MKJ is running a promotion about their new “Secret Strategy”. In this training, I give my opinion of their not-so-secret “Secret Strategy”.
The following transcript is AI generated. Please excuse any typos…AI isn’t perfect yet.
I receive hundreds of emails every day. The vast majority of them I never even open. This one caught my attention though. It’s from MKJ talking about an event they’ve got coming up in the next few weeks.
The subject line got my attention “be the first to know this secret strategy”. I like a good secre! I got my curiosity up, so I opened it.
Learn about behavioral marketing. Secret strategy? That confused me.
Behavioral marketing is one of the fundamental principles of marketing. It’s been around forever. It’s even in my mind map that I showed you last week.
At the top, in the circled area is what we talked about last week, how to evaluate your competitors.
But if I zoom in a little bit, there’s behavioral marketing right down there as one of the options. One of the approaches, the strategies, if you will, for marketing your funeral home.
There’s a lot of different types of marketing out there. Behavioral marketing is definitely one of them. It’s not exactly a secret.
Today I will give you a little bit of information on it and then you can decide whether you want to spend money going to Colorado or maybe just go on a ski trip instead.
We’ll talk about what is it, what are the pros, what are the cons? And I’ll give you an example.
What is it?
Behavioral marketing is the method by which companies target audiences based on their behavior, interests, intentions, geolocation, and other metrics. That’s from HubSpot a great source of good marketing information.
The metrics list is the key. You’re able to target an ad in front of somebody based upon a whole set of different things.
Retargeting means, did they come to your website? Now I can retarget you.
Geographic. Do they live in your area? I can target you. Have they expressed interest in your area?
I can target you demographic, data, gender, age, all sorts of different things, political leanings.
I can target you based on your searches as in what have you searched for in the last little while.
Have you ever notice that if you search for something pretty quickly thereafter, you start seeing ads for it all over the place. That’s called behavioral marketing.
Interest based targeting, do you, are you interested in a certain thing? Say golf. Realistically, you’re going to see more ads for golf clubs than a non-golfer will. Why? Because you’re interested in it and everybody knows it. It’s tracked somewhere.
Recency, frequency and monetary as in where have you spent your money? That gets tracked. All goes into a big database and behavioral marketing is about using that database to target people.
There are significant pros to it. It’s a very, very powerful strategy. It increases the relevance of advertising. Again, if you’re interested in golf, you’re going to see ads about golf.
That’s improving the overall efficiency of the ads because they’re relevant to me.
You’re going to get better conversion rates on those ads because you’re putting your ad in front of a very targeted audience, and you’re definitely going to have an in increased return on investment.
Fundamentally, behavioral marketing works, but there are cons to it.
There are significant privacy concerns. There are significant lawsuits all over the world right now because some companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, or now x, have been using this information and tracking people online for a long time and they’re getting into some legal problems for it.
You have the risk of becoming an annoyance and building mistrust instead of trust. People know that this is going on and they generally feel like you’re stalking them. Why are you following me on the internet? It’s not necessarily something that a funeral home should do carelessly.
It’s very powerful, but you have to be careful with this tool.
You have a very limited audience reach. You’re not talking to everybody. You’re talking to a very small group.
You’re dependent upon third party cookies. You’ve probably seen it where you go to a website now and, uh, there’s a popup there asking you to accept their cookies. The reason they’re having to do that is because of those lawsuits that I mentioned earlier.
People have cracked down on this and they’re not putting that accept my cookies message up because they want to. They’re putting it up because they’re legally required to.
There’s the potential for discrimination in this. As soon as you target one audience, you’ve excluded another audience that can be looked at as discrimination.
So yes, there are some pros and they’re great pros, but there’s some cons too, and you’ve got to be careful with this one.
Here’s an example.
Now we are running behavioral marketing campaigns for clients. We’ve been doing this for a long time.
Here’s a campaign that we are running for one client using Facebook.
Facebook provides you a, a piece of code that you can add to a website called the Facebook tracking pixel, which then Facebook tracks what happens. They, they’re providing all the, the intelligence, if you will, behind the behavioral marketing campaign.
We’re specifically looking at people that visited an obituary. The next time that person goes on Facebook, they’re going to see a 30 second video ad, and it’s really just a repurposed video that was run as a television commercial. We’re running the same one on Facebook.
This one happens to be extremely good quality, making really good points. So I’m okay with repurposing that one.
That person who was on your obit page is now going to see a commercial from the funeral home. That’s one audience.
Now, what Facebook then allows us to do is to create a new audience based upon people who watched the video and based upon how much of it they watched.
I think in our case, we’re looking at people that watched 50% of that 30 second commercial.
Somebody’s scrolling through their Facebook feed. A commercial comes on there for the funeral home.
They had recently been on that funeral home’s website. They start watching this instead of scrolling ahead, they actually engage with at least 15 seconds of that video. That’s a person who’s not going to be offended by you. You can target that person. You can follow up with them.
We follow up with that person in a new audience right away with an ad that offers grief resources.
That’s not offensive, that’s not a problem at all.
About two weeks later, they’re going to see an ad for pre-need.
Now, if we had done that in the reverse order and led with the pre-need ad that could be offensive. It’s too close to the event if they’ve experienced the loss, hitting them with a prenatal ad right away is rude.
No, we wait. Give that a couple weeks. First, we offer grief help. Then we offer preneed.
That’s the power of behavioral marketing. Based upon what they do, we can target them.
Now, this is a very powerful strategy, but it can be used in other ways. One of the textbook examples, and literally they teach about this in school. Ff you took a master’s marketing class, they’re going to use this as a case study. The fact that Trump’s digital marketing director used Facebook to help win the White House.
Yes, using almost the exact same technique that I just showed you for the funeral home. They put a video out first because videos advertising is extremely cheap on Facebook, cheaper than an image ad.
They put a video out first. If you watched a certain percentage of it, then you’ve got a series of campaign ads after that.
The first thing they put out there was an anti-Hillary video ad, and if you watched it, you’re in the target audience now and they’re going to follow you and track you all the way through.
This is how powerful this is. This is why this is not necessarily a tool that every funeral home should get into.
It’s a tool that is very powerful, but it needs to be used very carefully.
Behavioral marketing, I’ve described what it is, giving you some pros, giving you some cons, and gave you an example.
It’s not new, it’s not a secret, but it is extremely powerful.
Now you can decide whether you want to go out to Colorado and sit through three days of learning about this, or you could just take a ski vacation.
Myself, I’d rather take the ski vacation. I’ll be back next week. Bye for now.