Page 14 - Oil & Energy - March 2013

14 • OIL&ENERGY
Marketing
It’s time to
get in gear.
What are you doing to adapt to dramatic changes in the retail
energy industry? Now is the time to shift your focus to the future
with a business plan developed through our 5-Year Strategic
Planning Exercise for Energy Dealers. Call Joe Ciccarello today
to schedule a 5-SPEED session for your company.
Vision s Direction s Success
ACCOUNTANTS | BUSINESS ADVISORS
www.gggcpas.com | 781-407-0300
Gray, Gray & Gray’s
5-Year Strategic Planning
Exercise for Energy Dealers
but that alone will not sell your products and
services. To get the most out of your SEM
investment, you need to market to website
visitors and other potential customers with
targeted advertising that keeps your message
in front of them as they travel the Internet.
Targeting customers based on demo-
graphics or behavior is a widely used
e-commerce practice that Internet users
encounter daily. Amazon.com analyzes cus-
tomer behavior on the fly to offer purchase
recommendations, and Twitter serves up
recommendations of people to follow based
on whom the user follows currently.
To target their advertising, companies
take advantage of advanced online adver-
tising services available from Google, Bing,
Yahoo and other web advertising platforms.
These services provide special code that,
when placed inside a website, can record
basic information about visitors. Depending
on the technology used, this information
may be recorded to the visitor’s browser for
retrieval at another time, or to an external
tracking service such as Google Analytics ™.
These visits can then be categorized, and
specific groups of visitors can be targeted
by a company’s advertising messages.
One effective way to target your adver-
tising is “remarketing” to users who visit your
website. By utilizing tracking code on specific
pages, you can track visitors to those pages,
and place them into a category of “interested”
visitors. If these visitors go to other pages on
your site, or even leave your site, they can be
separated into even further refined categories.
As these visitors view other websites which
participate in the same web advertising plat-
form, your ad would be displayed.
With remarketing, you can be very spe-
cific with your targeted advertising. In one
scenario, assume your website has a page
on standby electric generators. Your web
statistics are telling you that you’re getting
traffic to that page, but they aren’t turning
into leads. With remarketing, you can track
visitors who have visited the page, but who
haven’t submitted their information to
find out more on your contact page. When
those visitors are browsing the web, your
generator advertisement could be displayed
to them, offering an incentive to come back
to your site. If you have ever noticed an ad
displaying on multiple sites as you browse
– seeming to follow you – you have seen
remarketing in action.
Remarketing requires that users visit
your website before you target them.
Companies can also use other behavioral
targeting strategies to bring prospects
to your site for the first time. Behavioral
targeting enables a company to place its
online display ads in front of customers
based on their browsing history. Web
advertising platforms can identify a pat-
tern of behavior based on a user’s search
history and/or the websites they have
visited. When a user fits the behavior pro-
file and geographic profile, the platform
serves up your advertisement. A company
can serve different advertisements for dif-
ferent behavior patterns. Display ads can
be served on Google, Microsoft, Facebook,
LinkedIn and other sites. Platforms like
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have
specific targeting and advertising options
that let you reach even further based on
the information their members have vol-
untarily provided.
BE AGGRESSIVE
Targeted marketing strategies like these
transform search engine marketing into a far
more active pursuit. Instead of sitting back
and hoping that consumers will discover
and choose your services, you can aggres-
sively pursue your goals. Some companies
will choose to dabble in targeted marketing,
while others will seize the opportunity and
invest heavily in targeting users who are
most likely to be serious prospects.
Companies also will make individual
choices about how to craft and deploy tar-
geted advertising. Whatever your strategy,
it makes sense to focus on closing deals
online. If, for example, you’re trying to
convert non-budget customers to budget
plans, deploy an online application that will
enable the customer to learn their monthly
budget payment and sign up on the spot.
That way, you get the results you want
immediately while minimizing the load on
the sales team. Customers also appreciate
being able to complete transactions online.
Diversifying your company’s services
is more important than ever now, and
targeting is a great strategy for identifying
your best prospects amidst the crowd and
focusing your marketing on them. If you
have ambitious offseason goals for 2013,
consider targeting as a powerful accelerant
for your sales and marketing strategy.
If you have questions about any of the
topics discussed above – or any questions
about how to effectively market your com-
pany – give us a call at 1-800-796-3342.
We’re happy to assist you.