Direct marketers can generate cost savings, sales volume and more by employing micro-strategies in a wide range of performance-based and other online media. Any direct marketer willing to get more granular with media buys can achieve new goals. Furthermore, innovative thinking often instigates new micro-strategies which invite a continuous loop environment for performance marketing.
Micro-strategies include geo-targeting, which has gained wide acceptance. Geo-targeting enables marketers to tailor their offer to individuals in specific geographic locations most likely to respond. Done correctly, geo-targeting can significantly reduce costs and boost conversion rates. There are a wide range of new and innovative micro-strategies that accomplish other goals, too. At Performics, we’ve coined a new term – “hyper-flighting” – that helps direct marketers leverage online marketing to make offline efforts, like catalog drops, more effective.
Catalogers have long leveraged pay-per-click (PPC) search marketing to capture demand generated by catalog drops. They release ROI/effective revenue share (ERS) requirements to more effectively capture the resulting increased interest and sales, and then quickly return to the ROI goals to maintain overall efficiency. Hyper-flighting enables marketers to capture demand efficiently over a short time window.
A leading outdoors cataloger whose program includes more than 50,000 keywords, recently experienced great success with this micro-strategy. Since ratcheting up the program to capture demand and then back down to return the program to its ongoing effective revenue share (ad cost per sale) took time and decreased profitability, the cataloger implemented a “hyper-flighting” micro strategy.
The team classifies keywords into one of five groups based on past performance and uses more specific micro-bidding strategies for the different keyword types when entering or exiting flights. This enables the team to quickly change the bids of high-spend terms to more effectively and quickly increase or decrease the cataloger’s ERS. The adjustment yielded large traffic increases, additional opportunities to optimize high-priority keywords, increased sales and improved efficiency. Year-over-year sales rose 15%, clicks rose 12 percent and the cataloger’s ERS decreased 11%.
Hyper-flighting represents just one example of the innovative micro-strategies helping direct marketers work smarter today.
Daina Middleton is CEO of Performics, the performance marketing agency inside Publicis Groupe.
