Be ready.
I perform a lot of internet searches for various products that I am helping clients with, so I get trailed by a lot of advertising. And these ads follow me virtually everywhere on the internet, so much so that they often seem ridiculous (I won’t name any names 😃).
I often wonder about how often that happens and how many ads are wasted on the wrong audience.
What if marketers put their ads on pages where there was actually some connection to the product for which the user was searching? What would happen then?
Well, it turns out that somebody else asked themselves that very question, and they actually hired a brain scan company to search for a genuine answer.
Previously, according to the usual market research methods, 74% of those surveyed said that they like to see ads on a page that matches the content of the ads, and 60% said that they were more likely to remember an ad on a page that matched it’s content. (i.e., new tractor ads surrounding an article about tractor buying).
The Integral Ad Science organization, however, took a biometric approach. They hooked up brain readers to a bunch of folks and asked them to browse the internet a bit; their brain waves were then recorded.
To make sure I don’t get their methodology wrong, here’s a quote on how they conducted the study:
Participants were asked to spend 30 minutes using an iPhone to browse pre-selected articles on eight different sites. They were shown one article and one ad per site. The digital advertisements were embedded naturally into the feed of each article, and multiple advertising industries were represented. Within the eight sites, four ads were shown alongside unmatched content and four ads were shown alongside content matched by either the article theme or message.
The research showed that ads matching their surrounding content are remembered 25% more than those that don’t match their surrounding content. In addition, these ads have 10%- to 23%-higher click-through rates, reducing overall advertising costs and increasing conversion.
Makes sense, right?
Now, on to the farmer’s perspective. Farmers don’t want to be led down a marketing funnel; they want the ability to cut to the chase, find out what they want to know, and move on to purchasing options. Asking farmers to jump through hoops once they’ve clicked on your ad is a sure way to turn them off. Give them direct communication and the ability to order or learn more.
They don’t have the time or the patience for anything else.
Be ready!
