Why Should My Business Use Immersion? — Part 1

The Beginner’s Guide

With the ever evolving world of digital technology, marketers, consumers and businesses have been faced with the challenge of navigating the online world. These technological developments seem to occur at hyper speed, altering the ways in which consumers and businesses go about their daily personal and professional lives. This change in behavior has forced consumers to alter the way they seek and retain information, and has forever changed the way in which brands position themselves in order to attract, retain and grow their customer bases.

Within digital, B2B and B2C consumers are spreading out their product and service research across multiple channels, leading brands to branch out their online marketing budgets more than ever before. This may be attributed to the fact that consumers of all kinds turn to the online world before making a purchasing decisions, often making use of 18 research points or more before deciding to buy.

With this in mind, coupled with the large amounts of information available online, brands are faced with the task of positioning themselves in front of the audiences that are most vital to their business, while needing to be able to stand out from their competition and remain in the front of their customers’ mind.

While many brands have adapted to the ever-changing digital demands, placing themselves actively within the online space, they often question whether these efforts have any true impact on their bottom line — questioning what impressions are really worth to them if they see low click-through rates, or how their audience reach affects their business if they do not see sales numbers increase immediately. It is for this reason that I will be tackling the concept of Immersion, and what these efforts really mean for your business.

“Once sales has worked to identify target accounts, it’s marketing’s job to take that list of accounts and engage with them.” — Craig Rosenberg (Account Based Sales Expert) @funnelholic

In this article, I will cover…

#1 What Is Immersion?

#2 Why Should I Care About Immersion?

#3 How Can Immersion Help Me Hit My Company’s Revenue Targets?

#4 What Should I Watch Out For With Regards To Immersion?

Let’s dive in…___________________________________________________________________

#1 What Is Immersion?

Immersion is the process of exposing a brand’s message to potential consumers before and during the research phase, in order to influence the purchasing consideration and decision in their favor, using strategic marketing methods to move them further down the sales funnel, ultimately turning them into paying customers.

In brief, the immersion process begins with the analysis and segmentation of the brand’s potential customer data, identifying which prospects are most likely to yield higher conversion rates, and turning them into in-market audiences. Once the optimal audience has been identified and segmented, neuromarketing and conversion optimization techniques are used to develop actionable audience insights that advise on the best creative and messaging strategy to be used for each audience that will appeal to their wants and needs, driving brand interest.

These processes lead to the distribution of the brand’s message to the audiences being targeted, across as many digital touch points as possible in order to expose the consumer to the brand wherever they may be online — often by using a combination of search, display and social advertising. This results in what we call Immersion, where the consumer is consciously and subconsciously exposed to the brand at all times, helping to form the customer’s opinion of the brand in a positive light before and during contact, driving them down each stage of the sales funnel through targeted and relevant messaging strategies.

Does this make sense? How about we try something more simple:

When you’re looking for flight prices for a trip to China, you may visit a travel agency’s website to do some research. Whether you have entered your contact information or not, this company has captured your digital signature in order to market to you in the future. A few days later, you visit a number of other websites, whether related to your vacation research or not and start to notice banner ads on those sites for the travel agency website you visited days earlier. You may not take notice, but your brain certainly does. After you get home and kick your shoes off, you decide to scroll through your Facebook feed to check on the latest updates, and see ads from that same travel agency with special offers on flights to China. After a number of days or weeks of seeing these website or Facebook ads, you decide to inquire with the travel website about your travel plans, and eventually book your trip through them. Voila! Behold the successful immersion strategy.

While it may seem like a pretty simple concept — which it is — the execution behind it can be difficult to implement correctly if you do not have a clear strategy in mind. I will help you through this in the next article, but for now if you need more convincing about why you should care about immersion, read on.

See how brands like Italtile used FetchThem’s Immersion strategies to increase their conversion rations in just one month, increasing their turnover by a staggering 60%. Read the full success story here.

#2 Why Should I Care About Immersion?

Most brands believe that digital advertising is simply for B2C brands, as a reported 81% of consumers turn to the internet when researching possible purchases. However, according to a recent article by Harvard Business Review, some 73% of 20- to 35-year-olds are involved in product or service purchase decision-making at their companies — with one-third reporting that they are the sole decision-maker for their department. If this doesn’t clear up why your brand, whether B2B or B2C, should take advantage of all the digital opportunities out there, then there are plenty of additional stats that we could use to convince you — but none of these will matter if you aren’t prepared to adapt the way your brand uses online marketing and sales techniques to align with what the online world is demanding.

