If you’ve ever felt like you were wasting money on pay-per-click ads, or you didn’t get the results that you expected, this article is going to explain exactly what happened and how you can better spend your money next time. You will be astonished by how easy it is to run proper ads, once you get the key concepts discussed in this article.
PLEASE NOTE: I am not responsible for the sheer joy you may experience at finding your inbox filling up with leads who want to learn more about your business’ products and services. You proceed at your own risk, with the full understanding that people might find out you exist, or worse–if they find out you might be able to solve their problems.
Now that we got that out of the way, I first want to cover something very basic to digital marketing that you MUST understand if you are going to be your own advertiser. This applies to any form of marketing and is a concept that we “marketeers” innately know and rely on to give us results, every time.
Understanding Digital Marketing: The Inverted Pyramid
The FIRST THING you have to visualize is an inverted pyramid. Just take a moment…close your eyes (after reading this paragraph) and picture the Great Pyramid at Giza, upside down, floating 1 foot off the ground.
Did you do that? Excellent. Now you understand everything there is to know about digital marketing and how to get thousands of leads. Congratulations!
You might think I am joking but if you can visualize that exact image using your mind’s eye, then you will never have trouble coming up with marketing campaigns that work. Now, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of why this imagery is so key, and how you can leverage it to become the Top Dawg of Pay-per-click Advertising.
The Three Levels of Digital Marketing
The pyramid that you previously imagined is actually composed of 3 gross levels. Sure there are strata in between, with some melding into the layers above and below them, but one could generally conceive of this upside pyramid having 3 categories.
Let’s step away from that image for a moment and visualize something similar, and probably even MORE helpful. I want you to imagine a funnel, with lots of water being poured into it. And below it–a jug. And that jug has your business’ name labeled on it. Each drop in that flow of water is a PERSON. And that funnel is your “marketing funnel.”
The Purpose of Marketing
The whole purpose of marketing is to:
- catch someone’s attention,
- tell them you exist,
- then convince them that they need your product or service,
- and then drive them to buy it NOW or as close to NOW as possible.
The closer to NOW you can get, the better you are at marketing.
Sometimes, however, getting them to buy now is not feasible, maybe because the product or service is expensive or hard to get. The person might have to think about it, and weigh the pros and cons of buying it, versus not buying, or worse–getting that product or service from someone else.
If you really did your homework, then you will be able to handle anybody, or close to anyone, no matter how hot or cold they are as a prospect. Where that person is in terms of “readiness to buy or reach” is where they are inside that funnel.
The level at the top of the pyramid is BRAND AWARENESS. The second, middle layer, is CONSIDERATION. And the third level (bottom, smallest) is CONVERSION. Depending on your marketing campaign, this CONVERSION goal might be a reach, such as the submission of a contact form, or a sale.
If you have to work the prospect over with more information, newsletters, or social media content before convincing them to buy, then that is called “nurturing your lead.” You do that once they have provided their contact information, such as an email. That is all part of the CONSIDERATION stage.
Now that we know the names of these 3 levels, let’s dive into what each of them means and what they look like in terms of marketing. The better you understand this, the more successful your campaigns will be–and the happier you will feel about the results of your hard work and dedication.
Brand Awareness: Telling People You Exist
The biggest problem you have (according to you) is sales. You need money now. But that is too limited a view. That is like saying “I need steak” when you haven’t eaten for 3 days. You don’t need steak per se; what you really need is FOOD. The beginning of sales is letting people know you exist, who you are, what your name is, and what you do. Anything that answers the well-known “WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHY” questions could fit under BRAND AWARENESS.
Why PPC Advertising Becomes Expensive and Unsuccessful
Now I am going to drop the secret of why ads are expensive, why you don’t get leads, and why your friend’s business gets tons of sales and yours doesn’t. By the way–Elon Musk uses this exact piece of information I am about to bequeath you to make billions of dollars every year, so don’t share it lest you make someone else rich beyond their wildest dreams.
THE FIRST STEP IN GETTING LEADS IS LETTING PEOPLE KNOW YOU EXIST!
Oh, my Lord! It’s unbelievable isn’t it? But do you know–so many people run ads telling audiences to BUY NOW without every telling them who the heck they are or what they do? And if you run ads that way, you are going to spend LOADS of money until some poor luckless soul takes the bait and purchases your ware. By that point; the $25 dollar t-shirt sale you made becomes meaningless because you spent $283 dollars convincing someone to get it.
The bottom line is, telling thousands of people you exist costs dollars. Telling thousands of people to BUY your product costs LOTS of dollars.
But now here’s another way to go at it. Did you know that telling people you exist costs pennies? Don’t sell them anything. Just constantly say “Hey! I AM HERE.” And eventually someone will hear or see you and think “Oh! I was just talking about that to someone the other day!”
And do you know that if you then run an ad targeted to THAT person, which will cost half a dollar or a few dollars, they will most likely BUY your product?! Why? Because they WANTED it to begin with.
I can hear the lightbulbs exploding in your head.
The Affordability of Proper Brand Awareness
The bottom line is, telling thousands of people you exist costs dollars. Telling thousands of people to BUY your product costs lots of dollars.
You might still be asking yourself why that is; well think about it. How many people are paying their that “BUY NOW” ad to appear on top of yours? Remember, PPC is an auction-style campaign. You pay to be higher than others. And if other people raise their bid, then you must raise yours to surpass them, making your ads much more expensive.
But Brand Awareness Campaigns can run for pennies because you are not competing with anyone to the same extent because you are not selling anything. You are simply telling people you are here.
