By Rick Gershman, Vice President of Messaging and Content for Ring Ring Marketing
A chainsaw is a wonderful tool. It’s the best one for the job, by far, when you need to remove tree limbs or turn those severed limbs into firewood. Used carefully and correctly, it’s a key component in your arsenal for yard work and other duties.
With that said, it’s also a key component in the long-running series of Texas Chainsaw Massacre films, and for good reason: Used the wrong way, the chainsaw is incredibly dangerous — even deadly.
(For the record, the classic 1974 original film is titled The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, with “chain” and “saw” as separate words, but that’s just a bit of trivia for you.)
So, if this article is about funeral preplanning (which it is, by the way), why are we talking about chainsaws? Fair question. It’s because the chainsaw struck me as a great analogy for the digital marketing strategy called retargeting, which is also often known as remarketing.
If you’ll bear with me a moment, I’ll connect the dots.
As I touched on above, the chainsaw is an incredibly efficient tool for doing the job right — when it’s used properly. But if you’re not cautious with a chainsaw, if you’re not following the safety procedures to the letter, you could severely injure — or even kill — yourself.
The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration notes that on average, 250 deaths occur every year from chainsaw use, with injuries (many of them severe) being in the thousands.
Does that mean we should stop using chainsaws? Should we stop selling them? Of course not. They’re excellent at what they do. Used properly, they make a task much faster and more efficient.
The only problem occurs when they’re used improperly, which happens far too often.
And yes, that’s where retargeting campaigns come in. Used properly, retargeting is one of the best ways to keep your funeral home “front of mind” for families interested in preplanning services. It’s wonderful at getting a second chance to convert potential leads who have visited your website or checked out one of your other ads.
However, when retargeting isn’t used properly — yes, just like a chainsaw — it can be extremely dangerous for your funeral home. It can aggravate and annoy leads, negate any chance of them becoming clients, and massively damage your online reputation.
To understand what I mean, here’s an overview of retargeting …
A Second Chance to Make a First Impression
Retargeting opportunities occur all the time. Let’s say a potential client visits your site and then clicks out without converting, for whatever reason — she wanted to check out some alternatives, felt a sudden need to check Facebook, wanted to order a pizza online, etc.
Just because the potential client clicks away doesn’t mean she wasn’t interested in your services. She might just have other stuff to do and plans to research her options later.
This is where a retargeting advertising campaign steps in. It’s an automated technique that continues to subtly promote your funeral home to that lead when she’s online, even when she’s not researching preneed options. It gives you a second and third (and so on) chance to convert that visitor without even lifting a finger.
Essentially, this technology tracks someone who visited your website but did not complete the process of contacting you or scheduling a service.
Families researching a service or product that’s fairly substantial rarely end the process after checking out only one potential provider. They might check out your website, leave and view several other preplanning providers while considering their options.
Retargeting directly promotes your products and services to people who have already checked you out. When someone visits your site, the technology tracks the visitor with cookies — data files uploaded from your site into the visitor’s browser. Wherever this person goes online afterward, the technology displays your specifically designed advertisements.
While a potential client might be considering a variety of preplanning providers, your ads will be the ones that person continues to see. And what’s especially interesting these days is that your retargeting ads can be specifically configured based upon what pages someone viewed on your site.
Sounds Great … So, Where’s the Danger?
Given the current prevalence of retargeting — and its “cousin,” audience-specific advertising — you’ve likely already seen this for yourself. You’re trying to read an article online and suddenly the same ad for the same product or service keeps popping up, over and over.
It’s annoying, but you scroll past the ad each time it appears, finish your article, and then pull up another site on the internet. You start digging in, and bam — there it is again. Same product or service, numerous ads, relentlessly targeting you.
Obviously, that’s not what you want as an advertiser. Even if the potential lead you’re remarketing is interested in your preneed services, they’re probably going to get irritated very quickly if they feel you’re stalking them everywhere they go — and especially if it’s not just one ad on each page but two, three, even four.
When I get targeted like that, I’m no longer considering that business. I don’t mind a retargeting ad being pushed at me on occasion, of course, but if I’m being hit with a constant barrage of ads, all of them coming from one firm, you’ve lost me for good.
The key to correctly using retargeting is finding that sweet spot where your ads are popping up occasionally, lightly reminding the potential lead that you’re ready to help whenever they are, but not jumping up and down, begging for attention like a six-year-old who drank too much Mountain Dew.
It’s not hard to solve this problem. When you create a retargeting campaign, you can set limits for how often your ad appears. You can also limit how many days it runs. These frequency controls are imperative to ensure you don’t come off as overly aggressive with your campaign.
Additionally, if you’ve set up your campaign correctly, it will stop displaying your ad to a particular lead once they’ve already converted. The last thing you want to do is waste ad money and pester a lead who’s already become a client.
I hope you’re already employing retargeting/remarketing ads for your funeral home. If not, please investigate that right away. Just remember that you have to use these ads with care and at least some degree of precision; otherwise, that chainsaw could kick back and cause some severe damage.
Rick Gershman is the vice president of messaging and content for Ring Ring Marketing (ringringmarketing.com), which specializes in helping funeral homes and cemeteries grow and protect their market share.
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