How to use marketing & advertising to better reach business goals
Together, marketing and advertising efforts send the right information, at the right time, to the right people, leading them toward a purchase decision.
Marketing focuses on the research side, where advertising acts in a (now, virtual) sales-role.
A successful ad should have a net positive ROI, meaning that the ad leads people to actually purchase your product versus simply visiting your website. We measure the success of the ad by the amount of conversions, or sales, the ad brought in compared to the cost of the ad. We measure the overall success of a website by the conversion rate, or the amount of website visitors divided by the amount of visitors that made a purchase. The conversion rate of both an ad and a website can be improved through conversion-driven marketing and advertising efforts as explained below.
Conversion-Driven Marketing
Marketing is the science of using data to discover the reality of a business’s target market and the ways in which to reach and influence them toward making a purchase. Sometimes, marketing efforts get distracted by metrics that don’t impact incoming revenue. Sure, other metrics are important, but the bottom line is that all marketing efforts should drive sales.
Do your research
An easy way to start collecting data for research is by installing Google Analytics on your website. Google Analytics can shine light on topics such as: What type of devices are your customers using? Is your website optimized for all screen sizes, on every page? Where are your customers shopping from? Would it be beneficial to send ads to that area? If your viewers are from another country, is your website accessible and easily translatable?
Simply by collecting and analyzing data, you can learn how to better advertise to your customers. Learn more about the ways in which Google Analytics can help you to make better decisions about improving your website.
Get to know your customers, intimately
Knowing exactly who is purchasing your product is much easier when sales are completed in person. If you are running the marketing for an e-commerce website, are you aware of who is purchasing your product? We recommend doing an audit that can tell you exactly who is purchasing your products, with as much detail as possible. Understanding why they purchased your product, or what about your website lead them to complete the purchase, can provide insight on what to advertise more of in the future.
Ask your customers
If you have questions that your data isn’t able to answer, you can conduct qualitative research in several ways by communicating with customers. Send follow-up survey after a customer purchases a product , or take advantage of social media. Don’t be afraid to create a poll on a post or a story to get feedback from your followers. When a customer sends your business a message over social media, this is also a great time to engage with them and ask a question or two. Qualitative research is valuable and can be sought out in creative ways.
Implement your research
It is one thing to collect and analyze data, but it’s another to use that data to make good decisions about advertisements. As you analyze data, we recommend that you make a list of your findings. After analyzing, go down the list and get specific about how you’re going to use this information to improve in the future. Be sure to keep track of the results, as this will help you to collect even more data, improving your marketing and advertising efforts along the way.
Conversion-Driven Advertising
Make your advertisements work like a sales team would
A sales person is able to determine which stage of the buyers journey a customer is currently in: the awareness stage, consideration stage, or decision stage. From there, they provide the relevant information for the customer at that time. From there, salesman schedule follow up conversations and guide the customer through a funnel of information toward purchasing the product. Your advertisements should do that, too. Here’s how they can:
Facebook has a tool, called Facebook Pixels, that are little bits of code on your website that work alongside Facebook’s analytics. Pixels are able to recognize recent actions performed by the target customer on your website, and then advertise accordingly. We recommend re-advertising with valuable content to customers that have already shown interest in your website, in order to guide them along the buyers journey just as a salesman would.
Spend less, target accurately
When you spend a large amount of money on an advertisement to reach a broad audience, you are likely to capture the attention of an unknown amount of potential buyers. It could be great, but it is a risk to advertise to a broad audience. The only potential buyers that your advertisement needs to reach are the ones actually interested in and are ready to purchase your product.
Let advertisements guide your customer to perform the action you want them to take
This seems simple, but it is critical for advertising success. Boosting a post on Facebook guides customers to send your business a message, when that may not be your goal. We recommend creating advertisements out of posts that perform well instead of boosting them, so you can guide the customer to your website instead.
Conversion-Driven Marketing and Advertising: an Indestructible Duo
Aligning both marketing and advertising efforts will help any business to better reach their goal: making money. Marketing, when done intentionally, can teach a business who to target and how, along with a plethora of other information that can improve the business all around. Advertising, when done intentionally to increase conversions, can lead those customers toward making a purchase at a higher velocity. When your advertisements aren’t performing as well as you’d like them to, you can lean on conversion-driven marketing to better design advertisements that perform well in the future.
There are many ways to improve conversion rates, and we only name a few in this blog. If you have any ideas, strategies, or questions that you’d like to talk about further, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We offer free consultations and would love to chat about how conversion-driven efforts can help your business, specifically, reach it’s goals. Thanks for reading!