Own Your Awareness Stage: A Guide to Buying in Prospecting
Our blog post from last week highlighted “3 Mistakes Marketers Should Watch Out For With their Digital Buys” and it received some fantastic responses. Many reached out to us to ask for more details on how exactly to market in prospecting (tip 2 from last week’s blog) but we decided to go one step further. This week, we’re offering this handy guide on how how to go about setting up prospecting (also known as Upper Funnel Awareness) on three different digital advertising platforms: Google, Facebook and FieldTest.
Google Ads
First up, Google Ads. Google makes it simple to have a prospecting campaign up and running in a few short minutes. At the beginning of your campaign set-up, you want to select the ‘Brand awareness and reach’ box as your campaign success goal:
Please note: the screenshots we are referencing here are from the ‘Expert Mode’ option that you can select at the outset when starting your Google Ad campaign. Do not let the name ‘Expert Mode give you anxiety. It’s intuitive enough that even newer digital marketers can make sense of it. The benefit being you will have more options to choose from to ensure your marketing campaign has the right nuances to benefit performance.
The next option you’ll see is pretty simple: are you running Display or Video? Choose the option that suits the creative you have on hand.
The next option is for Bidding and the question you are being asked is “What do you want to focus on?” with the two options being ‘Viewable impressions’ and ‘High Quality Traffic’.
Viewable impressions means that your ads have a higher percentage of being seen by actual human eyeballs, which is certainly important. However, we might recommend trying the High Quality Traffic option instead. This option might make your costs slightly higher, but it should also make conversions stronger so it’s a good trade off. You can always adjust your campaign later if needed.
And that’s pretty much all there is to it! Add your budget, your creative and launch your Google Ads prospecting campaign.
Facebook
Your second option for upper funnel prospecting is social media marketing, the most common of which is facebook post promotion. This is common because not only are there billions of people on Facebook but often your brand will already be posting on the platform, meaning creating promoted content is as easy as choosing which posts to boost with the built-in Facebook boosting functionality. If you haven’t done this before, let’s go through step by step and show you how to make Facebook bring in new customers.
Your first step will be having a post prepared for promotion. If you’re not already posting, consider not only the new leads that it can bring you but the confidence factor a steady social media presence can lend to your brand and consider doing regular posts across social media platforms. Once you have written or selected a post to promote simply click on the bottom right hand corner where it says “boost post”. This will take you into the Facebook promotion funnel where you can choose your audience targeting type.
Once you've made it to the targeting menu the options become fairly straightforward. Here you have the option to select through targeting or select by who follows your account/ their friends only. While experimentation is important we recommend that if you’re at the point where you are building out your awareness stage marketing you take a broader approach and choose some audience segments.
From here you can set your custom audience interests and locations. Try to keep your key customers in mind when choosing these and don’t be afraid to use your current data to inform these decisions. For example, if you are selling a lot of products in Dallas and Houston, try targeting Austin and see how your ads resonate.
Once you’ve laid out your custom audiences it’s time to decide on your budget level. Facebook will give you an estimate of the number of intenders your post is likely to reach at each budget level, so try to make your decision based on what makes the most cost sense to you and your business.
From this point you’re all set and ready to go! Simply enter your payment information and preview your post to double check for things like spelling, grammar and imagery (there’s nothing more annoying than paying for promoting a post only to notice a typo AFTER it has been boosted) and you are all ready to push your post forward for review and posting. Remember that Facebook does review all promoted posts before publishing and this can often take a day or two so be prepared for a small wait in worst case scenarios but following your approval you are ready to promote your post to new audiences and bring in some new customers.
FieldTest
At this point you’re probably fairly well versed in many of the terms and ideas involved in digital advertising so setting up your FieldTest campaigns should be relatively straightforward. Like Facebook, you’ll want to ensure that you have high quality content to link your ads to. We’ve discussed what content works best for our ads before, but some of the best performers are blog content, third party reviews and specialized landing pages. Once you’ve decided the content you will be linking to it’s time to dig into the FieldTest platform and start your awareness campaign.
From the FieldTest Console page your first step will be pressing ‘New Campaign’, which will open up the new campaign screen
Your next step will be naming your campaign. FieldTest allows you to bild campaing at every stage of the funnel so be sure to name it accordingly. For this demo we’ve gone with Awareness 1, but whatever you choose make sure it’s something you can track down and identify easily at a later date.
Following this, simply click Upload ad to upload a pre-made banner or Create Ad to create a new ad with the FieldTest Ad Builder
The FieldTest Ad Creator is intended to give you full control of your FieldTest ad units. Name your ad, choose your perfect headline and creative then customize it with our selection of fonts and styles. Once you’re satisfied with your unit, hit save to save your ad creative and move on.
Now that you’ve created your ad, it’s time to choose your audiences. Much like Facebook, you’ll want to think strategically here but cast a wide net. Choose major cities you want to target and make sure to type in some interests to make sure you’re serving ads only to people who will love them. Once this is done it’s time to move along to budgeting.
Here you’ll enter in your full campaign budget and CPM bid. We’ve written about the CPM and how it effects ad performance, but for Awareness it can sometimes be beneficial to bid just a bit higher than usual in order to secure the best possible placements in front of your new customers.
Once this is done you’re ready to hit save and launch your ads. Congratulations, you’ve just launched a highly-customized awareness marketing campaign on the FieldTest platform! Keep an eye on it and soon your new customers will be working their way down the funnel to become new customers.