Why Should My Business Use Immersion? — Part 2

The Intermediate Guide

In my previous article, I briefly introduced you to the concept of Immersion and why you as a brand should care about it in order to help you hit your company’s revenue targets. Not only can effectively executed Immersion strategies boost your overall success, but it can help align your sales and marketing efforts in a way that helps you close more leads and generate increased revenue with less marketing spend wastage. Read “Why Should My Business Use Immersion? — Part 1 (The Beginner’s Guide)”, here if you missed it.

In this article, I will take you through not only what Immersion strategies can do for you marketing and sales efforts, but which metrics you should be paying attention to to measure its success.

“Sales equals service. When you sell, sell from honesty, integrity and compassion. It’s not about the hard sell, it’s about the heart sell.” — Eric Lofholm ( Motivational Speaker and Master Sales Trainer) @EricLofholm

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

In this article, I will cover…

#1 Immersion For Marketing Success

#2 Immersion For Sales Success

#3 How To Measure Immersion Success

Let’s get started…___________________________________________________________________

#1 Immersion For Marketing Success

While I speak of immersion as a strategy that aids in the success of both marketing and sales efforts, as true success cannot be achieved if one is used without the other, here I will take you through what the concept of Immersion means in terms of marketing.

In comparison to traditional forms of marketing, the immersive marketing methods are distinctly passive. The customer is invited in a friendly environment (e.g. retail store) instead of being aggressively forced to do so. The idea is to encourage customers to engage in a two-way interaction with the brand. Whether these customers are in the B2B or B2C space, your goal is to influence their purchasing decisions in favor of your brand, and by using Immersion strategies in your efforts, you increase your chances of success.

1. Targeting Your Ideal Audience

Every brand wants to be at the forefront of their potential customers’ mind, with with more than half of the world’s population being on the web, marketing teams are faced with the challenge of not only getting their brand online, but positioning it in front of the customers that will be of most value to their businesses.

Whether marketing teams are looking to expose potential customers to their brand via search, social or display advertising means, narrowing down your audiences for successful targeting is key.

Immersion makes use of any new or existing data you may have, whether online web data, CRM data, 3rd party data or more, and narrows down those customer lists to develop what we call In-Market Audiences. This process is carried out by identifying your Ideal Customer Profile, and analysing your customer data to segment your lists into defined audiences based on their common traits such as their job title, demographics, income, customer value, and more — which aids in the development of the key insights you will need to create relevant messaging that will drive results. These segments should be visible within each stage of the sales funnel as your messaging, creative and delivery strategies will differ as each group progresses.

Some Ways To Gather Customer Data:

• Previous or existing customer data (CRM lists)
• Website retargeting data
• 3rd Party data lists
• Loyalty or account data

2. Developing Actionable Audience Insights

Once you have identified your ideal audiences to be used in your marketing campaigns, you can proceed to develop insights that will inform on your creative, messaging and delivery strategies. Immersion marketing, places emphasis on having an understanding of the target audiences’ behaviors and preconceptions at each stage of the marketing process, and how one can leverage these to form insights that will see the creative and messaging strategy of the brand succeed.

In order to develop actionable insights that will aid you in later processes, you need to begin by taking a look at each audience segments’ common traits. As you should have already separated your audiences based on their stages of the sales funnel, the micro audiences or In-Market Audiences that you have created for customers within each stage will inform you on common characteristics of that group that will aid you in discovering how best to market to them. At this stage, you may be tempted to seek assistance from neuromarketing professionals, or turn to websites that aid you in the actual ad and messaging design — Don’t!

At this stage, you should merely be identifying the type of audience that each In-Market Audience group is comprised of, and what type of common ad characteristics they will best respond to.

For Example:

• Your Audience Is Comprised Of Upper Level Executives — This most likely means that they would not respond to colloquial language, and because of their busy lifestyles will not have time to read lengthy ads. Therefore you should ensure that your creatives are bold and eye catching, providing the key benefits of your offer that appeal to their pain points, written in simple fonts that appeal to their professional nature.
• Your Audience Is Comprised Of An Older Age Group — This might mean that you should not make use of difficult-to-read fonts or small text to ensure easy readability. Most likely you should make use of softer imagery and use full sentences as this group would not appreciate shorthand.
• Your Audience Is Comprised Of Middle-Aged Males — This would mean that many of these prospects are most likely family men, or are the main breadwinners in their household, and are responsible for taking care of others. This can indicate that you should appeal to an egocentric bias that makes them feel like their hard work is valued, avoiding the emotional appeal and heading straight for the key benefits of your offer and its monetary value.

