By: Vlad Sherbatov
About a year ago, I spoke at the deBanked conference in Toronto about the importance of using online partnerships to help solve the 3 main challenges and questions we face in digital marketing:
How do we get more customers online?
How do we lower customer acquisition cost?
How do we do it at meaningful scale?
The main point of my presentation was that it’s necessary to look beyond the low hanging fruit of pay per click, media style advertising and even SEO, and compliment it by consciously focusing on building and leveraging relationships with a variety of powerful online entities that possess their own, trusting audiences.
With the right approach, these “publishers” can talk to their audiences about your brand, your products and your services. And that is incredibly powerful, and long-lasting, unlike conventional media buys.
Here is the video highlights of the presentation, with the transcript following below.
Transcript:
Hi everybody, really great to be here. Very quick introduction - my name is Vlad Sherbatov, I'm the president and co-founder of Smarter Loans.
The few main questions that we usually face when it comes to online customer acquisition and that is how do we get more customers online, how do we lower our acquisition cost and do it more effectively, and how do we do it at scale.
Let's take a look at the online marketing universe, or in our case the ocean. When we're trying to capture customers on the Internet we usually go after the low-hanging fruit what we see above the surface here. We will start with pay-per-click or PPC online advertising: Google, Facebook, Bing, LinkedIn, Display ads, RTB, whatever you fancy. But let's take a look and see what happened in the PPC world in the past five to seven years. Acquisition costs have gone up tremendously, there's been a lot more competition in the marketplace. So we try to invest in SEO, search engine optimization to try to supplement it and drive some organic traffic to our website, the high quality kind, but it's a grind, right, it's really hard to get a lot of organic traffic and it makes sense, it's so expensive in pay-per-click, how can it be cheap?
Well this is where you have to dive a little bit deeper and look below the surface because if you look below you'll find some very powerful things: publishers, aggregators, magazines, video channels, podcasts, review sites, financial bloggers, you name it. There's an entire ecosystem right, it's a habitat and this area is extremely extremely important because this is where people spend the remaining two to three hours once they leave there with your website, this is where people are arriving in their decisions, and these are the entities that show up in all those other searches when somebody is looking for your product or service.
All of these entities have spent a lot of time and effort and they've been able to build and grow their own audiences that visit them regularly, that trust them, there are not paid clicks, they are the highest quality type of online behaviour you can bring to your website. And with the right approach you're able to have these entities talk about your brand, talk about your products to their audiences.
How do we build successful online relationships with these entities and when I say successful I really mean the few things that you see on the right-hand side of the table. This is what we want as advertisers or companies, funders, lenders, etc. We want something that's consistent, we want something that's high-quality, we want something that's scalable or at least has potential to scale, and we want the profitability, otherwise it doesn't make sense.
But a successful relationship is a two-way street, so let's take a look and see what the publisher wants it's what I refer to them collectively, right the partners. Where you want consistency the partner wants solid tracking so that their have confidence to sell or to send you consistent referral business. Where you want high quality of traffic, your partner wants high quality of product and sales team, in other words high conversion ratios. Where you want scalability the partner wants regular reporting, right it's very simple that at least gives them the opportunity to scale something for you. Not monthly, not weekly but daily right, hourly, through a portal perhaps. And profitability I mean that should be the easy part you look at what you're spending right now and your other channels, you look at your average acquisition cost for a customer on the internet and you try to shoot lower than that and anything that comes in will already help your bottom line and that's a great first step and you go from there.
If you're able to focus on the left-hand side of this table rather than the intuitive instinctive things that are on the right-hand side those are the things that we want...if you're able to take care of in-house solid tracking, make sure you have a sales team that's on it, you have a high quality product, you have great reporting and you're fairly compensating your potential referrers, then you'll be one step closer to developing these relationships.
And if you're able to build multiple successful relationships with these publishers then I can tell you that you will get more customers online, you will lower your acquisition cost you're going to do it at scale, and you will gain a very significant competitive advantage in the industry.
To grow your business using efficient and to the point digital marketing tactics, send me an email at vlad@simplee.digital or leave us a note here: http://simplee.digital/get-in-touch
Author: Vlad Sherbatov, President & Co-Founder at Simplee Digital Marketing.