One of the core principles my agency operates by is to shoot from the hip only when data is unavailable or economically impractical to analyze. Thankfully as an Internet marketing agency we have access to near real-time volumes of data to analyze on our clients’ accounts.
In this article I’ll discuss one of my clients and the marketing campaign we are managing. It’s an integrated marketing campaign using almost all mediums and channels available in San Antonio excluding news media and broadcast channels.
Some background notes
One of my biggest clients is in a highly saturated, competitive and complex consumer market. One of the holy grails in my industry here in San Antonio is to land an Air Conditioning company. My client,
TASCO Air Conditioning is more than an AC service company. They are a veteran & family owned business carving a niche for high end home comfort systems. Terry and his wife Susan Wolf (TASCO; Terry & Susan’s Company) started their company in 1982, weathered several recessions, changes in technology, changes in marketing and a serious blow to the housing industry. Two years ago I was contracted to “help potential customers find TASCO.” Now my agency’s task is to convince potential customers to call my client NOW no matter where the potential customer is in the consumer decision making process.
What data do I use?
75% of my data is sourced from webmasters accounts,
analytics accounts, marketing intelligence vendors, niche Internet marketing data providers and most anything categorized under competitive intelligence in the digital space.
25% of my data is gained from meetings, phone calls and emails with clients.
An analogy before we proceed!
Specifically for Internet marketing I haven’t really honed in on the best analogy in my pitches to potential clients. One analogy I’ve been testing lately is this one as it also allows me to provide insight into how dynamic our campaigns are. Excluding vendors our in-house automation is very thin. Eyes and hands on work is very important considering the trust and sums of capital clients invest with us.
Internet marketing campaigns are like driving a car. An active campaign is like having your foot on the accelerator. When you approach a red light you take your foot of the gas and apply the breaks waiting for your signal to go forward or turn. The data we see from analytics tools is similar to traffic lights. From a distance we see a change occurring. In this case we’ll say the data is pay-per-click (PPC) trends down the last 5 days of the month and first 4 of a month; no matter the creative or optimization efforts.
However social media trends up mid-month until the 10th or so for a certain consumer facing client. While our campaign calls for a certain ad spend each day within a budget we see an opportunity coming. Prior to the light turning green we turn on our turn signal and prepare to turn down another street.
The Decision
The most recent example of this scenario happened this week with my client TASCO Air Conditioning. We had a fun little video produced for social media, PPC was active by leads were flat and I was under budget. Data show and customer feedback Facebook is surprisingly a good lead generator for this specific client.
We collaborated and decided to reduce PPC spend during the next few days based on data, stop the current creative on FB and save the budget for the video boosted posts. Within the last 24 hours we’ve reached over 5k FB users, earned some likes, read some nice comments and found some leads that AdWords wasn’t sending us this week.
Conclusion
We still kept our commitment to the Internet marketing campaign even as we moved into the monthly slow cycle. Our small change in direction was both profitable and fun. Without data we probably would have tinkered with some ad copy and budgets and never seen this opportunity. Check it out here:
TASCO’s Halloween Video
