Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice - Ad Gab: Search Retargeting

Episode Date: February 3, 2021

Today's Ad Gab topic is all about search retargeting. Host Ryan Alford and co-host Josh hill dissect what search retargeting is and the best ways to utilize it in your strategy. In this bonus episode on The Radcast, Ryan and Josh first address what search retargeting is and why it's worth your time. They also share the benefits of having relevant keywords and ensuring your creative matches the overall brand.If you enjoyed this bonus episode of Ad Gab, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe and share the word if you love The Radcast, so we can keep giving you the strategies to achieve radical marketing results! You can follow us on Instagram @the.rad.cast | @radical_results | @ryanalford | @joshchill We'll talk to you soon! #theradcast #radicalmarketingresults  If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, join Ryan’s newsletter https://ryanalford.com/newsletter/ to get Ferrari level advice daily for FREE.  Learn how to build a 7 figure business from your personal brand by signing up for a FREE introduction to personal branding https://ryanalford.com/personalbranding.  Learn more by visiting our website at www.ryanisright.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel  www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You're listening to the Radcast. If it's Radical, we cover it. Here's your host, Ryan Alford. Hey guys, what's up? Welcome to the latest edition of the Radcast, AdGab edition. I am joined, as always, by our digital media manager here at Radical. Josh Hill, what's up, Josh? How's it going?

I'm good. Always feel like it's a mouthful. Yeah. Your title, you know? Just call me the founder or whatever. You have like 17 acronyms, you know. Digital marketing guy, numbers, reporting analyst. I'm like going through my head.

All right. Okay. No, but good to have you, man. And I'm kind of excited about today's topic. Me too. This is some techie stuff. I know. It's techie.

And it's always been at the front of my mind as far as the wonderful nature of digital marketing and its potential. I always thought, you know, the holy grail of marketing, and the beauty of digital marketing has always been the ability to target, you know, versus mass media. You know, mass media, you throw up a billboard, you throw up a TV spot, you know, yeah, cable, you can sort of target interest, but digital media has been, the fundamental wondery of digital media has been the targeting abilities,

especially as social media platforms has come along, you have platforms, you can target interest, likes all those things. but the holy grill of it has always been search. Yeah. Because you've got people that are raising their hand. And so, but that search data has always been a little bit behind the largest of wall gardens. Yeah. Be it, Google, Yahoo, wherever.

And let's be honest here, Google's the big player. So I have always been fascinated by how you leverage the hand raisers. And so I think that's what's got me excited about. our topic today, search retargeting. Yes, absolutely. It's so hard to find. The cross-channel stuff is just so hard. Getting out of those sandboxes of Google's playground.

Exactly. And so, you know, the search retargeting sounds potentially complicated, depending on where you are with your marketing and digital marketing language. It's like, what exactly does that mean? But what on its surface, though, the challenge with digital marketing and any marketing is you want when you spend your ad dollars to target people that are in market. Yes. And that is always, and there's been, there's certainly things as the DM data management platforms and, you know, not to use every acronym in the digital marketing playbook. But there's been ways at getting some of that intent that's been.

some of those signals that are out there and then build those. So you've got intent audiences. But the highest intent, the most sure intent is always like when someone identifies themselves as being in market. So for instance, a car. Let's keep it down. You know, we don't really do car advertising here. We don't work with dealerships or anything.

But if you do a Google search for Ford Mustangs for sale, there's a good chance you're in market for a fun month. same or someone you know is yeah maybe it's your daughter or son you know if it's 1990 i'm not sure if four mustangs are still cool like they were when i was growing up but again that you get that signal because someone's going and they're conducting a behavior beyond just an interest-based behavior they're right they're signaling that they're in market yeah and reaching those people it's so difficult because it's hard to differentiate your yourself from people who are just big Ford fans versus like people who might work out a Ford

dealership and they're not going to buy a car. They're working there so they're researching Ford, keeping up the day on news and stuff. So they're just thrown into the audience and it's not clean. Yeah, exactly. And so to date, though, there's really only been two ways. There's been other things and other things that have marketed themselves this way. But I think historically, though, two ways. SEO, working on your content on your site so that you rank higher.

