating A Multichannel, Integrated Campaign To Boost Your Profits Now. You can order it as a hard copy on Amazon or as an audiobook, or you can click HERE for a signed copy.

Step #2 — Create a Strong Landing Page

Your landing page is your foundation.  It is the place that you’ve fully curated to maximize interest and engagement.  A strong, succinct headline needs to be supported by a clear call-to-action and reinforced by direct response copy, graphs, images, and video.  Altogether, your prospect must believe that your product or service is the best thing for them and has great benefits.

Step #3 — Make the Most Out of Facebook Advertising

Facebook is one of marketers’ most powerful tools. Is every marketing director making the most of Facebook’s advertising platform?

For example, for Family Radio, we created four different types of prospective customer lists to target with our ads:

• Custom: Custom lists can be anything you upload, from a current customer list to inactive customers or new prospects. They’re yours to mold to your advantage. For Family Radio, we built the initial list using their database of listeners, Facebook followers, and newsletter subscribers.
• Look-Alike: Look-alike audiences are built off what the Facebook algorithm deems to be the best prospects based on their demographics, behavior, and databases. We used powerful new ads to drive engagement from a new audience.
• Retargeting: Retargeting is so important that it should not be skipped. These ads turn your curious prospects into customers and your one-time customers into loyal, long-term buyers.
• Affinity: Affinity audiences are prospects that do not fully meet your targeted demographic criteria but have overlapping interests that could translate into a significant lead or conversion.

Step #4 — Banner Ads and Native Ads

Banner and native ads can also serve as great tools to capture interest and sales.  They do have a few differentiating factors:

• These ads tend to have a more editorial slant, capitalizing on news, curiosity, and related “newsworthy” opportunities.
• Longer headlines usually provoke a greater response; they give prospects more ideas and angles to latch on to.
• Placement can be critical. Native ads are programmatically adjusted to fit the design and content of their host webpage, so be sure you are tracking allocation and performance closely.

Step #5 — Conversion Emails

Conversion emails are another game-changer that can do so much to generate sales.

• Affirming and strengthening your brand
• Re-inspiring your unique selling proposition (USP)
• Allowing our prospect to learn more about your product
• Reminding your prospect of the urgency of the opportunity and so much more.

A conversion series is a collection of emails that:

1) Use direct response copy and art

2) Are spaced properly apart

3) Are telling a story.

For Family Radio’s test, we created 3 emails.

Our Results

In our email conversion series, we hit an open rate of 29.7% and a click-through rate of 7.7%. That’s well above the industry standards of 25.17% and 2.79%, respectively.

In the case of our landing page for Family Radio, we were able to create a landing page that, over our small test campaign, counted over 53,000 visits, including 11,000 new users and 19,000 conversions. This was with an average viewing time of 29 seconds.

On Facebook, our affinity audience turned out to be our second-highest-performing targeted group for Family Radio, driving over 1000 conversions behind our Look-alike group, which delivered close to 4000 conversions.

Again, much of that success was predicated on our holistic, multichannel marketing approach.  In this case, every piece of every channel contributes to a larger funnel of brand significance and persuasion.

If you’d like to learn more about these strategies and how to implement them for your business, call us at 615-933-4647 or email Michael at [email protected].