Project Description
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This masterclass on pricing was based on a workshop by Paul Cheek, Entrepreneur and Hacker in Residence at the Martin Trust Center. Paul is a serial tech entrepreneur and a software engineer, and he has been teaching online advertising since 2018.
Workshop recording
Q&A
Remarketing, also known as retargeting, is a form of online advertising that shows targeted ads to users if they have already visited your site. This keeps your brand top-of-mind and connected, even after they leave your site.
Here is how it works. You see an ad for something or you are on a website, see an ad on Amazon for a Snuggie. Two days later you are on Walmart.com and you see another ad for Snuggie. Snuggie knows you know you are interested so they are following you.
The way to do it is to add a small snippet of code from Google, Facebook or other ad networks to your website. Once you do that, Facebook or Google will follow you elsewhere through browser cookies.
There are so many goals you can pick and your mileage will vary. There are personas you want to test. You may have done some primary market research to back it up. How do you prove this persona wants what you have? How do we make sure that the value proposition resonates? You need to focus your goals around that.
Let’s say your goal is to test whether the value proposition resonates. This is generally a great first goal. The first hurdle to clear is that you want people to click on the ad. Once they do that, the metric to note is the click through rate (CTR) – this is the percentage from people who saw the ad to people who clicked. A good CTR means that you have done a good job targeting the persona and the value proposition appeals.
You may be able to do inbound marketing, and you may need to be careful about your ads. But there are still things to do to get your company in front of the right people. For instance, you can run digital experiments to test the problem (instead of the solution). Target them on Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram or wherever else they are. You have to be careful, but you still can target them with broader language in the ads to draw people in with the problem statement, while not putting your regulatory strategy at risk.
You could try different ways of framing the problem and the solution to see what type of positioning resonates. Your call-to-action could invite them to sign up to learn more – and that landing page becomes a mechanism to acquire interview candidates. All this can be done without making your solution crystal clear or stating any claims from a diagnostic or therapeutic standpoint.
Hubspot can be an integrated platform to help you put up landing pages, lead forms, tracking, remarketing and funnel metrics without having to do each individual piece yourself. That is a tool that is an option. Hubspot has a startup program that offers discounts for startups depending on their annual revenue level.
You can also do-it-yourself with a Google Ads / Google Analytics / Google Optimize pipeline you set up if you have the technical skills. This is completely free of charge.
If you are using an online ad on a new platform, they may not have great dashboard, reports and numbers to help you figure out whether your campaign is effective or whether you are meeting your goals. There is a way to send details of that campaign in the URL that you are sending people to.
There is a campaign URL builder that you can use where you can plug in the campaign source or referrer (e.g. Google, newsletter), medium (e.g. cpc, banner, email), campaign name, as well as the paid keywords and content that differentiates ads so we can fully track every user who comes through the pipeline.