Visitors need to convert into leads in order to become profit-driving customers.
Digital marketing, for the most part, is simple.
Nowadays, anyone can set up an ad campaign on Google or Facebook and start driving clicks. The competition is high, and it seems everyone wants a piece of the online action.
With the rise of new-age tech and consumer startups, there is no limit on the ways you can get people’s attention. We have click-based ads, YouTube ads, banner ads, story ads, and so on. But at the same time, digital marketing is also getting more challenging.
While running ads is relatively easy, the biggest challenge for most startups and digital marketers is getting an ROI on the ad dollars spent on these various channels. It isn’t easy to get an ROI because funding the ad spend is challenging unless the customer transacts with you and makes a profit for you,
Anyone can fund ads with investor money in the initial stages, but that’s not a sustainable way to build the funnel for the long term. The most important question to ask in digital marketing is not how and where to run the ads but how to ensure an ROI on the ad dollars spent and sustain the campaigns for the long term.
Related: How to Grow Your Email List With Facebook Ads
The funnel concept
There are different stages in the funnel, and the only way to make an ad campaign work is to ensure that all the stages are built solidly. In general, branding campaigns are out of the question for bootstrapped small businesses. Putting your brand name on TV and banners will not convert viewers into customers.
Digital marketing becomes more effective when it’s focused on lead generation. Collecting names, emails, and phone numbers is the best way to bring potential customers into the funnel. The best way to get viewers to opt-in is to give away a free resource in return. This is usually called a lead magnet because it attracts leads. Think of it as an ethical bribe that you give to the visitor in return for their email ID and the permission to market to them again through email.
Most brands (both B2B and B2C) mess up after this stage. The leads are cold and will not be in a position to buy your product or service. Trust needs to be built. Trust grows with engagement, and engagement comes with good content.
Since ad campaigns are at scale, the nurturing needs to be done at scale. And the only way to nurture thousands of leads is with marketing automation. Marketing automation also needs to be personalized at scale in a deep marketing process. Constant Contact simplifies Marketing Automation by following up and warming your potential customers to your brand.
Deep marketing involves creating a marketing funnel where every segment of your potential customers and leads get unique content that is relevant to them. The higher the relevancy, the faster the cold leads become warm leads. Converting cold leads into warm leads takes time, and the best way to achieve this is to send a sequence of emails spaced out in a 2-3 day window. With Constant Contact, you can segment your leads into categories and manage them more efficiently with more tremendous success.
Related: The 11 Commandments of Online Marketing
The value of warm leads
Trust needs to be built before you can start selling to the leads. To convert cold leads into warm leads efficiently, it would be best to nurture them over time. But warm leads are not the solution. Warm leads do not put money in the bank. Warm leads need a nudge if you want them to become paying customers. You must gently push them toward a transaction without appearing sleazy and pushy.
If the first stage is attention and the second stage is building trust, compelling copy, and a sales pitch are the funnel’s third and most important stages.
Someone trusting you doesn’t mean anything until they are ready to use that trust to transact with you. Warm leads can be converted into paying customers using various sales methods. You can use sales pages, videos, meetings, group sales through webinars, or even offline meetings.
An ad campaign’s effectiveness depends not just on the ads but on the nurturing sequence and the sales efficiency. If the transaction happens successfully and turns out to be profitable, you can take profit from it and reinvest it into ad campaigns to grow.
This process, done for a long enough time, builds a reputation for the brand. The brand’s reputation also helps with the ads and pushes up response rate metrics such as click-through, visitor-to-leads, and lead-to-customer ratios.
Related: 3 Proven Strategies To Use Social Media For E-commerce Marketing
Guest Author
Deepak Kanakaraju is a digital marketing author, speaker and trainer. He has worked previously for Practo, Instamojo, Razorpay and MoEngage as a digital marketing manager. He now trains people on digital marketing and is the CEO of ed-tech platform LearnToday.com.
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