Banner Promotion Strategy
6 minutes read

In a previous article we’ve seen how we can make our banners stand out of the crowd and get people’s attention. But creating eye-catchy banners is only one piece of the advertising puzzle. 

Another important aspect is how do we get our banners in front of the people. 

In this article we’ll see some ways we can distribute our content to be more cost efficient, but also conversion-efficient.

What is the biggest need that your product/service satisfies?

In the advertising world, as banner creators, we literally fight for people’s attention. This is why we sometimes recur to use shock in our ads.

Shock Banner Creation

 

But what if you don’t always have to come up with the craziest idea on the market? What if your product would be the shock, if advertised to the “wrong” people? The strategy I’m talking about refers at advertising to an intermediate person, who is not the real beneficiary of your product. 

Let’s say you sell purses. A typical approach would be to sell it to the end consumer: women. But what if you sold the purses to men?

Are men in your target audience? Of course not, you’d say. But, if you wrap this in the right context (Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day etc) men are the perfect customer. Men want to make women happy.

So, you don’t sell a purse, you sell an experience.

And that’s how you create shock in your ad without the need of crazy visuals. This is the attention part in the AIDA process.

But why shouldn’t you sell directly to women? After all, there are more women buying purses than men, right? But think about the need your product really serves in that particular moment. And the real problem you  solve in this particular example is the need of buying a gift. After all, women buy purses all the time!

And because your product solves a big problem in that particular moment. Your banner isn’t interruptive anymore. It is the right ad in the right time.

Another advantage of going an indirect route are costs. Most of your competition is probably focused on the ”traditional” way. So, promoting your banners where the competition is low, the costs are also low.

Of course, you can’t apply this strategy every day. But the principle remains the same and your should always ask yourself: what is the real problem my product solves in that particular context?

Leverage your existing customers

As banner creators, we are beating our brains trying to get to more and more clients and we sometimes forget the true value of our existing clients. It is far more easier to sell our products or services to existing customers, than to someone you you don’t have a relationship with.

Customer Retention Vs Customer Acquisition Costs

 

Source

Let’s see how some big players are successful at selling to existing customers and then how you can adapt this strategy to your banners.

A very simple way to sell to an existing customer is using a method called cross-selling. Cross-selling means to encourage a customer who buys a product (a coffee machine, for example) to buy a related or complementary product (coffee filter for example).

Or, one of the most used phrases in fast-food: Would you also like some fries with that? 

Cross Selling Examples 1024x612

 

You may think that a few dollars won’t move the needle very much since cross-selling basically means selling some cheaper related products. But here’s some data that might draw your attention.

Amazon reported that a whopping 35% of the year’s sales came from cross-sells especially since they’ve introduced “Customers who bought this item also bought” and “Frequently bought together”. 

Remember I’ve told you a bit earlier that you are leaving money on the table if you’re not leveraging your existent customers? Well, upselling is an even more efficient method to increase sales with a lower cost than acquiring a new customer.

According to research from Predictive Intent, upselling performs 20 times better than cross-selling when it comes to product pages. Take JetBlue’s “Even more space” initiative for example, which offers passengers the possibility to buy seats with more legroom.

The result: $190 million in additional revenue in 2014 (compared to $45 million in 2008, when it first launched). 

Upselling means to encourage a customer to purchase a more expensive model in the same product family or to augment the original model with additional features.  

How To Leverage Cross Selling In Your Banners 600x155

 

How to apply this strategy in your banners?  

Let’s first take a look at cross-selling. Going with this strategy doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to sell your product in a pack, like Amazon does. You can use the retargeting function of your advertising platform (usually you can do this with most of the advertising platforms). For Facebook for example, you can use the retargeting pixel. 

How this retargeting pixel works? Let’s say you sell  printers. After you created an ad account, you install a tracking code on your website provided by the platform, in this case Facebook. If someone clicks on your ad but does not complete the purchase, you could create an Ad that reminds them of the benefits of your product (increase conversion rate) or if they bought a printer, offer a discount to printer cartridges that go along with the printer (cross-selling).

Setting up a retargeting campaign is easier that might look at a first look and you should definitely read more about it.

The advantage of retargeting ads have a 10x higher click-through rate than display ads – and visitors subject to retargeting are 70% more likely to complete a conversion compared to non-retargeted visitors.

After all, if you buy a 150$ printer, it’s very likely that you’ll also buy a 20$ toner cartridge because you’ll need it anyway, right? 

Pay attention though, your cross-sell item should be cheaper than the original product, and something that only takes a quick buying decision.

Now let’s take an upselling example.

Let’s say you are a SaaS company with a freemium product. Why not use retargeting to explain your premium features? After people have started using the free version of your product, you can retarget them with an ad in which you show them what would be the advantages of getting the premium version. 

Or in the printer example above, if the customer watched a product, added it to cart, but didn’t buy, you could retarget them and promote an Ad which offers a different (more expensive) product, but which might fulfill their needs.

Think about it, once they’ve purchased from you and you’ve already established a trustful relationship, your ad isn’t interruptive or annoying anymore, because it is very personalized.

One thing you should be careful: do not try to sell a much more expensive version of your product/service. If you want to buy a 20.000$ car, you probably won’t end up buying a 50.000$ car, but you probably would buy a 22.000$ car, right?

 

Think about the whole marketing funnel

You may think that a marketing funnel means more money spent because you have to create more ads which lead to more clicks etc… And you’re right, with the second part. A marketing funnel means that you have to create more clicks. But the truth is, people rarely buy the first time they get on a landing page.

Here’s what AdEspresso’s CEO, Max Chieruzzi says about this. He says that with Facebook ads, their overall cost per acquisition within their funnel is more than 50% cheaper than sending people directly to a landing page. 

They spend around $600 to $1,000 per month, depending on who they want to target – new users or if they’re interested in targeting based on competitors. 

To do this, they pay around $0.10 per click. 

But when they do retargeting ads based on people who’ve already visited their site, but didn’t convert into leads, their costs go down significantly to $0.03 to $0.05 per click. 

So, what we can learn from this is that we shouldn’t always try to sell directly to a customer, but take them through the whole buying process more thoughtfully.  

For example, first, send them to 1-2 blog articles, then to a case study and only after that to a landing page.

Aarrr Metrics

 

Conclusion

There are three things I would like you to remember after reading this article:

1) Try to be more creative about your distribution strategy and find less crowded audiences to whom you could sell.

2) You should focus on existing customers as much or even more than acquiring new ones. 

3) Nurturing your prospects save you some money in the long run.


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Patrik Bindea
Patrik Bindea is a self taught SEO and Content Marketer at SMARTERS, a Growth Hacking Company. He helps businesses grow using an inbound marketing approach. He is passionate about marketing and engines, especially search engines.

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