A Recognizable Marketing Scenario
The convention hall buzzes with the excited voices of eager attendees. Laneways are packed as vendors vie for the attention of thousands of passing strangers. The largest of the booths attracts droves of visitors as faces washed in neon gaze longingly at idealized works of plastic and innovation. Booth attendants skip between convention-goers, striking small conversations, collecting emails to add to their growing database. Days later, when the bright lights of the convention go dim for the final time, as bags of free merchandise pile in the empty halls, vendors scurry back to their desks and convention-goers begin to see emails appearing in their inboxes.
Old School Marketing Meets the Digital Era
This is remarketing and a great representation of the power of a well-constructed marketing funnel, a feature that has proven to be as important to old-school marketing as it is to modern digital marketing. These days, we may not have a densely-packed convention center, but we have the next best thing, or the next best 5 things, or 10 things:
● Facebook
● Twitter
● Instagram
● Google
● LinkedIn
● … the list goes on
In many ways, these digital communities are the convention centres of years past. They are collections of vast audiences whose attention advertisers and brands fight to earn.
Attracting Attention in the Digital Era
A convention vendor attracts the attention of audiences with their booth, but in the digital era, you attract attention by running targeted digital campaigns on a number of platforms. This stage of the marketing funnel is known as prospecting. During the prospecting phase, you generate interest in your brand by attracting an audience that fits your consumer profile. But how do you turn this brief initial interest into extended engagement with your brand? The answer constitutes the second phase of a well-crafted marketing funnel, known as remarketing.
The Beauty of Remarketing
These days, you don’t need to go to as much trouble as those on the convention floor in order to generate prolonged brand engagement and gather the information needed for remarketing campaigns. Collecting emails through face-to-face interactions simply isn’t a feasible or effective method for digital marketers to generate leads. But, by installing a small bit of remarketing code onto your website, you can gather information on visitors to use in a very similar fashion to the emails collected by convention booth attendants, and drive continued brand engagement through remarketing. Remarketing messages can appear on any number of digital platforms in front of the most engaged segment of your audience, and encourage continued engagement just as the emails collected by booth attendants would.
When working with companies who are considering digital marketing for the first time, it can occasionally be difficult to explain the process to important members of the team. But when you really take a look at it, not much has changed. The medium may be different and new, but the method is the same. There is plenty to learn from the past, and it is important to find ways to tie modern methods of digital marketing back to these valuable historical touchstones when pitching clients and curating your own strategies. You know what they say, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
