I especially liked tip #4: “Compare yourself to others.” It’s illustrated by a page from the Territorial Seed catalog, which lists 10 ways their plants “stand out from the rest.” Virtually all — such as “plant-safe boxes” and “convenient ship dates” — are claims that any gardening cataloger can make, but no matter. The catalog page still serves the purpose of establishing Territorial Seed as an expert, and giving the buyer complete confidence that they’ll receive robust, healthy plants at the appropriate time for planting.

That’s why remarketing programs, such as Google remarketing, are generally tremendously successful. We’ve found, however, that many companies miss one huge opportunity when creating a remarketing program: text ads.

For many of our clients, text ads account for about 75% of their remarketing ad impressions. Yet it seems that most companies only use image ads for their remarketing campaigns, thereby missing a lot of potential.

Another benefit of text ads is that they’re less expensive to create than image ads. That makes it easy to keep testing new ads, which leads to better performance in the long run.

If you’re running a remarketing campaign that just uses image ads, consider adding some text ads to the mix to maximize your reach.

One approach I’ve seen used in other industries is to connect with influential bloggers and offer to send them free product if they agree to write about it. The understanding is that the bloggers are free to write whatever they like, be it good or bad. But naturally, with a good product, the outcome is almost uniformly favorable.

Start with a list of gardening blogs, and determine which ones have the greatest affinity with your products. Don’t just send product cold. Contact the bloggers, introduce yourself and your company, and ask if they’d be open to trying your product(s) and blogging about it/them.

For just a bit of time invested, you’ll spread the word and get good feedback at the same time.

Called See First, it allows Facebook users to select Pages or people to receive priority in their news feed. To turn on See First for a person or Page you’re following, you hover over the Following button near their cover photo and click on the See First option that appears in the drop-down menu.

Each Facebook user can only select up to 30 people or Pages to see first, so it’s important to encourage fans to add your company Page to their priority list now.

Take, for instance, Target’s decision to allow Internet access within its stores. Executives were fearful that doing so would lead shoppers to compare prices and buy from less expensive online competitors.

According to Internet Retailer, Target instead discovered that the majority of in-store shoppers visited www.target.com, in search of product reviews, other styles, and customization options. Target is now “show-rooming” itself, highlighting products that they only sell online. The strategy has boosted sales all around.

That reminded me of an historic example of how different distribution methods complement each other: The Book of the Month Club. When it was founded in 1926, a club that distributed books by mail was a revolutionary concept — one that had a lot of naysayers. The addition of the negative option automatic shipment feature further turned publishing on its head. Retail bookstores were terrified. Many of them tried to thwart the competition by joining the club, then returning the monthly selection in droves.

Eventually, the bookstores realized that whenever the Book of the Month Club featured a particular book, it sold more in bookstores as well. Instead of being a threat, the Book of the Month Club was providing free advertising for the bookstores.

The moral of the story? Don’t let fear drive your actions. Until proven otherwise, always entertain the possibility that your fear may be unfounded. It’s rather surprising how often that’s the case.

1. Use the search function within Analytics to identify all the branded search terms. You’d be surprised what people search on. To use our site as an example, in addition to “Evergreen Marketing,” a significant number of people come to our site by searching on these keywords:

evergreenmarketing
Evergreen Group
Evergreen Shelton CT
www.EvergreenMarketing.com
Val Gosset
Valerie Gosset

If I look in Analytics for search terms that include “Evergreen” and “Gosset” (and the common misspelling “Gossett”), I can uncover most of the branded searches that drove traffic to our site.

Keep in mind that your SEO efforts tend to drive unbranded traffic, while branded searches generally represent people who are already familiar with your company.

2. Google Analytics lists a tremendous percentage of your organic search as “not provided.” 75% to 85% of organic search usually falls in this nebulous category. “Not provided” represents people who were logged into a Google account while they were searching, or who used specific browsers, among other things.

To calculate what percentage of your organic search is branded, subtract the number of “not provided” searches from the total searches, and calculate branded searches as a percentage of the balance (i.e., all searches for which the keyword is known).

You can learn a lot from reviewing your analytics, but it can be easy to jump to the wrong conclusion if you don’t dig deeply enough.

Look more closely, and the vast majority of organic searches are almost always branded ones. That is, they involve some variation of the company name. Sometimes it’s the company name itself. Other times, it’s the company URL, some other variation or misspelling of the company name, or perhaps a proprietary product.

It’s likely that more than 75% of your organic searches are for branded searches. This traffic, plus your “Direct” traffic (i.e., people who typed your URL directly into the navigation bar), is coming from people who are already familiar with your company. Chances are that nearly all of the Direct and branded Organic Search traffic is catalog-driven. Cut your catalog mailings, and you’ll cut your Organic Search in the process.

There are a couple caveats regarding how to calculate what percentage of your traffic comes from branded search. I’ll go into those in my next post.

Run ads on Facebook, using their Lookalike Audiences feature. You can upload email addresses of your buyers, and Facebook will then show your ads to prospects with similar attributes.

Your ads can run in the Facebook news feed, right column, or both. Be specific about the benefits your newsletter offers. Continually test both images and copy.

Instead of sending people to your site to sign up, another option is to use a Facebook plug-in to create a newsletter signup tab right on your Facebook page.

While Facebook users may not be in “shopping mode” while on Facebook, a newsletter signup is a much easier result to achieve, and gives you the ability to market to a new audience repeatedly.

In a recent blog post, One of Google Adwords’ Best Kept Secrets, I described how to check the Search Term Report to learn exactly which phrases triggered your PPC ads. Today I was doing just that for a client who sells gardening tools. It was remarkable to note how often the singular version of a keyword was profitable, while the plural was not. So for instance, garden trowel was profitable, while garden trowels was not; garden cultivator was profitable, while garden cultivators was not.

I suspect that people who search on the plural of a term are in the early innings of shopping, and they’re checking out options, while people who search on the singular term are closer to actually buying. That’s only a suspicion, but the reason doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that it was a consistent pattern, for this client anyway. By eliminating searches for plural variations, we’ll make their PPC campaign more profitable.

The specifics may be different in your case, but the principle still holds. Regularly inspect your Search Term Reports and look for common threads among search terms that aren’t profitable, then use that insight to refine your campaigns.