And let's just stick to Google here. I'm sorry Yahoo. I'm sorry Bing. But let's just use Google for the blanket. When it covers 75 to 90% of the market, we're just going to call it Googling. And just admit that they've become the Band-Aid of Search. But when you own, there's been two ways. getting your SEO in order with content so that you rank on those keywords so that when people do those searches and they raise their hand, you are at the top of the organic listing.

Yes. And then two, pay per click. Yes. Which is the search ads, you're paying to be up there. And that's, it gets expensive, like really fast. And then it's not always effective because you might, you just depending on how your campaigns are set up, you might be paying over and over for someone to go somewhere else. and buy it and like buy it. Exactly.

And people have historically been a little, you know, they still say half, you know, I see a different data figure all the time. But universally it's somewhere around 50% of people won't kind of know it's an ad. Yeah. It says ad next to it. Google's gotten pretty good about hiding it, you know, like if you're just in a hurry, you might can jump on it or if you just like screw it, I'll, you know, some people will just do it because they know that people are paying for it.

Yeah. But somewhere around half the people won't click the ad. So they're skimming over that to go to the organic listings. So historically, you've had those two ways to get the hand raisers. You pay the fee with Google, which is keyword, pay per click listings, ads so that you get to the top. It gets expensive. It's highly competitive. Or SEO.

In SEO practice, we're not pooing that. We still think that's a great practice from digital marketing. You should be building up your SEO, getting that organic listing. as fast as you can, but it takes time. And so thus, if you're a new company or you're in a highly competitive field, that's just always a moving target. So today you've had those two ways with which to go after those high intent audiences. And what we've introduced here working with some data partners that we have is an ability

to do search retargeting. I think you're going to start to see more and more as you get out there. But this is definitely, I would say, say in the last 12 to 18 months become definitely not mainstream but you're starting to see a few players in this with the ability with which to target people and so josh let's explain to everyone kind of at its core what search retargeting means yeah so what you start off with is someone at the the SM where you build your keyword list and from there we collect we collect searches from those keywords so people who are searching on Google people are searching on websites

people who are who are searching for a specific brand either on a search engine or like a search widget on a site those people are going to be like kind of targeted with these if they matched up the keywords with this audience so that enables you to reach that data through social media, programmatic display, some OTT stuff. Like, this kind of expands you to use visuals for targeting those people as opposed to strictly words where people know they're just trying to like, they know it's a search ad. And again, they're not going to click on it. Exactly.

So you've got, they've done a search for, let's go back to the Ford Mustang for sale, they've done a search for that. And instead of potentially paying for pay-per-click ad, if you run these campaigns through us or another partner, you can retarget people that have done that hand-raising. Real-time might be the wrong word, but same day sometimes. Depending on the campaign, we can get data same day for those searches so that you're serving. And this is back to, you know, you're at least serving relevant content to someone. So you're not sending someone who's searching for Ford Mustang. You're sending them jet skis.

You know, like, yeah, they might be interested in to it. But it's at least a relevant ad to something they've searched for. And so that when they're scrolling through their Facebook feed, scrolling through ESPN.com or wherever they may have a display ad, they're getting that same content with which they have searched for within a relative short period of time, correct? Yeah. And then it helps you.

It definitely helps you not waste money, just annoying people who are researching but not in market. Because we all know what that's like where we're like, I'm just looking. Yep. It's like the virtual store system. Be like, can I help you buy anything? Exactly. And so you've got a more, instead of just a single channel of a pay-per-click ad, you kind of get, which we like, it we call it with our clients kind of that wall of sound.

Right. So that you're serving up relevant advertising. to something they're already shopping for. They've raised their hand. And really, that's the, that's always been kind of the, again, the holy grail of what you want as a digital marketer. Right. You know, you want someone that's interested in a product or service that you have. But the biggest and best thing is knowing that they have high intent and are in market now.

Yes. And again, with this, with this data and being able to reach multiple chances. panels is most decisions being made at that lower funnel, like they're going to need probably multiple touch points before they actually get there. That's kind of why we talk about frequency so often and over and over again because we need the frequency for you guys to kind of like get it ingrained of like they have all kinds of research out there. Like maybe like a t-shirt online, someone will need to look at it three times before they actually purchase it. But like a car, it can be in the hundreds of times they need to look at that car and look at it.

