As promised, in this article I reveal the incredibly powerful but oddly obscure remarketing strategy.

I started investigating the possibility of becoming a life coach some time ago, and as an online marketing guy, one of the first things I did was look into how I would market it.  What I discovered kind of took me aback.  I found that there are thousands of life coaches out there, and it seems like marketing is a real challenge.

As a pay per click expert, I was interested to know how life coaches were utilizing this fundamental marketing platform and I was surprised to find that almost no life coaches were advertising there—not even the big names in the personal development field like Wayne Dyer, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Joe Vitale, Esther Hicks, Jack Canfield, Marianne Williams, etc.

Then it occurred to me why this was probably the case.  Search Engine Marketing, otherwise known as Pay Per Click, or just PPC, can be really tricky. Google has devised an incredibly sophisticated and complex marketing platform, but frankly, the user experience leaves a lot to be desired.  And when you combine high complexity with a confusing interface it can be a real problem for the users. Then you throw in the fact that if you make a mistake it can cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars within a matter of hours, you have the makings of some real horror stories.  I am sure that many life coaches have tried pay per click not really understanding the complexities of it and really got burned.  The word spread, and now the only life coaches who attempt it are the ones who haven’t been around long enough to hear the horror stories.

Their Loss is Your Gain

And that presents an incredible opportunity for You! This is what we in the marketing game call a Green Field opportunity—wide open spaces to expand with virtually no competition.

But what about that nasty problem of the runaway spending?  Well, it doesn’t have to be that way.  In this article I am going to reveal a way for you to laser-target your advertising, showing your ads to people who are clearly interested in your service and paying just pennies per click when they click through.  Furthermore, you can customize your messages to address their specific interests or concerns as well as their stage of the buying cycle.  Talk about laser targeting!

And because you are only showing your ads to those few people who are really interested, you can generate lots of high quality traffic for a very modest budget.

Remarketing 101

So enough with the build up.  Let’s get into the details.

The strategy I am talking about is Google’s Remarketing system, sometimes also referred to as ‘retargeting’.  (I should add here that Microsoft AdCenter has the same technology that works in basically the same fashion, but I’ll focus on Google for now).  I wrote an article on retargeting back in 2010 when it was brand new, and it is still very obscure.

When most people think of Google Adwords they think about keyword matching.  With keyword matching in the search network, Google looks at the keyword someone has typed into the form and matches that word with words advertisers have bid on.  In terms of the Display Network, the traditional method was to match the keywords an advertiser has bid on with the content of a website that displays Google’s Adsense ads.  The theory there is that if the content of the website matches the advertiser’s keywords, then the visitors to that sight should be interested in their ads.

The Remarketing system functions very differently.  Here keywords aren’t the primary criteria to determine if a person would be interested in your ad.  Instead, Google looks at whether a person has ever visited your site or not, and if they have, what did they do on your site.  In other words, they don’t have to infer from keyword matching that someone is possibly interested in your service.  Google knows they are interested because they’ve already visited your site.

That means that if you can just get somebody to visit your site once, all of a sudden you (via Google) can identify that person anywhere they go on the web and keep showing them your ads over and over again.

You have no doubt observed this yourself, right?  You visit a particular website and the next thing you know you are seeing their ads all over the place–on YouTube, in Gmail, and on random sites all over the web.  You are being retargeted.  And though it is really pretty obvious what is happening–you visit a particular site and all of a sudden their ads start showing up all over the place–most people are generally unaware of what is going on.

Tony Robbins is all over this.  You probably thought you were seeing his ads everywhere because he has so much money that he can afford to just blanket the web with his ads.  No!  You are seeing his ads because you have visited his site before, and he (i.e. Google) knows it. If you aren’t seeing his ads all over the place, just go visit his site and I expect you will be soon enough.

But Tony is the only one!  As a search engine marketing specialist, I know how to research what people are doing with pay per click. So of course I dug into this and was really surprised to see no other personal development gurus doing this.  Now I should add that there are several life coaching programs like the Coach Training Alliance and Websites for Coaches doing it.  But no individual coaches.

So think about this: What if you set up a retargeting campaign targeted specifically at people who had already visited your site?  Then you went about any number of ways to get people over to your site through social media, email marketing, etc. Now those people are going to start seeing your ads all over the place. Chances are they won’t put two and two together and say ‘oh, I must be seeing their ads because of Google’s retargeting technology’.  They are more likely to say, ‘Wow! This person must be really successful because I keep seeing them all over the place.  They are really blowing up!’

And whether or not visitors understand the mechanics of what’s going on, the fact remains that you are going to be right there, reminding them again and again of the benefits you have to offer.  Every marketer knows that repetition, repetition, repetition is the key to getting your message across.  With remarketing you have the ability to repeat your message over and over to the people who matter, and not to all the other people who will click your ads indiscriminately and thus transfer all your funds over to Google.

Retargeting?  More Like Laser Targeting!

It gets even better.  Because Google doesn’t just allow you to target people who have visited your site, but people who have visited specific pages within your site.

So let’s say you had a special limited-time offer on your site.  You could have one set of ads running that just points people to that offer, and this would appear to anyone who had visited any page of your site recently.  Then you could set up a different set of ads targeted at those people who actually viewed the limited time special offer.  This ad might include a deadline date or some other key benefit about the special offer.  And let’s say you have a form on your page where people could request a particular article related to that offer.  You could create another set of ads specifically related to that article.

Or here’s another great one.  You offer a simple, one-question survey like “What is your greatest challenge in life?”  Your visitors answer the question and depending on the answer, they get placed into a retargeting group specific to their answer.  If they answered that their relationship is their greatest challenge, they will see ads from you about how you can help with their relationship.  If their depressed, your ads will focus on depression.

You get the idea. Can you imagine how great your conversion rate would be if you could laser target your ads like that?

Now I don’t mean to make this sound like it’s just as simple as that.  As I said, the Google Adwords application is complicated, and to do the kind or laser targeting I just described would require web development work to integrate Google’s codes.  And then there’s creating the banners themselves, writing your content, setting up your lead capture system, etc.  It takes some serious marketing and technical chops to make this happen.

And that’s where I come in.  I have the skills to implement a sophisticated remarketing program for you.  And that’s not all.  Whether you need help with email marketing, social networking, search engine optimization, graphic design, product development… you name it.  I can help you.

And for a limited time, I’m working at a discounted rate so I can quickly build my client base.

If you’d like to understand how these systems work, learn more about my experience, or just brainstorm some ideas feel free to contact me and I’ll be happy to discuss your plans.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Dane

Email: coach@danechristensen.com
Phone: (408) 781-1767
Skype: mentor124
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/danechristensen/