With E commerce or any type of product sale for that matter, it’s obviously critical that you get the right eye balls on your website at the right time.  I mean that’s what advertising is all about in a nutshell.  But what if that wasn’t necessary?

As 2018 draws to a close, we need to be mindful of what we’re all racing towards.  Racing being the keyword.  Speed.  We want speed in everything we do.  As little resistance as is physically possible to what we want.  Speed in page loading.  Speed in checkout (I’m looking at you Amazon).  Speed in the acquisition of required information.  Why will Alexa and Google Home rule the day?  Because it’s easier to just speak than to grab out my phone and type.

So through the lens of the reality of where we are as a society, we need to be mindful of how important website visits actually are to our end goal.  I’ll give you an example.  Suppose a social agency with clients in their late teens and early twenties.  They have a nice website and they do Facebook and Instagram and Google advertising and all that good stuff that proper entities should be doing.  The ultimate goal is to get a client visit in the hopes of a desired client outcome.  But the interesting thing here is that the desired outcome isn’t necessarily dependent on the client visit.  We would like to believe it is, but the uptake of the information is really what’s required, whether that’s through the staff at the agency during a visit, or simply compelling media delivered digitally.

Let me give you a scenario.  Through Google Ads a prospective client searches a keyword and hits the website.  For whatever reason, said user exits the website without taking action.  Sure it stinks but that’s reality.  However, we’re still left with some pieces to work with.  First, if that user saw our keyword and clicked on our ad, they’ve just shown us they’re in-market for the service being offered.  Second, if we have Facebook Pixel and Google Remarketing tag set up, we now have a means to reach them.  The traditional path would be to show them ads to get them back on the website for another crack at closing the sale.  If we’re being stone-cold about what we really need for the outcome, and what’s needed is the desired decision, not the desired decision via the in-office visit via the website contact form, why send them back to the website at all?  It’s just more speed bumps.  Why not use the media to educate them on the desired outcome?  15 second videos and similar?  Youtube recently launched a video sequencing option on the Google Ads platform.  Supposing the aforementioned scenario, what if we created a 4-part video series that paralleled the “in office” experience.  Sure it would lose the human touch, but it would drastically expand in reach!  And all to that in-market audience we might have never had a shot at.

It’s almost 2019.  As marketers let’s behave like it.