Mini Series: Retail Growth Strategies - Getting New Customers

Mini Series - Retail Growth Strategies - Strategy #1 (New Customers)

New customers are the focus for just about every company on planet earth. Yet, with so many of the retailers we talk with at Omni Digital Group across the country it seems at times that it lacks strategy around this important driver for any business. This is the first pillar for us and we constantly talk about it with our customers. From reading this you will take away many valuable strategies you can go and execute on in your business. Please, if you do nothing else after you read this but one, go and execute. Execution is everything in a business and these strategies work.

Let’s start with how we help companies incorporate these strategies and the platforms we use here at Omni Digital. We specialize in Facebook, Instagram, Email and text message marketing. For this article, we will focus really around Facebook and Instagram but there are very specific ideas of how to generate new customers through email and text as well. We will show you examples inside the Facebook platform and have videos as well. We want to make this a toolkit for retailers. Take it and grow your business!

Now, let’s dive in. As a business, we recommend that every business who advertises on Facebook and Instagram set up their Business Manager account through Facebook. This gives you access to so many more tools than just general boosting or businesses that do not have this set up. The real benefit? You can beat your competition. Now, let’s walk before we run and take this through baby steps by going through the Business Manager account and a couple very specific things you will want set up. Take the time to research each and every aspect of this individually but we will go through it as well.

• Facebook Pixel - The Facebook pixel allows you to track people and the activities they take online. Nothing more, nothing less. It is a simple piece of code you install on your website. We’ve all had the experience of going to a website and then seeing ads for this company when we go back to Facebook and Instagram. That is the Facebook pixel at work. Take the time to install this. There is a helpful article below. Again, you need a business manager account to do this. Especially nowadays when according to Salesforce eighty-seven percent of shoppers now begin their hunt in digital channels – up from 71% the prior year. You NEED to have the Facebook Pixel installed. If you are a 100% local company this stat should really get you to think you need to do things differently than your competitors. “88% of consumers who search for a type of local business on a mobile device call or go to that business within 24 hours.” Nectafy.

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/952192354843755?id=1205376682832142

• Events Manager - What is found in here is a bit more complex. But, again to keep it simple, This is where you can create your Facebook pixel as well as set up customer conversions and standard events. Custom conversions allow you to track activity to a specific URL. Let’s say you wanted to run ads directly to people that visited a specific URL. Say, Women’s and Men’s as an example. That tool allows you to do that and segment them out. Then, standard events track specific “events” that happen on your website. The way we utilize it at Omni Digital is the buttons and activity that takes place on your website. Let’s say you wanted to track the ROI of your online purchases. What this allows you to do is track people who click “buy” on your checkout page and who click “add to cart” on the product page as an example. It allows you to track this activity. 

• Audiences - This is arguably the most important aspect of all your advertising. Who are you advertising too? We find most companies really just over complicate their advertising. Sure, you want it to be as effective as possible. If there was one area to get VERY right it is here. 

  1. Custom Audience - SHOWN AN INTEREST. That is what I want you to focus on. These are people that have shown an interest in your business and may or may not be a customer. Do you think people are interested in your product if they’ve been to your website? Let me give you an example

     1. Company A: They have a customer go to their website. They have the Facebook pixel installed. They have a “website retargeting audience” built in Facebook. They show ads to their website visitors because they’re actually running ads and paying for them. This person DID NOT purchase from them online and did not come to the store in-person. The next time that person goes on Facebook or Instagram they see an ad for this company because of having everything set up properly.

     2. Company B (Competitor to company A): They have the SAME customer researching their website. They DO NOT have the Facebook pixel installed. They have no idea if this visitor actually purchased. Because they do not have the Facebook pixel installed they cannot show an ad to this person the next time they’re on Facebook or Instagram.

        1. Who do you think is more likely to get the sale? Company A all day. Here is an interesting stat from Salesforce. “Half of repeat buyers make their second purchase within 16 days of initial purchase. Across the behavioral data of 500 million consumers, our data found that retailers and brands have a limited window of time to win their second purchase: 50% of shoppers make a second purchase within less than three weeks of the first. To guard against attrition, marketers and commerce leaders must prioritize new re-engagement strategies, including speedy retargeting, personalized loyalty offers, and perfectly timed upsell opportunities.” Notice how they mention you NEED to implement the strategy of retargeting which is one of the top strategies we implement here at Omni Digital Group.

  2. Look-A-Like Audience - What if you could create an audience in your area especially if you are in a metro area of say 1,000,000+ people and make 100,000 of them that look, act, feel, like the same pages as your customers? Wouldn’t that make sense? One of the strategies we implement is just this and we will show this in more depth. If you are going to spend $10 getting in front of 1,000 people or an average of $10 per CPM of 1,000 impressions, wouldn’t you want it in front of 1,000 people MORE likely to buy or less? Seems logical. But, if you were to advertise to that 1,000,000 people without the look-a-like audience you would spend thousands of dollars. 

  3. Saved Audience - We will dive more into this as well but this is an audience you can create custom and then save to be used for future use. Pretty simple! We will go through a couple key examples for different retail niches. 

Now, let’s dive into a couple examples of the custom audiences

1. Website - This is where you can create audiences based on the activity on your website. You can get as granular as top 25% of your website traffic based on time spent or even the specific pages they visited. Here is an interesting stat about people who abandon websites and why this is important, “48% of shoppers have left a brand’s website and made a purchase from a competitor because of a poorly personalized experience.” Here is another key stat from McKinsey & Company, Google says “61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they had trouble accessing and 40% visit a competitor’s site instead.”