As you can see, each audience type has its own unique way of looking and responding to a brand’s messaging — most of which will be derived from common sense, but as always Google can help. By having an understanding of what would best appeal to each audience group, you will be able to create more relevant ad creatives and messaging, which will provide you with higher success rates than a general messaging strategy used across all of your segments.

3. Creating Relevant Messaging

Immersion marketing is all about the ability to appeal to the consumers’ conscious and subconscious mind. Therefore, you not only need to know what type of creative and messaging strategy will work best for each of your audience groups, but you need to be able to create messaging that is relevant to their wants and needs at exactly the right time. Remember when we separated your audiences by the stages in the sales funnel? That plays a big part in this process as you need to be able to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.

For Example:

• If Your Audience Is Comprised Of New Leads — You should create messaging that introduces your audience to the brand, focusing on how you solve the pain points potential customers may have. You can adopt a question and answer based messaging approach for example, such as “Are You…”, then “We Can…”. This way the potential customers are faced with the real problems they are facing as well as a solution on how to solve them.
• If Your Audience Has Been Reached Out To — At this stage your audience has been exposed to how your brand soles their issue and needs to be reminded of this fact. For example, you can adopt a “Reminder” approach, such as: “Remember To Choose Us To…”, then “So That…”. This way potential customers are reminded if your offer and why they need it.
• If Your Audience Is In The Closing Stage — At this stage, your deals should be close to signing or purchasing. They have been exposed to your brand and have already been reminded about what you can offer them. All you need to do here is let them know that you are still here for them and are ready to help. For example, you can adopt the “Waiting” messaging strategy by using “Your Path To…Is Waiting”, then “Take The Final Step”. This shows that you are considerate and appreciate the audience’s decision, and are not pushing them to make a decision right now.

While it is best practice to alter your messaging based on where your targeted audience is in the sales funnel, you also need to remember the insights you have gained on each audience segment within these stages, and remember to update your audience lists as they move throughout the funnel to ensure your messaging remains relevant as they progress. Immersion allows you to accurately target your ads to each audience group as they move along in their customer journey, ensuring that your brand stays front of mind throughout the entire process.

“Success is making those that believe in you look brilliant.” — Dharmesh Shah ( Founder/CTO at Hubspot) @dharmesh

4. Precise Ad Targeting

As part of an Immersion based strategy, the aim of delivering your ads to your audience is largely based on where they are online as you want to ensure that no matter where they are, whether on a website, researching competitors, making use of search sites or social media, that your brands’ message is everywhere — making your brand unavoidable. It is not enough to merely use one platform, for true Immersion marketing success is the careful and strategic use of all platforms available to you to get the best result — helping you close the loop between all of the marketing resources at your disposal.

As in many marketing campaigns, you will be looking to load your audience lists to the various platforms you are looking at using, and focusing the majority of your resources on the platform that returns the best match rate. It is no longer enough to simply load audience lists and run campaigns, you need to create highly targeted campaigns for each of your audience groups in order to effectively measure what works and what doesn’t for that specific audience. This also allows you to easily update your audience lists as your customers move up or down the sales funnel. I go into precise ad targeting in other guides on our publication, so I will not bore your with the details here, to ensure that your eyes don’t go square from the heavy reading. But make sure that you read these articles by visiting our publication, Inside Revenue.

5. Developing Messaging And Delivering Strategies

A large part of an Immersion-based marketing strategy it is important to monitor and optimize not only your messaging sand creative strategies as your campaigns progress and your audiences change or move along the sales funnel, but to optimize your delivery strategies to increase chances of success. While you may be thinking that a low click-through-rate spells doom for your campaigns, that’s not what Immersion is all about. I’ll get to that part a little later on in this article.

