When using 3rd party applications in the digital space, it’s crucial to familiarize yourself with the lay of the land and stay informed. More times than not, these marketing platforms reward doing things their way, and the sooner you learn the best ways to appease the beast while continuing to do what’s best for your business, the better. Most of these platforms/applications put a great deal of emphasis, and rightly so, on the sales funnel.
At this point, you probably know that making a cold sale is much more challenging than selling to someone who is already interested/familiar with your product or service — digital marketing is no exception. Services like Facebook and Adwords reward advertisers who follow their carefully plotted ad management architecture. This typically involves beginning with traffic based campaigns and slowly moving to campaigns for retargeting engagers and retargeting people who show continuous interest (AddToCart, Multiple Site Visits, High % of Videos Watched, etc.)
Many of these online advertising marketing tools are spanning and enable highly personalized retargeting and funnel management — that being said, a good funnel can’t exist without great tracking installation and continuous ad optimization — it really is an art form.
Obviously, the first step is understanding retargeting. Next, ensure that your retargeting lists are populating properly and are separated into the various specific lists that you will need (you can do this after the fact, but you might as well have them filling from day one. Fleshing this out early on will also force you to strategize passed the mere first tier of the funnel.) We have used numerous ways of measuring value/intent and building out retargeting lists; many of which were stated in the previous paragraph.
We have become fond of using the 75“% Watched of Video View” metric to create a warmer audience. Facebook has a built-in metric to measure a 75% Video View which proves valuable when trying to turn a cold audience into a warmer audience. If this is something that you are interested in, be sure that the video you are testing has a length of substance: 75% of 15 seconds is not a very telling statistic. After generating this video campaign, we were then able to build out campaigns targeting those video viewers, LP viewers, and anyone who viewed a product in order to increase the conversion and lead them to an intuitive, clean landing page.
Another key component of developing an effective funnel campaign is to practice a/b testing at each stage of the funnel. Don’t test to see which ad is able to convert cold audiences into buyers more effectively — instead, use different optimization techniques at each stage of the funnel and test creative and audience settings to see which one helps you meet each conversion goal. (It’s important to note here: this is not a process that ‘completes’, rather, this should be going on for the lifetime of your new campaign. So long as you are regularly getting new content to test.)
Once you implement a funnel strategy in your marketing efforts, you should see measurable results. Plus, it’s malleable. You can always swap various sections of the funnel if it is not performing how you intended.