Full-Funnel Marketing Guide: How Strategy Influences Ad Creative
If you’ve ever advertised with the FieldTest Platform you know it’s the fastest, easiest way to promote your brand online. We’ve built one of the most effective tools to scale your business through effective digital marketing, but in addition to providing the best tools we also want to share some best practices to ensure a highly effective campaign.
We built the FieldTest platform with a 3-stage marketing funnel in mind, the Awareness stage, the Consideration stage, and the Action stage. We’ve written about each extensively, so if these terms don’t sound familiar, feel free to reference our previous writings and get caught up.
While it’s great to understand the core concepts behind these strategies, we also believe that it's important that we give practical examples of how to best use the tools we provide to advertise effectively. Today we will be focusing on how your ad creatives should change to meet the stated goals of each individual stage, and we will showcase not only how your images and headlines should change with each individual stage, but how your ad unit choice and targeting options should also be customized to accomplish the unique goals of every funnel strategy. So without further ado, let’s get started!
Top of Funnel - Awareness
Making new intenders aware of your brand
When planning your advertising the top of your funnel should be a main priority, especially if you have a smaller brand or are just starting out. Awareness is where you will generate the most buzz and drive new traffic, focusing on reaching new audiences that weren't already familiar with your brand or products. We’ve talked before about the general rules for Awareness - Use your best product and lifestyle photography and present them in large display banners with fun ad copy - but today let’s take a look at what some Awareness banners actually look like.
An awareness banner can take many forms. The FieldTest Nearly Native Unit, for example, was designed to excel in all stages of the funnel including awareness, but that’s not where your options end. As mentioned before this is the place for large, beautiful display banners showcasing your amazing products. When branching out from the nearly native unit you should start with the standard sizes: 300x600, 160x600, 240x400, and 720x300. These ads all are designed to fit in particular parts of the page that will catch your audiences’ attention and make sure you leave a lasting impression.
Large format, design-forward ads that tell your potential customers what to expect from your product are a great way to drive traffic to your site.
Simply deciding on a larger banner format isn’t enough if the banner design doesn’t properly sell your product. In fact, beautiful design is most important in the Awareness stage where catching your audience’s eye is the primary goal. If you have a graphic designer on staff, this is where she will earn her keep. Let’s focus on what you should do in your Awareness ads. First, you should always have your brand front and center. This is most people's first time seeing you and it’s important that even if they don’t click your ad they at least have their attention captured. Go with your best lifestyle and product shots and mix in some fun colorful copy to match. Second, your copy should inform your intended audience of who you are, but don’t be too detail-oriented. This is an introduction, you’ll get a chance to really sell yourself later. Third, always include a CTA button that is relevant to the desired link. People love to click on buttons and if you break out a specific area that your customer can click on they are up to 3x more likely to do so. This can be a small box in the corner or a special section of your copy that is designated as a clickable area, as long as you have a call to action that is relevant to the landing page (read more, learn more, buy now, etc) you'll be much better off. Hit all of these notes and soon you’ll be singing the sweet song of success with all the new traffic being driven by your beautifully planned awareness campaigns.
Mid-Funnel - Consideration
Showing your ads to users who are intenders and in-market. They may be familiar with your brand, but are not familiar with your products yet.
Now that you have captured your audience’s attention with beautiful display ads it’s time to convince them that your brand is the one to choose. See there are likely many brands in your space vying for your customers so you’ll have to actively work to make sure that when the decision time comes, you are the brand they choose to purchase from. This is done several ways in consideration, but less so in the imagery as we saw in awareness. Rather, in consideration, we set ourselves apart with our content. Here, we use informative ads that direct clickers to content that tells a brand story and builds consumer confidence. What kind of content works well here? There are a few main examples we recommend. The first is earned media. Earned media is any media you yourself have not actively participated in. If your product earned good reviews in a publication, that is earned media. Got included in a holiday gift-giving roundup? Earned media. Included in a viral social media post? You get the idea. By linking to this content you showcase to your audiences that not only does your brand have a high quality product as seen in the awareness stage, but you’ve made an impact and are trusted enough to be mentioned in these pieces of content.
Use your earned and owned media to build consumer confidence. Speak directly to your customers and show them exactly why you are the best fit for them.
While earned media might be among the most effective ways to advertise in consideration, it can be difficult to achieve for smaller brands just starting out. Even brands who have it should avoid resting on their laurels only using earned media and should take a more varied approach in order to maximize the effect of their consideration campaigns. Your other option? Owned media. If this sounds similar to earned media you’re probably right. Owned media can take on many of the same forms as earned media, except that your brand “owns” it - or produces it. This means blog content, social media posts, other marketing materials such as usage guides, all of this is owned media. By promoting these to your custom audiences and lookalikes you’re showing them that not only do you have the product they need, but you care enough about selling it to them that you’ll go the extra mile to create content to inform them and keep them engaged. In a stage of the funnel where consumer confidence is king it’s hard to undersell how important that can be for turning an intender into a converter. But how do you make that final push? Let’s Discuss in the final stage.
Lower Funnel - Action
Making the final push to convert your intenders into customers.
We’ve enticed your audiences with beautiful display ads in awareness and informed them of your greatness with engaging content and earned media in consideration, now it is time to make the final sale. In the action stage we take all of the data gathered using your upper-funnel campaigns and put it to use to make the final push towards sale. That means leveraging what is called "Retargeting", or showing ads ONLY to users who visited your website but did not convert.
We designed our platform to not only be a full-featured ad builder and publisher, we also built it to allow you to easily take advantage of some of the most advanced targeting capability available. You see, throughout your campaigns we’ve been gathering data on your audiences. Every click of an ad, every item left in a basket, every mid-funnel conversion has all been tracked in order to make your action stage perform its absolute best. Now that you're setting up your action creatives it’s time to put it all to use with some laser-focused creatives designed to be the final push to make your most interested intenders become long-term customers. What do those ads look like? Let’s discuss.
As mentioned above this stage is all about leveraging your data to approach only the most interested intenders to buy. This means the people who clicked your ads the most, or people who browsed your products and left an item in the basket, all people who showed serious interest in your product will be included in what we call a “retargeting group”, and will often just need that little bit of extra incentive to convince them to purchase.
In action you should use any ad unit that makes sense but always have a strong push to convert. Offers, discounts, sales, they all push your intenders to become customers
By making your action headlines feature some form of incentive to convert you are giving your audiences that extra push to finally hit the purchase button on your site. These incentives include discount codes, free shipping, or first-time customer offers. We’ve seen campaigns that include these things perform as much as 4x over campaigns that don’t.
Now is the time to cut loose, target all platforms with all ad sizes. Use messaging that reinforces winback messaging (Aren’t you forgetting something? Don’t miss this one-time offer, etc) to bring the intenders you’ve found in your upper and mid-funnel campaigns back to your site for final purchase.
We built the FieldTest platform with one goal in mind - to give every brand access to the tools of the advertising pros. We hope this guide helps you understand how to effectively use these tools to build high-performing, full-funnel ad campaigns that will promote your brand, scale your business, and drive new customers for years to come. It is important to remember that each funnel strategy has a unique goal that needs to be accomplished with unique creative solutions.