What I’m talking about here is the careful monitoring of your view, reach and engagement results in terms of peak delivery times. Immersion is all about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time, which means more than delivering your messaging to prospects in terms of their sales funnel stages. Think about it. Do your customers spend more time on websites during the day, but more time on social at night? These kinds of insights can be guessed for sure, but to allocate your resources correctly and ensure that you’re reaching your audience at their optimal time of cognitive recognition and interest is key. This is where the careful monitoring of your results comes in.

6. Lesseing Marketing Spend Wastage

This is pretty simple to do when you’re using an effective Immersion marketing strategy. In short — if you are able to identify the exact audience that you are looking to target and deliver relevant messaging to them at just the right time, you will not be wasting your resources on reaching people that will not be interested in your brand or product, or be wasting your campaign budgets away on general messaging techniques that deliver to audiences while they’re sleeping.

Bu using the above techniques and taking advantage of a team that has experience in perfecting these types of campaign strategies, you can not only lessen your marketing spend wastage, but lessen the closing cycle of your deals, while maximizing your chances to increase the amount of positive ROI achieved.

#2 Immersion For Sales Success

I have previously taken you through what Immersion means to a brand’s marketing efforts, but what about sales? Surely that is the area that you’re most interested in? Well, as mentioned, when the two departments work together as one, Immersion success can soar to new heights, so below I will take you through what Immersion means in sales.

Immersion strategies work best when sales and marketing teams are aligned, and synchronized to perfection. Ask yourself, how can an Immersion strategy work if sales does not know what marketing is putting out there to specific audiences and when? How can marketing know when to deliver the right messaging to specific audiences and line their strategy up with what sales is promising them? Enough about that for now, let me take you through what an effective Immersion marketing strategy can do for your sales efforts.

1. Increasing Chances For Outreach Success

In a normal campaign, a sales person generally reaches out to a prospect once they have their contact information, whether received via a contact form or existing or purchased data list. If a customer has landing on your website and has requested a call, that’s great, that means that they might (and I say might) have done an appropriate amount of research on your offerings to make your job of closing that lead much easier.- but what if they haven’t, what if it’s just an enquiry because they’re still in their research phase? Or, what if you reach out to a contact on your data list who has never heard of your brand before? This makes life much more difficult doesn’t it?

This is where Immersion strategies come into play. In order for you to see a higher chance of success in your outreach efforts, it would benefit you if your prospects have already been made aware of your brand and its offerings before you reach out to them, allowing for an establishment of brand recognition and trust before you make that first call or send that first email. An effective Immersion campaign will start Immersing your prospects in your brand’s message 21 days before you begin making contact.

This number is key — have you ever heard that it takes doing something 21 times to form a habit? It’s the same concept here…if your prospect is exposed to your brand’s message for 21 days or more, they will more easily recognize your brand, and on a subconscious level begin to trust its message — so that by the time you reach out to them, they will be more receptive to your sales pitch! And isn’t that what every salesperson wants — a chance for them to get through the entire pitch before being hung up on or interrupted? Of course it is. If you decide to skip this step, you might as well rely on the old fashioned outreach results you’re used to — and everyone wants to increase their results don’t they?

2. Moving Prospects Down The Sales Funnel

So, we’ve covered the new prospects in the above section, but what about those prospects already in your sales funnel, or who have moved there from the above stage? As mentioned, Immersion is all about timing and relevance! By using the Immersion marketing methods in the previous section, your prospects will have the right message being delivered to them as they navigate through each stage of the funnel.

If your prospects still see the message they saw when they first got exposed to your brand, and eep seeing that message all the way through other end of the sales funnel )however long that may be), they will eventually get tired and stop noticing your efforts online. This is why it is crucial for marketing and sales teams to coordinate as these prospects move through the different stages. This will not only help reduce banner, and message fatigue, but develop on the foundation built up in the subconscious mind, helping your prospects take in additional messaging without you needing to redo the sales pitch each time.