The listing on the dealership website or something probably like 50 times before they actually call them up and even show up to test drive it. So being able to get out of those gardens and kind of reach across the different playgrounds, it's way more effective and way more effective at getting like the reach and also kind of reaching those people and saying, hey, like we've got the product and service you're looking for. I know you're looking at other places, but like, please consider us. And, you know, as far as the application goes, I mean, think about it if you're, you know, we work with a lot of banking clients, we work with, trying to work with textiles and fabric. We've both got D to C and B2B. But when you think about the application, you think if someone's searching for a car loan, if someone's searching for an insurance provider, again, you've got real intent, you've got a

specific product or service that you might be offering. And to be able to hit those hand raisers, it really has dynamic capability across a lot of industries because search is used for B2B, B2C, e-commerce, like almost every industry, almost every, it has application for just about anything. Yeah. And it's so cool because you can almost retarget other people's retargeting. So they might not even see your. service, but you might be the perfect service for what they're looking for, but they might

never find you on the search engines, but if you catch them in the audience, that's the perfect opportunity for you to finally make that connection and establish that relationship. Any best practices in the creative or nuance that you would recommend when building or thinking about the creative that would support this type of a campaign approach? Definitely. I think if you're kind of like a product-based, person, you want to be pushing the product. Let them know

how fast you work, how quickly with the messaging of the ad. You're getting these low funnel people and they might not have heard of you before but this is not the time to get your Super Bowl branding commercial targeted with them. You need to be going after the kind of lower intent messaging

of like we can provide this within this time frame or we can get this to you at this price or like our product's better than competitors because of this or our service is better. That's when you really want to go in for that sale. And, you know, everyone listening, you've been dying. You know, and we preach all the time to our clients, patience.

Yes. That, hey, you've got to build the funnel. You've got to build the awareness. Talk about, like, some less things than just to talk about the problem that you're solving all that. Well, this is your opportunity. We've got them down at the, we're bringing them in at the bottom of the, or the middle to the bottom of the funnel. This is the time to move all the chips in. This is when you can be short.

Just get to the point. Yeah, they're already looking for it. Yeah. So, you know, they're looking for those boots. You just got to tell them why your boots right now. You're not sitting and sipping coffee in the morning. You're taking the shot of espresso and moving on. Exactly.

So, again, to kind of recap, tremendous opportunity here with search retargeting, building keyword lists, much like you would do for SEM or SEO, where you're building keywords that are relevant to your product or service. for just about any industry, and you want to get those high search term, but high intent keywords. So, you know, if it's something that you want, like, something like if someone's looking for an online store,

that would, like, you know, online store for insert product here, that's usually a high intent type keyword because they're looking for someone to shop, and that's what we want. Or other things, you want to really base it on those keywords and optimizing what those are. And what we'll do with the campaign

is then optimize accordingly based on which ones are driving the most behavior. Yeah. And so, again, keyword lists and then having the right creative that really aligns with driving action immediately for why by today. Exactly.

You're getting the direct intent with the keywords, direct message, kind of takes care of itself there. It's like one of the, It's like complex but so simple at the same time. Exactly. And in our business, we kind of, we're always looking for what's new and latest and greatest and the ability.

And in some ways, things change quickly, but the opportunities for new platforms and new ways of targeting aren't initially overnight. So when something like this comes along, we thought it was key that we bring it up. Any other final thoughts, Josh? I think we covered everything I've got. Cool. Well, there's your 15-minute ad gab on. on search retargeting.

If we can help you with that, you know where to find us, radical.company, or just ping us through the radcast. And we'll see you next time. Thanks, Josh. Yo, guys, what's up, Ryan Alford here? Thanks so much for listening.

Really appreciate it. But do us a favor. If you've been enjoying the radcast, you need to share the word with a friend or anyone else. We really appreciate it. And go leave us a review at Apple or Spotify. Do us a solid.

Tell more people, leave us some reviews. And hey, here's the best news of all. If you want to work with me directly, you want to get your business kicking ass. And you want Radical or myself involved, you can text me directly at 864-7293680. Don't wait another minute. Let's get your business going. 864-7293680. We'll see you next time.