Anyone who has ever walked into a Lowe's or Home Depot to buy a lawn mower can relate to the number of choices available. Even with large inventories to start every spring season, these retailers seem to always be out of stock by mid-summer.
So, what is the secret behind selling lawn mowers?
Campaigns to sell lawn mowers are like most retail campaigns–you start by building a great audience, and then you optimize that audience for the digital channel. There are four steps:
If you are starting from scratch, the most important step in selling any product is knowing your audience’s demographics.
With Semcasting’s Smart Zones audience targeting platform, you have access to over 750 demographic variables, enabling you to determine the exact size of a prospect’s lot, whether they own their home, their discretionary income and their location. You can qualify your prospects for distance to the store and ability to pay. You can personalize your online ads, targeting homes in each trade area, based on lot size and ability to pay.
Picture yourself in a Home Depot looking for a lawn mower. You visit the garden center, check out the live plants and play around with BBQs. You even buy some grass seed.
The behaviors you show in the store are analogous to what you do online. The difference is that when you’re online, these behaviors and actions are taking place in an anonymous world–difficult to track and difficult to leverage into product sales. With Semcasting’s Site Visitor Attribution (SVA), you can collect this data from visitors to your website and turn it into baselines for follow up action. Visits are identified for retargeting or turned into direct leads.
To optimize your campaign for the best ROI, you’ll want to match your selected audience with the media categories they have shown a preference for in the past. Match audiences to contextual categories, ad sizes, devices, time of day and day of week. This will accelerate your engagement with your prospect, increasing the likelihood that they will turn into a buyer.
When it comes time to launch your lawn mower campaign, you’ll have a fully customized audience, matched to their media preferences and closest storefront. They have the ability to pay and they may have already shown an interest in home and garden products. The coordinated use of multi-dimensional data is a key part of the Smart Zones cookie-free targeting platform. It enables any retailer to customize audience targeting to known buyers with real interest, before the first impression is served.
Learn more by visiting our Smart Zones page.