The amount of positive interactions or touch points required for a prospective client before converting their enquiry into a sale is ever-increasing. In old media, less than 8 positive interactions with a brand could lead to a sale – now that figure is closer to 20. Why must there be so many positive interactions before a sale? The key reason is the competition has significantly increased. People are exposed to more screens and opportunities to see multiple advertisements, meaning those ads need to be more effective and meaningful to that person to get noticed.
When marketing was conducted through print (newspapers / magazines) and tv messages were broadcasted, advertisers had no way to pin point individual demographics apart from general audiences for a show being run or the readership genre of print.
So, how can you drive sales in a very competitive market? Fortunately, Facebook and Google are the masters of data mining. They are able to segregate and pin point individual people and create laser specific demographic audiences. When an ad is created, it can be specific to that person or audience, increasing the likelihood of making a sale.
More interesting are Facebook’s conversion ads, where a tracking code named Facebook Pixel is stored on your website. For traffic that is useful, (i.e. a visitor that buys a product or submits their contact details in a form), Facebook registers that event as good and determines what is common between each person that conducts that action. When deciding who to display that ad to next, Facebook prioritises audiences that are likely to convert.
What is more powerful when used in conjunction with Facebook and Google Ads is ‘remarketing.’ For instance, an ad is put out there, someone clicks on it and visits the website but is not ready to make a decision. We know that 80% of people who have just been exposed to something are not ready to purchase right there and then. Money has been invested and that person has just left the website – so what remarketing ads need to be put in front of that person to get them to come back to the website and take action? The ads that are shown can have context, i.e. “you left something behind!” if they reached the checkout, but decided not to purchase. Lead generation campaigns that person visited the landing page, poked around for a bit and just left, create another interaction with that person to make a sale.
Options to Drive Sales
Facebook Ads
Before a sale can be made traffic needs to be generated to a landing page, which compels that traffic to buy your product or service. Facebook’s offers various effective methods to put ads in front of the right people. Starting with a Facebook advertising campaign always begins with interest based targeting (i.e. they follow a certain page, of a specific age/sex/location and/or have interests in certain topics). Following an interest based campaign the customer data generated is fed into Facebook to generate a like audience, where Facebook finds commonalities between those people to target more successfully.
Google Ads/ AdWords & Google Display
If there are people actively looking for a product or service, they are searching for it on Google. This presents an opportunity to get in front of people when they are close to making a purchasing decision by having a Google Search Ad.
In addition, you could run ads on the Google Display Network, which is more like Facebook ads, where people of specific interests are targeted to generate traffic to a landing page or website.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is incredibly important in making a sale these days, and don’t think an email marketing campaign is simply sending out emails telling people to buy now on your newsletter list – it’s far more than that. Given the complexity of digital marketing, people must go through a sales funnel to minimise customer acquisition costs. Money has been spent using Facebook and/or Google ads to bring someone to a website, and then they are incentivised to submit their email address. The reason for doing this is that it reduces the cost of ad spend, because we know people are more likely to engage with an email than an ad.