When you then run campaigns to those people who interacted with your Brand Awareness Ads, it costs a lot less because Google (or Meta, or LinkedIn) knows exactly who to show the ad to.
The audiences for brand awareness campaigns tend to be very broad. Whereas a bottom level campaign for sales of purses is going to target “middle-aged women in NYC who are in the upper 30% income bracket who like brands like Rebecca Minkoff and Tom Ford”, a top-level brand awareness campaign might run to “women age 35-50” in 10 zip codes.
The key to successful brand awareness campaigns is targeting a wide range of people who are more or less your type of public. Once you have run your ads for a good length of time, you are ready for CONSIDERATION.
Consideration & Traffic: Making People Think About Your Brand
As you tell people you exist, or that your product or service exists, you naturally follow that up with the next type of campaign: TRAFFIC and CONSIDERATION. Traffic means exactly that–driving people to visit your website or social media account. Campaigns that have buttons like “VISIT WEBSITE” or “LEARN MORE” are used most often in consideration campaigns.
Once the person arrives at your desired destination, making them think is the next step. That is why it is called CONSIDERATION. Your job is to entertain them with content that makes them think, and as a result they begin comparing the pros and cons of your product or service versus the other one they were curious about.
You do this with statistics, case studies, comparisons (think “positioning” in traditional marketing), and freebie guides, e-books, webinars, and articles. All of this adds up to consideration and your focus at this stage in the funnel is to provide enough data to the individual, that they become convinced that you are the better choice.
If you have done your job well, any CONVERSION ad will now have tremendous success in prompting the person to CONTACT you or to BUY.
You have worked hard getting them there and now you can enjoy the fruits of your labor…almost.
Conversion: Turning Prospects into Leads, Making Sales
Well, I think by now you can see WHY ads don’t always worked. It’s really like the tale of the poor young man who took the pretty girl on a date, and tried to kiss her after getting in the car, before they ever drove to the theater and watched the movie!
People do not like being rushed when making a decision to buy something. And girls don’t like being kissed without a having had a romantic dinner, and perhaps a flower in-hand. So your job is to prime your prospect to where they are ready for your offer; and at this point, it will be so irresistible they will want what you have to offer. You have nurtured your prospect and now they are ready to become a lead or sale.
You can now run “BUY NOW” or “10% OFF – LIMITED TIME OFFER” type ads and they will bite. This is because the prospect now understands the VALUE of what you are providing them–and they want it!
Now here’s a caveat. Don’t make it impossible for them to reach you. Make it so easy, they will have no difficulty doing so. That seems like an obvious warning but you would be surprised how many people say they want leads and sales but don’t really do the actions to show that is the case.
Here are just a few of the common ways people REPEL leads or sales AWAY from their business:
- Slow websites that take forever to load
- Phones that ring and ring until the person hangs up
- Contact form submissions that get answered days later
- Broken links on websites
- Insufficient or non-existent CTAs (calls to action, e.g. “CLICK HERE TO BUY” links)
- Extremely complicated contact forms with too many fields
- Never checking or replying to your social media inboxes or comments
I cannot tell you how many times I hear from new clients “we don’t have enough leads.” Yet they are engaged in these egregious activities. We have to train them out of these bad habits. They are shocked to find out they have to talk to people and answer emails to get sales!
So please, please, please, if you want your ads to convert, you MUST make it easy for the person to do the actions you are asking them to do.
How Bad Contact Forms Can Ruin Your Conversion Rate
We had 1 client who was getting thousands of monthly website visits but only a couple hundred leads a month. Upon examining their sales funnel, it turned out their contact form was merged with their pre-qualification form. The result? Nobody bothered to submit the contact form to learn more. Why? Because they had to fill out 12 questions and nearly write an essay about what they wanted!
To solve this, we built a separate pre-qualification form, and simplified the public facing contact form, paring it down to 4 fields:
- company name,
- full name,
- and mobile phone number.
Then, and only after having obtained their contact info, did we push them into an automated workflow to have them fill out the pre-qualification form. In this way, we could learn about their business and the desired service they were inquiring about.
The result of this rework? 120 more leads came in than usual that month!
And the number of pre-qualification forms were so many, that the sales guys were backlogged as they rushed to get them all reviewed in preparation for their discovery calls with the new leads.
The 4th Level – After the Sale
There is actually a fourth level to the funnel, but that is post conversion. It’s called “RETENTION.” This means repeat sales, and is a completely different type of campaign. You could go even further and expand that out into RECOMMENDATION (think reviews, word-of-mouth, etc.)
But that is beyond the scope of this article and something which I will cover in another piece.
Summary – What to Remember About Digital Marketing PPC Ads
Remember this and you will always succeed with digital marketing:
- People need to know you exist, and what your products and services are.
- They need to know the benefits of your product or service.
- They need time to consider those benefits and compare them with others offering similar things.
- They need to trust you and feel you are the right choice.
- They need to be nurtured if they are not ready.
- They need an easy way to reach out to you should they make up their mind.
- You can speed up the process by showing the right ads at the right times to the right people.
- You can scale the funnel to reach more people faster, thereby getting better results.
- Your budget is the limit, when the funnel is properly set up.
I hope this article gave you an in-depth view of what might be wrong with your marketing funnel if you weren’t getting the results you wanted. And now, you might have a greater desire to dive deeper into marketing to learn all those terms you have heard but maybe were too overwhelmed to research.
I wish you tremendous success with your digital marketing.