Unlike with the first step of immersing your audiences in your brands’ message for 21 days before outreach, this marketing delivery continues on from that as you execute your usual follow up strategies — meaning no wait time before you follow up, just stick to the best practices on follow up times so that you don’t come across as overly pushy. Where possible, you should try incorporate any relevant messaging that marketing is using in your follow ups, which will spark the brain off and cause a reaction that will aid in your overall efforts — reminding them of what they’ve consciously or subconsciously noticed about your brand while being online.

3. Helping To Close More Leads More Quickly

It you haven’t already guessed, Immersion strategies help you close your sales leads more quickly. If you’re in the B2C space, your consumers will have been exposed to your products enough and in such a relevant way that their brains will signal them to consider making the purchase — it’s that simple. If you’re in the B2B space you may be wondering how this translates? Well, consider this. If marketing has been able to target their ads directly to the decision makers responsible for making the purchasing decisions at target accounts, by the time you reach out to your contacts in your initial outreach efforts, every relevant person at that company would already have heard of your brand and what it can do for them specifically, and at each stage of the funnel, so that by the time they move along it towards the closing stage, they’re most likely to go with the brand they’re already come to know and trust over that of a lesser-known competitor.

In both the B2C and B2C scenarios, Immersion style marketing has proven its worth when carried out correctly. It does not only lessen marketing’s spend wastage, but saves you time and money by reducing the number of outreach activities you need to do when compared to that of a non Immersion-based sales effort.

#3 How To Measure Immersion Success

When it comes to measuring the success of marketing and sales efforts, traditionally (depending if you’re in the B2C or B2B space you would be looking at click-through-rates or engagement levels, conversions or leads received, leads closed or purchases made, then obviously cost of acquisition in order to measure your overall Return On Investment (ROI).

What people don’t realize, is that while these metrics are important, Immersion marketing is not based on a lead generation tactic. It focuses on brand recognition and building brand trust in order to aid your sales team in closing the deals. I’m not saying that you should ignore your CTR and leads or conversion, but when it comes to an Immersion strategy, you should rather shift your perspective and adopt the mindset to that of a brand using more traditional marketing methods such as tv, billboard, radio and magazine ads.

You might be thinking that this sounds ridiculous, think about it. How often do brands se success by plastering ads across prime time tv slots, or by placing strategic billboards where they know their potential audiences will see them? Believe it or not, these types of advertising methods do work! They were always just too difficult to measure in terms of their success. This is where Immersion marketing techniques adopt traditional advertising methods such as these and translate them to suit the online world — allowing for their effective measurement.

How do you ask? Well, Immersion marketing solves the problem brands previously had by being able to measure the amount of times the brand’s’ message is seen, the unique number of people who have seen them, and how many times each of those people has come into contact with it.

These Metrics Are:

• Impressions — The number of times your brands’ message was seen by the entire audience you have targeted
• Reach — The number of unique people within your audience that has seen your brand’s message
• Message Frequency — The amount of times each of the people who have been exposed to your brands’ message have seen it

See how brands like Sureswipe used Immersion strategies through FetchThem to execute the perfect up sell campaign and increase their overall conversion rates and ROI by reading their success story here.

In an Immersion campaign, your goal is not to encourage lead generation, or to increase your conversion numbers or sales, itis to increase your brands’ exposure and recognition among the targeted audience to prime them for your salespeople to reach out to them in order to lead them further down the sales funnel while reducing your overall marketing spend wastage. It’s as simple as that. If you receive engagements, leads or sales directly from these campaigns, I see it as a bonus, but there is a reason that brands set aside budget specifically for lead generation campaigns, and conversion based campaigns.

In short, why are Immersion campaigns so successful? Because they work alongside your current sales efforts and further nurture leads and prospects. This means when you do reach out people have heard of and trust your brand which increases your chances of closing.

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While I could go on and on about the usefulness of Immersion strategies in your sales and marketing effort, I’m going to move onto another key area of focus, what you should watch out for when using these strategies in business. While not many brands adopt a complete Immersion strategy of synchronizing the sales and marketing processes to increase their chances for success, each brand implements some part of an Immersion strategy in their efforts, even if they do not recognize it.

In my next article, “Why Should My Business Use Immersion? — Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)”, I will take you through the common mistakes marketing and sales teams make when they think of Immersion, and a few other tips and tricks I think you might find useful.