Most people feel pretty intimidated when it comes to designing a paid marketing campaign and rightfully so. If you do not execute that campaign well or if it’s poorly designed, you’re likely to waste a lot of money. In this article, I’m not going to go into the nuts and bolts of how to use an ads platform like Facebook but instead give you an understanding of how you should think about it. Your strategy should always lead your tools, not the other way around.
A Marketing Funnel
The first thing you need to understand is that there are three main phases in marketing. People define these phases in various ways, but for our purposes, let’s define them as Brand Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. Think of each of these terms as buckets that someone falls into in the process of possibly working with you or buying your product.
Once you understand these three phases, or buckets that people fall into, then you can design a marketing funnel that supports a process that builds a relationship with people to turn them into customers.
Brand Awareness
The first step in a marketing funnel is Brand Awareness. No one will ever buy your product or service if they don’t know you exist. You can use a variety of different platforms like billboards, social media ads, and more, to make sure people are aware that you exist.
At Caffeine Marketing, one of our favorite ways to make potential customers aware of our clients’ product services is through Facebook ads. Often it’s the most effective and affordable when done correctly. Metrics that should be important to you at this stage in the marketing process are impressions as well as link click or possibly even landing page views.
Consideration
After someone knows what you offer and who you are, they may be considering buying your product or service but are just not ready yet. In this phase of the relationship, you should be designing marketing systems that enable you to stay top of mind for a potential customer. Regardless of what marketing tool that you are using, you should be educating your customers on how you can make their life better.
Outside of running retargeting campaigns with ads, another great way to help move people towards conversions is social media marketing. Julia and her team can help you create content for social media that will show people who already follow you.
Conversion
A conversion is an event that you want to happen. The event that most people care about is the sale of a product or service. Often when you’re first starting an advertising campaign, you will look at other conversion events like lead generation sign-ups as well as add to carts.
The reason that we look at those other conversion events that are happening before we look at purchases is that often we do not have enough data or sales yet to determine if the campaign is effective. This can tell us if we should tweak something on the website or in the advertisement itself.
In Summary
No matter what tool you use, you should be thinking about your customers’ journey to working with you, like the stages of a relationship. These phases can not be rushed, but there are things that you can do to make them happen. Both Julia and I work with people who have wasted a lot of time and money on marketing that doesn’t work. One of the biggest reasons this happens is because people don’t understand the framework I laid out for you above.
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