RAM adds a new revenue stream with sponsored retargeting

Marketing takes time. And the nonprofits and associations that are actively growing their community are putting in the slow and constant effort of telling their story to everyone who will listen. And then waiting to see who bites.

Austin Morgan is the marketing and communications coordinator for the Restaurant Association of Maryland (RAM). And his mission from the start has been to bring RAM to a new generation of restaurant owners, managers, and employees.

Austin says, “When I joined, our executives had this idea that we need to get more modern — we need to do more digital marketing. We can go to restaurants, we can show up in person. But that only gets you so far today.”

As times change, the way we connect to each other changes too. In the past, you’d show up to a restaurant and hang around until the owner showed up. But now those relationships more often than not start online.

Let’s take it from the top

If you’ve been in marketing for some time, you know how often the funnel image pops up. But there’s a reason for that: it works. People who don’t yet know about your organization are going to interact with you differently from those who are getting to know you — who in turn are different from those who already know you well.

Austin says, “The way I think about our marketing funnel is starting with pretty much anyone who’s in the restaurant world. That could be a restaurant owner or manager or employee. And our general campaign ads that we run in the background year round are those awareness ads showing off our brand, possibly for the first time.”

The primary way RAM finds these new audiences is through search keyword campaigns. By using information about what people are searching for online, RAM is able to serve ads to the people who are searching for the things that they uniquely provide. 

Sample ad from keyword search campaign

Talking about the keywords, Austin says, “It could be anything from grease trap removal to employee training. We’re looking for a pain point that we know managers or owners are facing.”

But once someone clicks on one of these general ads, RAM now knows what interests them. And with retargeting campaigns, they start to increase the frequency at which these audiences see their ads. And they can get more specific with messaging, since they know the exact page they landed on.

“We know who these people are,” Austin says. “They just came to our website. We even know what page they landed on, and our assumption is that these aren’t accidents.”

There’s an ad for that

Marketing at its best is tapping into these unknown drivers behind our behavior. When we’re reading the news online but end up on RAM’s website, we may not have set out to take that trip when we pulled out our phone, but something inside us connected with the message.

Austin says, “People don't always even know what they're searching for. But I think it's just the availability of the different campaign types or campaign styles in Feathr that allow us to find so many new members. It's not a one-campaign-fits-all strategy. Feathr allows us to run really detailed and specific campaigns for our unique audience members.”

Everyone’s a little different. And by having access to a wide range of distribution channels, RAM is able to connect with future members exactly where they are.

“The most important thing for me is the segmentation I can do in the platform,” Austin says. “We have so many different types of buckets based on audiences’ different needs. We can group people based on their interest. Even if we don't know exactly who they are for privacy reasons, we still know what their interest is, so we can serve ads to only the most relevant audiences.”

Your audience is valuable

Associations and nonprofits know how important their members, partners, supporters, and communities are. But sometimes it’s hard to connect that value to the dollars and cents.

Associations have access to unique audience groups, and though you would never sell anyone’s personal information, you can share that anonymized audience with partners and organizations that want access to those same people. 

Austin says, “I actually sent out an email this morning to partners who are distributors and restaurant adjacent, saying, ‘Hey, we're having a flash sale on ads.’ So we created these bundle packages where we sell 50,000 or 100,000 ad impressions. So even between our big events or membership drives, we’re still bringing in revenue year-round through digital.”

This type of partnership is a win-win for RAM and their local partners. They’re adding a new revenue stream while partners are becoming insiders to their unique community.

Austin says, “It allows our members to advertise with more relevance. We're a very niche sort of association. We know that 80% of our website traffic is coming from restaurant owners, operators, and managers. So, we sell ads to our allied members who want to get in front of those exact people.”

Example of a sponsored retargeting ad that RAM serves on behalf of partner

At the heart of Feathr’s sponsored retargeting is the idea that the right partnerships can lift everyone up. RAM is seeing increased revenue, but they’re also fostering connections between their partners and their valuable community.

He says, “We want to increase RAM's value, but we also want our partners to be able to increase their value. And Feathr plays the role of connecting them with our community.”

“Show me the money”

RAM never asks their sponsors for blind trust. In Feathr, partners can see live reports that spell out exactly how campaigns are performing. And RAM can share these reports directly with them through a link, letting them see for themselves the impact of their sponsored retargeting campaigns.

Austin says, “We give all our partners a link to the dashboard so they can track everything in real time. And this shows them how the campaign is performing so they can change up the ads if they want to or change their messaging.”

RAM used Feathr to get in front of new members in the restaurant world while expanding their digital revenue by selling retargeting ads to current partners. Check out how you can use Feathr to grow your community and meet them exactly where they are — online!