Our Interview With Elevate Magazine
We sat down with the team at Elevate Magazine for their series “Branching Out” which examines ways today's financial marketers are reaching new audiences.
Elevate Magazine (EM): What challenges have you faced when trying to reach new markets and demographics?
Nikki Lindgren: In the Paid Media lane specifically, platforms are headed on a machine learning path and tracking is getting even less clear. What this translates to is while it's just as easy and affordable as ever to reach new audiences, the insights around who the audience is comprised of is limited. That is until you get the customer to convert and you get your st party data.
My recommendation: use paid to create the funnel, but rely on MER to determine program success, not ROAS or CAC.
EM: How do you identify new audiences? What data analytics tools or processes do you use?
Nikki Lindgren: Get in the habit of using 1st party data. See what GA4 is telling you about the site visitor and survey your customers. Once you identify this new audience, speak directly to them in your messaging, just be aware that your digital team is going to target an audience broader than your target, that's fine, it's just a sign of the times. When your messaging is specific, the paid ads platform will help show it to the right folks!
EM: How do you measure the success of these efforts?
Nikki Lindgren: ACOS and MER 100%. Please, please, please stop using last-click GA4 data (or Shopify data) and please pay little attention to ROAS...ROAS is fading by the minute.
EM: What role do you see print advertising playing in these types of initiatives?
Nikki: There is a resurgence of traditional media, including print coming back into the mix. Lean into this carefully, and be very data-driven in the decision to go into print. Test a few markets at the same time to see where you can get the biggest awareness lift.
EM: How does it compare to digital marketing tactics?
Nikki: From a reach perspective print can be pretty effective, obviously, there is little tracking around print, but given people need to see a brand on average 7 times before converting there is strength in showing up across different mediums for those 7 impressions.
EM: Can you share an anecdote about a successful partnership or collaboration you used to reach a new market or demographic?
Nikki: We've found growth using creators to create non-traditional UGC for our brands. Examples include running products over by monster trucks to prove product strength. Finding new ways to use products, ie: under-eye cream for cuticles, etc. While we don't support people buying our clients' products for these use cases, the goal is to stop people in their tracks to consider our brands in the first place, and that's what non-traditional UGC is doing for us.
EM: How do you tailor your marketing messaging and content to resonate with new audiences?
Nikki: We take a super tight, 3-foot view of what it's like to be part of the new audience. We speak directly to their desires, pain points, etc. This enables us to do everything in our power to break through with the audience from the get-go. As a result, we see a 28% higher CTR for ads that speak directly to the audience when compared to our basic evergreen messaging.
Takeaway, BE SPECIFIC!
EM: How do you strike a balance between targeting new audiences and maintaining your current customer base and loyalty?
Nikki: We work with great email/sms marketing agencies that kill it from a retention perspective. That said, quarterly we'll take a pass of lapsed customers to get them to repurchase from us with a limited-time promo or some incentive.
Why only quarterly? Because our brands do a great job with retention already and have limited budgets, so focusing too heavily on showing ads to retain customers gets in the way of scalability.