2. Customer List - We will save this for our next article about attracting your existing customers.

3. Video - Here you can actually target people based on the % watched of your videos.

4. Instagram Business Profile - These are the engagers of your Instagram. Not necessarily your fans but people ENGAGED. So, they may not like your page yet!

5. Events - These are people who would have said they were “interested” or “going” to an event you held.

6. Facebook Page - Similar to Instagram above, these are the people who have engaged with you on Facebook. Not necessarily the people that just like your page.

Next, let’s hit on the Look-A-Like audiences to give you a better look into how this actually works. When you want to create a look-a-like audience you can BASE it on any number of different “custom audiences” you have just created. For this example, we are creating a list based on Omni Digital Group’s Facebook page engagers. But, you can do it based on your customers, website visitors, video viewers, or any number of different options. I would personally recommend customers. Who better than to base it on? What it does is pool 2.4 million people or roughly 1% of people on Facebook in America. But, then you can target people in your 30 mile radius and really drills it down to your city. I would only recommend this if your city or county of a 25 mile radius is 150,000 people or more. Otherwise, it just becomes too few people for Facebook’s algorithm to really work.

Now, we will go through a couple saved audience examples because this is where especially the new customers get fun!

1. Example 1: Work Boot Customers in Chicago (Bigger market but specific)

When you go and create a saved audience the majority of the time you will live in the “detailed targeting” space. We will show specific results. Now, the first thing to know is that in the Chicago area there are 4,800,000 people in a 25 mile radius. That’s is a ton! If you spent $10 to reach every 1,000 people it would cost you $48,000 but I can assure you it would cost more like $150,000+ just knowing Facebook and how it operates. Now, in this example we are targeting individuals who would need work boots for their job as a requirement. Now, what we did is in the location section we did people who “live” in the 25 mile radius of Chicago. Why? Because you can also target people “traveling” or even “recently” in the area. You don’t want to do that. If you are a local retailer and targeting someone who lives in St.Louis but was recently in Chicago that would be wasted money. You can also see we are targeting 20-60. That way, we can target people in the working age that need work boots. We are targeting both men and women. Now comes the most important part, detailed targeting. Why? We are targeting people with jobs in the industries of things like construction, farming, transportation, and installation. As you can see the lit went from 4,800,000 people to 100,000 people. Now, it would cost just $1,000 but more than likely $4-5,000 to reach all these people. A lot better than $150,000 AND your ROI will be much higher as we are targeting THE people who NEED this product. That is the power of Facebook advertising. 

Example 2: Running Shoe Industry customers in Chicago

Now, this targeting will blow your mind and it is so amazing at the same time. This one will take 3 different screenshots. I want to keep this one simpler since we just hit on Chicago and some of the other example above. Here is the MAJOR thing I want to hit on. If you want a great audience to target go narrow. What do I mean? Let’s take a look. 

We are targeting people 25-60 living in a 25 mile radius of Chicago. Then, we target people who like pages related to “running” on Facebook. Nothing too crazy. But, that takes it down from 4,800,000 too 1,000,000. Then, we target people who like pages related to running AND also like the brands you see below. They MUST like at least ONE of these. Then, we get even more crazy. We make them like all of this AND like a popular running magazine called “runners world”. Now, if you like all these pages you are a serious runner. It goes from 1,000,000 who like running to 350,000 people who then like the brands and then to 47,000 who like all of the characteristics and then “runners world”. If you are a retail running store customer in Chicago I can’t think of a better list.

• Ads Manager

In this final part on new customers we will bring it all together and actually build out an entire campaign from start to finish so you can see how it would flow. We are going to use the running shoe example we had above to build out the campaign AND the work boot example if you are a store that happens to sell both.

There are three parts to creating a campaign. You will see something like this when you get into ads manager below.

• Campaign

When I go and create I usually use “quick creation” when it comes to setting up an ad and will look something like this. You can always switch to the “Guided Creation” as well. First, inside the campaign you have to select your objective. We are going with “traffic” inside this campaign. This is to drive clicks to our website. Here are all of the options below as well. There are 13 in total and we usually stick to traffic, conversions, reach, video views, and engagement at Omni Digital. You then will want to select your daily budget you want to spend daily. We recommend $10/day. Then, you name your ad set and we will create that in a minute. Then, name your first ad which we will create in a minute as well.

• Audience

Then, you will want to create your audience. We will used the saved audience we used for the running shoe store example. We will also use dynamic creative as well. That way, Facebook shows 10 pictures to people and optimizes over time for the best performing picture or graphics.

Then you will want to click “saved audience”

You will then want to use automatic placements and then optimize for link clicks at the bottom. 

On the next screen you will then upload 10 pictures of shoes.

• Ad/Creative

You will then ad your text and link and complete the copy of the actual ad. What is your offer? That is a crucial part. What makes you unique? Is it a discount, guarantee, fit process, selection, colors, brands, etc. What is it specifically? Mention that in your ad verbiage! We like to do a $10 off offer where we can and then really just pepper people with products and brand where we can’t and usually some type of 60 day fit guarantee or something similar. Below is an example of our finished ad using Omni Digital Group as the page example. You are now LIVE! You now go through the exact same process except this time on the work boot side. We will show images below.