What exactly this post has to do with Storm Troopers doing "YMCA", I'm not sure. But perhaps it best serves the purpose of highlighting the fact that people can stumble across some awesome online content in all kinds of surprising places, even here. After all, Storm Troopers are young men too, sometimes they're, in a new town, looking for a place to go, and they're short on dough... Anyways.
Let's get down to business: Your clients and potential clients online, no matter your industry, vertical, size, or location, can be categorized into three groups:
In this blog, we are going to consider the “Stumbler”, and how we take this unique Persona into account when building your online marketing strategy. First of all, who is the “Stumbler”?
These are people, companies, or potential clients that have a need for your service or product, but are not aware of the existence of you unique solution or brand.
We call them the “Stumbler” because that is exactly how they find out about you. In the world of television advertising, we would call this: “Branding”. If you’ve ever watched an episode or two of Mad Men, then you probably have a basic idea at least of how Television Advertising works. The idea is to try theorizing and researching who the client is, where they live, and what interests them and what they watch. Then advertise on these shows to raise awareness and introduce this broad audience to your product.
Well, in a sense this is close to how we need to market to the “Stumbler”. It IS a branding mission, but online marketing has a massive advantage over Television in that:
The trick with adequately marketing to the Stumbler is to do proper research. Reaching into the far corners of the internet can be scary. It is certainly easier to just “broad match” one or two keywords and hope for the best online. But you can’t find gold without digging first.
The fact is, the “Stumbler” is a fickle creature:
Unlike their compatriots the “Researcher” and those with “Commercial Intent”, they don’t tend towards one device over another. Being equally as likely to be found on a Tablet, Mobile device, or even a Desktop computer.
They are keenly different from the “Researcher” in that they are not yet even researching your product, service or brand. Therefore they are not making any searches at all related to your offerings on search engines.
This is an important point to understand, because SEO cannot gain you new clients through this technique. This is a PPC (Pay Per Click) only strategy, and not just PPC, but Display PPC with a Branding Major.
In addition to Display ads purchased on a CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions), what other sources can we mine for “Stumblers”? Social! Social is a veritable gold mine for Stumbling. It stands to reason, for example, that if Joe is interested in a niche product, then Joe’s friends may have similar interests, or at least be part of an online community that may have similar interest.
This is where we start getting into the subject of: “Relevant, but not related interests”. In other words: Doug is a web designer. Doug likes to ride old “café style” motorcycles. I am marketing a service for Designers. I wonder if other Designers like riding “café style” motorcycles too? But I digress; this is a whole separate topic, and one for a future blog post. Watch this space.
A rookie mistake would be to send these visitors to a Landing page. The fact is, the “Stumbler” is easily scared off. They don’t want to be sold too. They don’t want conversion centric pages. They want facts, figures, and resources. YouTube Videos, FAQ’s, tools, info-graphics. They want soft conversion phrases like: “get in touch”, and “got questions?” not “buy now”, or “Call now”.
Likely you as a marketer, or website owner, are very concerned about conversion rate and increasing revenue. Often the rate of conversion is a key metric, yet this is simply not the right measurement for the “Stumbler”.
The fact is, precious few, if any “Stumblers” will take action and become a client. The vast majority is just not ready to do so. So what do we do? Ignore this valuable strategy because it may water down an otherwise BS metric of conversion percentage?
What is the “Stumblers” escalation strategy?
This delicate group of visitors needs to be developed into clients carefully. We can’t spring the sales “trap” on them just yet. Placing these visitors into a unique remarketing group within Adroll and Adwords, we want to escalate these “Stumblers” into “Researchers”.
So how do we do this? What is the “Researcher”, and how do we market to this group? These will be the questions we will consider in my next article as we continue to discuss our approach and philosophy to SEO.
Until then, feel free to get involved in the conversation. If you agree, or disagree, I’d like to hear from you. Comment here, or tweet me @ainsleymuller.
