One of the biggest areas for marketing improvement is a better utilization of remarketing campaigns for known leads: how to offer content more effectively than individuals should be receiving and how to tailor that content more appropriately. In this week’s whiteboard session, multi-channel marketing takes center stage as one of the best practices that can revitalize your marketing.

In my last blog post, I wrote about some of the essential characteristics that I look for while hiring new marketing technologists. In order to create a new multi-channel nurture system that resonates with your audience in scalable ways, you’ll need to have the mind of a martech: a combination of an analytical mindset, software or web development experience, and digital marketing DNA. This union of marketing skills is what helps martechs create successful, robust, and scalable implementations such as in the case of multi-channel marketing.

The Process for Better Nurture

By combining customized nurture paths and demographic gating, multi-channel marketing has typically strengthened the marketer’s ability to offer content more specifically and more tailored to the prospects who need it. It’s a technique to help reach out to your existing leads and remind them that you’re a hub of fantastic learning and knowledge and they should consume more of your content.

The key to enabling intelligent remarketing lies in a marketing automation platform’s ability to produce server-side dynamic content based on your lead data. Here are the steps to use that information to implement intelligent remarketing:

1) Assign Remarketing Pixels

On your landing page, assign remarketing pixels based on your actual marketing automation platform database. Inserting re-marketing pixel on your site—simply choose re-marketing pixel vendor. Afterward, install the pixel on your website, adding a piece of JavaScript to your site.

2) Assign the iFrame 

The iFrame is an invisible box within your landing page. It’s offscreen, but it still registers a hit. This iFrame possesses a unique URL that can’t be visited publicly and is only served up dynamically based on what’s most appropriate from your marketing automation.

At this stage, then, dynamically assign an iFrame to specific visitors based on values within the lead database, and latch this new information back into your database.

3) Assign Updated Remarketing Campaigns

Do the logic within your marketing automation platform and assign specific remarketing campaigns to your prospects. Since you have your own segmentations in your remarketing service based on visits to those hidden URLs, your remarketing service will see the lead visits from hidden URLs.

Note that the first and biggest piece is having an actual landing page with dynamic content (this can be either server-side or through JavaScript) on which you are able to do actual computations within your marketing automation platform. Within the landing page, you insert an iFrame—the invisible box in the corner of the landing page. The iFrame, using its computations from your marketing automation platform, is what tags your visitors and latches their information into your re-marketing vendors.

Remember that, within this landing page, the iFrame is entirely invisible. It’s offscreen, but it still registers a hit. It possesses a unique URL that can’t be visited publicly and is only served up dynamically based on what’s most appropriate from your marketing automation. Within this barebones HTML document, this iFrame contains a remarketing pixel from your vendor.

Sending the information from the iFrame back to your MAP

Let’s say that a lead comes into your system: they fill out a form, and you, the dutiful marketer, need to determine the best campaign for this individual. You’ve already done your buyer persona profiling, your pain point/product interest profiling, and your buyer stage profiling (i.e., the three profiling programs to rule them all!)—based on these computations, you can now serve up an iFrame based on this lead’s value for a remarketing campaign. Call this campaign Group 1, and serve that specific iFrame with a unique URL for that group. For example/remark_group1.html
(Keep in mind that you’ll want to use a consistent naming convention.)

Note that, as far as remarketing vendors are concerned, visitors are actually visiting a specific page (even though, in reality, the visitor simply hit the invisible iFrame that was served up dynamically). Regardless, this site latches into your remarketing vendor, and therefore anyone who visited the specific URL (i.e., Group 1) receives a display ad that you want to promote to them specifically.

These are the three steps that will allow you to more effectively offer the most tailored content to the most deserving prospects.

Multi-Channel Marketing in Action

Let’s walk through an example.

1. You have a marketing automation program that dynamically assigns the (new, custom-created) lead field used for segmenting your database within your remarketing campaign.
2. Create a Segmentation within your marketing automation platform with cascading logic, grouping the leads into their own segments based on the lead field calculated above.
3. Create a dynamic snippet with dynamic content based on this new Segmentation you made. This is the HTML that goes into the landing page, and each one is a separate iFrame that triggers a visit to a segmentation-identifying URL with the remarketing pixel/cookie.
4. Your remarketing service (e.g., AdRoll, Bizo, etc) sees the lead visits that hidden URL. You have your own segmentations in your remarketing service based on visits to those hidden URLs.
5. Create ads for those segmentations—Twitter promoted posts, Facebook ads, Facebook promoted posts, and web remarketing. You turn them on.

How will this multi-channel nurture make an impact?

• You can cut your cost per qualified lead enormously by ONLY targeting demographically qualified leads. Look at your waterfall and lead velocity. Let’s do some math here:
  • Let’s say your cost per conversion in a campaign is $50. That’s all people, demographically qualified and not.
  • Let’s say half of those conversions are demographically qualified. That means your cost per qualified lead is actually $100.
  • Using server-side dynamic content, you can plant the remarketing visit with special criteria: only set remarketing campaign if the Lead’s Status is Marketing Qualified Lead.
• You can use multi-channel, personalized campaigns—not just on your website and email.
  • We all know the effectiveness of multi-channel marketing campaigns. You see the same ad on a billboard, then another billboard, and on a bus driving by. Top-of-mind!
  • Personalized campaigns are proven to be more effective. You tailor the content to the right person and deliver it at the right time.
  • Integrating marketing automation with remarketing means you can have multi-channel campaigns that are personalized. You can serve the right content at the right time across more than just your website and your emails—the web, Facebook, and Twitter (and LinkedIn if they ever pick up their game).
• You can expand your intelligent lead nurture channels into social and the web.
  • I’m not talking about your company’s daily tweets or Facebook posts that everyone sees. I’m talking about prescriptively showing content that is right for a lead and guides the lead down the funnel, through more than just emails and your website.
  • Ever have one-and-done downloaders of content? You can bring them back by reaching out to the channels they use. They just wanted your content, now it’s time to remind them that the content they downloaded is produced by your company’s leadership.

Better Remarketing Campaigns for the Future

Remarketing—as it’s currently integrated with marketing automation platforms—can’t quite get to this level of computed complexity. However, with your new iFrames, you can actually use any remarketing vendor and not just the ones who have product integrations. Use self-service platforms, and use the vendors that are more effective for your campaign goals.

The more targeted and specific your campaigns are, the more effective they will be. Let’s bring B2B marketing up to speed.