You have been curating high quality content for your audience. You have been posting on social and building a community for your brand. People are aware of your business and you have the right product that addresses their needs, but the leads just aren’t coming in. What has gone wrong?
Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action (AIDA) – the essence of the AIDA model or any funnel strategy is in creating touchpoints with your potential customers at every stage of the buying journey. Given time, conversion will trickle down the funnel; depending on the product sales cycle, some will start to see results in a couple of weeks, or it could take months before the first sale comes in.
At the top of the funnel, while investing in traditional marketing tactics like blogs, PR, awards, and event sponsorships drives awareness for the brand, it might not be the most effective driver for product discovery unless you prompt your audience to do so. In this day and age of information overload, buzz from ad-hoc campaigns could be short-lived, especially when every brand is competing for user’s attention. Be it on Facebook, LinkedIn, or search engines, re-engaging your audience with the right messaging when they are ready to enter the purchase journey could unlock new sales opportunities, and performance marketing is here to speed up the process.
Performance marketing is about driving actions from your audience: driving site traffic, driving sign-ups for product demos, for example. These actions could be achieved organically for sure, but it can help your brand stay top-of-mind in a competitive environment, establishing communication touchpoints with your target audience before your competitor reaches them.
Performance marketing alone isn’t going to drive sustainable growth, and results aren’t going to appear overnight. From content and messaging, to targeting and channel placement, your paid media strategy should be formed in conjunction with your traditional marketing and organic media efforts to maximise its effectiveness.
Lack of budget and complexity in ROI measurement are often what deter businesses from investing in performance marketing, but we can make it easier for you. Get in touch for a consultation session to see if performance marketing is the missing piece to your growth engine.
How to set yourself up for success in performance marketing
1. Setting an appropriate media KPI and optimisation goal
While the end goal of activating paid media campaign is to drive sales and revenue, media campaign goals and objectives aren’t always the same as business goals and objectives; it can be more efficient optimising towards the immediate action (e.g a product page view) that you want to drive from your audience, rather than an action that is three steps ahead (e.g purchase).
As far as machine learning goes, the algorithm still needs to be fed data before it can learn to run ads effectively. For example, since it takes 50 optimisation events for the Facebook algorithm to exit learning phase, it is far easier and quicker to stabilise delivery if the optimisation goal is set to Page Views, rather than bottom-funnel metrics like Purchases.
That being said, it is still key to keep tabs on all funnel metrics as they are good indicators of your audience quality.
2. Set up a test & learn agenda
There is no one-size-fits-all media plan: find what works best for your business by testing it yourself. To kick things off, have a clear idea of what you want to learn about your audience, see what the priorities are and what is actionable in the short and long term, then set the hypothesis for each test.
3. Ensure the necessary tracking pixels are in place
Check that your analytics platform and ad platform pixels are tracking the relevant actions correctly, and make sure that all your URLs are appended with the appropriate UTM parameters for site activity to be recorded accurately.
4. Templatise and automate reporting
Automate reporting with third-party data aggregation tools such as Supermetrics, or link your Google Ads data with a Google Sheet Add-on or Google Datastudio whenever possible. Saving half an hour pulling data each week could spare you an extra 8 hours over 2 months!
More importantly, a standardised reporting template also helps you keep track of trends over time, and makes sure that key metrics are being pulled in and calculated correctly.
5. Monitor and optimise your campaign, but don’t overdo it
It takes time for the algorithm to learn and adapt delivery to your target audience – making too many changes in a short period of time would deprive the system from exiting the learning phase, which in turn could drive costs up.
Need a subject-matter expert to help with your performance marketing set up? Contact us today to find out more.