Online sales and marketing success is more than just about making the sale or getting a bunch of conversions. Obviously all brands measure the success of their efforts by the number of sales or deals that have resulted from their online marketing efforts, or by the amounts of leads that they’ve gained. But immersion is more than the physical results — something commonly overlooked by brands when using this strategy.

When a consumer or business begins researching products or services, 81% of them turn to a search engine as a starting point. This search typically begins with 70% of researchers searching for a generic term rather than a specific brand. By the time the buyer has decided to make contact with the brand, talk to the sales agent or make the purchase, he or she has already consumed a wealth of information on the offer being investigated, such as competitive pricing, offerings, brand reputation, reviews, and more.

While some B2B and B2C buyers will read heavy amounts of information before making a purchase decision, a 2017 study indicates that it is the short bursts of visual and text information that sticks with them, as this exposure triggers subconscious reactions and influences the purchasing decision well-before the buyer actively takes the first step. This is where the concept of immersion comes in. By using immersion strategies in their efforts, brands are able to help shape and form the opinions and thoughts buyers have about their products or brand before reaching out to them, aiding them in breaking through the noise of their competitors to affect the consumer’s mind both consciously and subconsciously.

This eventually helps the brand build trust with its potential customers before outreach has even begun, moving these prospects down the sales funnel into paying customers.

Immersion Helps You

• Align your marketing and sales efforts
• Identify your most valued prospective customers
• Gain insights to deliver relevant messaging to your targeted audience at each stage of the funnel
• Reach your targeted audience wherever they are online
• Increase brand awareness and build brand trust
• Move your potential customers through the sales funnel
• Influence the conscious and subconscious purchasing decision
• And more

Immersion Metrics That Are Important

When reporting on an immersion campaign we are often asked, Why do Impressions matter?, So what if we Reached that many people we have had no sales? With immersion being about getting the right message in front of the right person at the right time, Impressions and Reach are vital to your campaign.

Impressions

Are the number of times your ads have been shown.

This is important because your ads are meant to be seen by the “right” person as often as possible. If you are reaching 100 people and only 100 impressions have been served, your ad has been seen by a person once, this is not going to be enough to build your brand image with the person.

Reach

Is the number of unique people that have seen your ads.

This is vital to check that your ads are being delivered to people that you are wanting to target and to also view whether your targeting is working. If you loaded 100 profiles to a platform and you are only able to reach 10 perhap you need to look at a different platform to assess where your customers are online to ensure your message is seen by them.

Frequency

Which refers to the number of times your reached users saw your ads in general.

This is an important metric to monitor as you will be able to gain insights on how many times your audience is seeing your ad before they take any form of action, this also greatly impacts your budget, as you may want to increase of decreases your frequency cap to influence how many times each user sees your ad.

In short — if you’re looking to drive prospects down the sales funnel, build brand trust, increase your brand’s awareness to its target audience, immersion is your key to success. We will go through the concept of immersion in greater detail in our next guide so that you can clearly see how this strategy can drive a positive impact on your bottom line.

#3 How Can Immersion Help Me Hit My Company’s Revenue Targets?

Immersion can drive successful results for your marketing and sales efforts when used correctly. In my next article, “Why Should My Business Use Immersion? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)”, I will guide you through what immersion can actually do for your business, and how you can effectively use it in your sales and marketing strategies. Read this article here, where I will cover:

• Immersion For Marketing Success
• Immersion For Sales Success
• How To Measure Immersion Success

#4 What Should I Watch Out For With Regards To Immersion?

My philosophy, when looking into any new or existing sales or marketing strategy for my brand’s online efforts, is to research the most common best practices out there and make myself fully aware of that mistakes teams before mine have made. This helps me implement new strategies and optimize my current efforts more successfully. It is for this reason that I have compiled an article dedicated solely to what you as a brand should be aware of when using Immersion strategies in your efforts to aid you in develop a strategy designed from success from the get go.

My article, “Why Should My Business Use Immersion? — Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)”, will take you through the common misconceptions marketing and sales teams have as well as a few tips and tricks to set your efforts up for success.

“Don’t be afraid to be unique. Rise to the challenge. Build your own brand.” — Butch Bellah ( National Sales Manager-Bull’s Eye Brands) @ButchBellah

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In this article, I have given you a simplified explanation of what the concept of Immersion is and why your brand should be using it in its sales and marketing efforts. The next article in this guide will help you see why Immersion is so important in today’s online efforts by going into more detail on how it can impact your brand’s success.

While Immersion might seem like a completely unfamiliar concept to your brand, you may already be unknowingly implementing parts of it in your existing efforts. In my next article, I will advise you on how you can expand on these efforts to implement a complete Immersion strategy, and what you should be doing to measure and improve on its success.

Read “Why Should My Business Use Immersion? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)”, here.