Advertising isn’t about giving people more choice, it’s about helping them narrow down their decision and inform their decision-making journey. Giving your prospects the opportunity to tell you when they’re no longer interested in something is not only an effective approach to focus your spend, it also gives better engagement to your overall brand. Let’s face it, being followed around by irrelevant advertising is a massive put off.
Serving relevant content to your prospects each time they engage with your website can involve a series of cues that prompt them onto the next piece of content or action that’s relevant to their decision-making journey.
Feedback is always useful to inform the process different prospects might take, but often surveys and Q&A’s are too onerous and have a poor response rate. We have found that asking a series of smaller cues gives instant feedback which can improve a prospects journey immediately, but also how you inform your remarketing and advertising strategy on a weekly basis.
Sometimes asking whether someone is still interested or not can be viewed as a negative question, but here’s why it isn’t.
Being able to understand how prospects are thinking about course areas, or other associated courses or pathways can help with your approach to informing what they might be interested in next.
You can reduce drop off from your website and serve relevant content whilst finding out what other courses they might be interested in. All of this informs the most likely journeys other prospects might take and more bluntly, ensures you’re listening a little more.
If you were speaking with a prospect in person, you would ask them questions about their study status, their interests, where they’re from and what they’re thinking about a particular course. You’d then adapt what you’d say, the information about level of study, related courses, societies or finance advice.
Flip this to the online user journey and if you’re not asking prospects anything, you’re literally just hoping their journey and search skills on your site, helps them to the right content. By serving questions through cues, you could begin to shape their online journey and shorten the time they might spend trying to find the information they need and more time engaging with the right content – based on what they’ve told you.
We all know that calls to action are important but often specific actions on a page can be easily missed – even with numerous user journey tests. Prompting prospects can help improve the journey through specific actions you would like them to take.
Tracking what prospects do on a specific page can inform what cues they may need to help them take the action(s) needed. This could be using a tool you have on a page, signing up for an event or even picking up on an application process.
Remarketing can prove a powerful way of reminding a prospect of their journey with you so far, but there’s a limit to how often a specific advert will have an impact. In fact, if a specific course is no longer of interest, ongoing promotion of it could have a detrimental effect on how a prospect views you as an institution.
If you can inform your campaigns by asking questions, not only are you serving the right content when a prospect is on your website, you can also inform your digital advertising.
And not only is this a smarter way to run a campaign and spend, it’s far more ethical too. We’ve all been annoyed by being followed by an ad that’s no longer relevant. Why wouldn’t you be checking this with prospective students?
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