It’s no longer simple to target your ideal audience. Rather than place a print ad or send a direct mail flyer, you have nearly limitless options to engage customers. And sometimes it can feel like screaming into a void. Is anyone out there? Can they hear you?
And not only that, but each advertising channel has its own ad guidelines, targeting options, and budget questions. It’s a lot to handle and manage, especially for small businesses.
Our team wanted to simplify this conundrum, so they developed a solution that lets businesses find and target their ideal audience no matter where they’re spending time online—all under one budget.
To better understand this solution and why it’s a game-changer for businesses, we talked with LocaliQ Senior Director of Product Stephanie Asrymbetov to get the inside scoop.
Your team develops and supports our engagement products. Can you tell us what engagement is and why businesses should care about it?
Engagement is all about driving meaningful interactions with potential customers who align with the business’s target audience.
Businesses should be very interested in driving engagement and creating more brand lift. As the web has evolved, the user journey has become much more fragmented, so it’s critical to meet users wherever they happen to be along the conversion pathway, create awareness of the business, and drive meaningful engagements along the way. This contributes to the effectiveness of the bottom-of-the-funnel campaigns, such as Google Ads, where you are really looking to convert users who may have been somewhat curious or interested previously and now are finally ready to pull the trigger and become a customer.
Why is cross-channel marketing so important for increasing customer engagement? What’s different about how LocaliQ does cross-channel marketing?
As mentioned, it’s critical to ensure that the business is being discovered everywhere a user could potentially be spending time, from social sites like Facebook and Instagram to YouTube, streaming channels like Hulu or Netflix, and other websites and blogs across the web.
LocaliQ works with businesses to determine who their target audience is and how to find them. Then, we build a strategy that deploys all of these display and video campaigns seamlessly with a single budget and leverage our AI-enabled Cross Media Optimization Technology to ensure we deliver optimal spend to the channels and tactics that are driving the most engagements from the highest-performing audiences.
Our automation enables us to constantly move budget to whatever channel is delivering the best results, so budgets are never stagnant in less effective channels and the campaign is fluid and efficient.
How does Brand Amplifier help business owners and what goals does it help them achieve?
Brand Amplifier is our unique approach to engaging a customized audience of opted-in users who fit the demographic profile that we identify as an ideal customer for a business.
We begin by sending out emails to those users to bring attention to the brand. We then target ads to those users across the web. We’re going deep to convert this targeted list of potential clients. Along the way, we measure not only engagement with the emails and ads but also leverage analytics to reveal brand impact on search traffic.
Lastly, we have the capability to take sales transaction data and match it back to our targeted audience users to attribute performance directly to the campaign.
Your team is always looking to build on our engagement products. Can you tell us about some of the features that make LocaliQ’s Brand Amplifier unique?
I think the three things that make Brand Amplifier unique are our ability to:
- Focus the campaign targeting on a custom-curated data-informed audience.
- Deploy ad campaigns across multiple channels to make sure we are targeting those users everywhere across the web and streaming devices.
- Leverage our platform’s Cross-Media Optimization Technology and automation to ensure budget is being spent effectively on the most highly engaged audience.
Video continues to grow in popularity. How do you believe video fits into the overall customer engagement strategy?
Video is massive in terms of the opportunity to really make a brand impact, especially since we’re not just talking about one platform like YouTube, we’re also talking about streaming platforms like Hulu, which means we’re able to follow people across devices. Today’s consumers expect and want to see ads from brands.
Often, businesses can find engagement strategies to be difficult to measure. What are some of the key metrics you and your team pay attention to when measuring customer engagement?
Engagements are actions like calls, form fills, walk-ins, visits to the website, video view throughs, likes, comments, shares, and more.
It’s important to note that our budget optimization algorithm weighs these based on the level of impact to the business. So, for example, a form fill where we capture a customer’s info would be more meaningful than a like on a social post. And since we want to encourage more of those, we make sure that we push more budget to the channels that are delivering superior engagements. Rather than optimizing based on cost, we leverage performance to inform our optimization.
Want to learn more?
Thanks to Stephanie for her insights into how our engagement products work to help businesses find their audience and drive meaningful results!
If you want to learn more about Brand Amplifier, reach out for a demo.