Here at FieldTest we want everyone to be able to effectively scale their business with high performing digital marketing. This is why we built the easiest way for anybody to set up and flight a highly targeted digital ad campaign! It’s not just as simple as building out an ad or two and setting them loose upon your audiences, however. We like to think about ad campaigns a bit more broadly in the context of what we call the Sales Funnel. If you’ve never heard this phrase before, or if you’re familiar but don’t know how it’s relevant to the marketing strategies brands use to drive conversions, then this article is for you!

You see a Sales Funnel is the groundwork for a successful ad campaign. A series of strategies proven to help turn potential customers into brand curious intenders into brand loyal converters. How do you put this funnel to work? Let us show you the way!

Meet the Three-Stage Funnel

Let’s start with the basic overview: We plan our ad campaigns around three distinct stages of the funnel: Awareness, Consideration, and Action.

While each is vital in the customer’s journey to purchase, it’s important to remember the best advertising success happens when you combine their forces into a full-funnel approach.

With these stages as our marketing pillars, we help you create ads that reach customers before they know you, when they’re thinking about you, and when they’re ready to click that beautiful “buy now” button. And from the discovered learnings, you can scale audience, target at lower cost and create campaigns that get results. 

Awareness:

This is the stage when a potential customer becomes aware there’s a problem, and they need your product to solve it. At this point in the funnel, the customer is completely unaware of your product and solution, which means you need to use clear, descriptive content that is engaging and has a low barrier to entry. We like to think of awareness as the showoff stage, filled with beautiful imagery, entertaining media, and easily digestible content. It’s also where we begin to target users based on their interests and demographics, so we make sure all that digestible content gets in front of people who want or need the product in the ads.

Awareness content comes in all shapes and sizes, including videos, founder stories, and basically anything that drives interest and brand engagement. Brand content such as blog posts or explainer landing pages are also great examples, as they’re an excellent way to tell digestible stories your customers can relate to. And the results are worth noting, studies show that conversion rates for brands that use content marketing are up to 6x higher than brands that don’t.

No matter what you do in the awareness stage, never forget this part of the funnel is to make prospects both “problem aware” and “solution aware.” The more your ad creative can explain your product the better.  Ideally your awareness ad would tell the user everything they need to know without even having to click. Do this right, and you’ll seamlessly move customers into the consideration stage without a hitch.

Consideration:

Once the customer has moved through the awareness stage, they start to consider the choices available to them – which will likely include your product along with your competitors.

So how do you separate yourself from the pack?

For online marketers, this is where you want to create more informative, product-focused messaging. Whatever ad units you create, whether they’re image or video-based, should link to your site and possibly include strong calls to action (CTAs).

Another great consideration strategy is the targeting of “lookalike” audiences. Here at FieldTest, we use this technique to find new potential customers that “look like” (or match in our data) users that visit your site or make a purchase. By going after people with similar interests, you can expand your audience and introduce your product to parties that may not have been your initial target.

Unlike awareness, were you inform about your offerings, consideration is where you’ll “showcase” your product’s features, differentiating your goods and services from the competition. Depending on your marketing goals, your mission here is traffic, clicks, and views of your website, all of which will fuel your retargeting in the next, final stage.

Action:

It may be the bottom of the funnel, but the action stage is top priority for turning sales. Once you have attracted customers and helped them understand the benefits of the product, it’s time to convince them to take out their credit cards and complete a purchase.

Here, you’ll use price-point and promo messaging, providing customers a closer look at key benefits so you can lead them to make an informed purchase.

Conversion is also where you retarget people who visited, bought, and even abandoned your site. Don’t forget that just because they walked away doesn’t mean they’re not interested in purchasing.

Conversion ads are also unique because this is where you can create custom messaging for both new and returning customers, based on how far they travelled into the purchase journey.

Did they buy something? Great, tell them about your other offerings or similar products.

Did they leave at the cart? No problem. Show them the products they left behind, or something in a similar category.  

When you combine calculated retargeting, creative sequencing, and custom messaging, you can effectively move customers from prospecting to sale at scale, and at a profitable CPA. In other words, you’ll seamlessly help the customer convert from an interested shopper to a dedicated buyer.

Closing Thoughts

Every campaign is different and every brand will take their own personalized approach to their marketing, but brands that use the sales funnel as a foundation will find themselves reaching their customers in ways that feel authentic and make a lasting impression. By connecting with new customers in awareness, informing them of what makes your brand unique in consideration and targeting them with personalized offers and messaging in action you’ll create a long lasting connection that will have them coming back for more. This is why it’s so important to use a full-funnel approach that incorporates strategies and learnings across all your stages to achieve long-term marketing success.With a bit of effort and a full-funnel approach you and your marketing team will find yourself running a high performing digital marketing campaign in no time!