There Is No Excuse for Wasting Impressions

Nothing frustrates me more than hearing clients describe the campaigns their previous digital
marketing firm ran on their behalf. There was certainly a time when saturating zip codes or geo
fenced areas with things like email, mobile display, social media, or other display campaigns
made sense. The data was simply not available to target any better than that. I get it.

To do so today is either lazy or reveals the inability of marketing firms to keep up with the
technology available to them. These types of campaigns waste a huge amount of impressions.
Instead of using the same budget to drive multiple impressions into an audience likely to buy,
they hit people with no chance of ever converting. It simply doesn’t make any sense today. The
fact is, there are no products or services that appeal to an entire area.

Let me offer a case study. We have an HVAC client that sells into dozens of markets. Each
market has a different demographic and a different mix of homeowner vs renter make up. Their
previous digital firm saturated every zip code with messaging using social media and mobile
saturation/display campaigns. To blanket the area and hit enough of the right people, they had to
deliver millions of impressions. We will call the cost basis for this “X”.

When we took over, we identified homeowners with houses at least ten years old. We delivered
hundreds of thousands of impressions to reach these people. We will call this cost basis “Y”. So,
in the X model, they’ve hit people who rent their home or apartment, people who live with their
parents, people who have just travelled to the area and a whole host of other people who have
zero interest or need for HVAC repair or replacement. Not to mention they’ve missed a lot of the
right people altogether. For most of those people, it doesn’t matter how slick our marketing is or
how strong of a call to action we use.

In the Y model, we’ve hit everyone who owns a home at least ten years old. We’ve been able to
deliver multiple impressions to each household and our conversion rate is much higher simply
due to the fact we are marketing to the right people. All the testing we’ve done is delivering
accurate analytics because we are gauging the response of homeowners only; not renters and the
like. Our campaign gets smarter, faster.

The best part of all of this is the fact the Y model costs a lot less than the X model AND delivers
more net conversions. Can you say ROI? We’ve mitigated a lot of the risk for the client since the
investment is less and moving forward, our campaign will only perform better and will become
predictable. To be clear, this is “Y” you hire a firm like Actionable Insights. We drive more
conversions for less money thus making the ROI on the campaign exponentially higher. There is
no waste and the ability to message a targeted audience for less money means your dollars are
spent wisely. While others talk about budget transparency, we’re busy talking about new revenue.