One of our biggest challenges as digital marketers is traffic.
How can we easily and affordably get people’s attention, push them to our websites, and convert them to subscribers and customers?
The secret is digital advertising.
And if you understand how to make it work, it can give you full control over your traffic flow and help you sell more too. In this chapter, you’ll learn the process for planning, setting up, and optimizing your ads, including the metrics you need to watch, the lingo you’ll use as a media buyer, and the people in your business who should be responsible for digital advertising. But before we start, let’s get clear about why paid traffic is a smarter investment than organic.
The Difference Between Paid and Organic Traffic.
Free traffic is always the goal, right?
Which is why most businesses aim for organic traffic first. After all, if you can get a steady flow of free traffic, you’ll pocket the savings.
But as with everything else in life, you get what you pay for.
Paid Traffic is very costly on one hand but one have take the chance to expand their business to the auidence at different-different place and of different interset. You can turn it on and off whenever you want. If you’re getting more traffic than you need, with paid traffic, you can slow the flow. You have control of where it’s going, how fast, and when.
Organic traffic, on the other hand, is more like rain.
You aren’t sure when or if it will come, how consistent it will be, nor how long it will last. Listen to the weather channel all you want. You have no control. With organic traffic, you can lose traffic if Google changes their algorithm. If a competitor has a huge launch, you could lose traffic to them.
You also have no control over where the traffic goes.
Even simple things like changing the URL of your landing page can mess things up. You can enjoy all the control of paid traffic without it actually costing you anything. You do that by building funnels that reimburse your ad spend.
So in essence, you can acquire customers for free, and then once your advertising costs have been reimbursed, use simple tactics to build loyalty and optimize your customers’ lifetime value. Better still, it’s not an either/or proposition.
The better your paid traffic is, the better your organic traffic will be as well, because good advertising drives traffic—and the pages that get lots of traffic tend to rank higher in search engines. That creates an upward spiral of traffic acquisition. A win-win, if you will. But it’s important to be realistic.
You just can’t run one traffic campaign and expect it to magically deposit a million dollars in your bank account. If you want a constant flow of leads and customers for your business, you must look at this as a system.
Top 3 Sources for Paid Traffic
Some of the best platforms for paid traffic are Facebook, Google, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
But again, it depends on what you’re trying to do.
Google Is Like the Yellow Pages.
Because Google is a search engine, people start there when they’re looking for information. So it’s a lot like the Yellow Pages.
To drive traffic through Google, you’ll bid on keywords that will help people find you and can lead to an ideal sales conversation.
Facebook Is Like a Billboard .
Scrolling through your Facebook newsfeed is a bit like driving down the highway.
As you scroll, you see ads, promoted posts, as well as random comments. And if you, as a business, are willing to pay, your message will also appear in the newsfeed of your target audience.
With Facebook, you can spend as little as you want and still expand your reach. Because it’s a social platform, and because they collect data on our behavior every day, they know a lot about us. All that data makes them the most powerful ad platform available today.
Target your ads precisely enough, and you’re sure to get the right eyeballs on your message.
YouTube Is Like Television
YouTube’s top metric is the number of minutes watched.
Their goal is to keep you on the site consuming videos, so they operate a lot like traditional television, playing ads in the videos, interrupting people’s viewing. Disruptive, yes, but with YouTube, your ads are always relevant.
That’s because you can target your ads based on the YouTube channels your audience likes, the types of videos they watch, and what they’re searching for.
So what are the top 3 paid traffic sources?
What’s the best place to start with your paid traffic campaigns?
Facebook, Google, and YouTube:
All three will give you quality traffic from people who are interested in your offers.
Okay, that gives you a good background for the strategy we’re about to discuss.
Let’s dig into the methods you’ll use to execute a winning ad strategy. Methods of Well-Executed Digital Advertising We’ve established that paid traffic is your best (and most cost effective) way to drive traffic. Now let’s talk about how to create ads that magnetically attract your best customers. NOTE: We’ll focus primarily on Facebook advertising here, but you can apply this same process to whatever platform you’re using.
Two Concepts for Evaluating Your Target Audience How do you know the type of ads you should be running and how to precisely target those ads?
There are two foundational concepts, these are: the customer journey and the traffic temperature.
Concept 1: The Customer Journey
The Customer Value Journey, keep in mind the path people follow as when they build a relationship with your business, from first interaction till the final sale. The three core stages of this Journey are:
Awareness.
This is the top of the funnel, when new prospects first discover your brand exists and that you can help them solve their problems.
Evaluation.
This is the middle of the funnel, when prospects are seriously considering making a purchase. Their biggest question is whether you’re the best source.
Conversion.
The is the bottom of the funnel, where people take action and buy something from you.
Concept 2: Traffic Temperature At each stage of the Customer Journey, your audience has a different relationship with you.
At the top of the funnel, they barely know you and may not even know what you do. But as they move through the funnel, they learn more about you and become more committed and loyal.
You might say, they “warm up to you.” Which is why we refer to this deepening relationship as “traffic temperature.”
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Targeting
The final element in a high-performing ad campaign is targeting, and it’s important because even a great offer won’t convert if you put it in front of the wrong audience.
Follow 2 rules of thumb when planning your targeting. First, be as specific as possible. Specificity has to do with research. When planning your targeting, learn as much as possible about your target audience.
You want to know your target audience so well, you can single out specific interests that this group has but no one else would have.
Second, get the message right for your target temperature. Temperature, as we talked about earlier, has to do with matching your message to the level of relationship you have with your target audience. Here are some guidelines for getting the temperature right. Cold Traffic. Here, you’re just introducing yourself to new audiences, so you have 3 goals (none of them being to sell):
• Indoctrination. Aim to build trust and establish credibility by sharing valuable information for free.
• Pixelling. When they arrive on your content, pixel them so you run more ads to them and warm them up.
• Segmentation.
If they click on a blog post about email marketing, we know they’re interested in that topic, so we can make them a more relevant offer later.
What kind of offers do you make to cold traffic?
• Blog posts
• Social media updates
• Content videos
• Podcasts
• Lead magnets
• Quizzes
• White papers
• YouTube ads to content
• Twitter ads to pillar content
• Infographics
When paying for cold traffic, you’ll pixel people who engage with your ad or click through to free content. You want to give them value so they begin to like your brand. So focus on entertaining, inspiring, and educating everyone who clicks through.
Feedback Loop
You need a system where complaints, praise, and other useful comments “heard” during social listening are routed to the correct person in your organization.
This makes it easy to apply the 3-step social customer service plan:
1. Acknowledge the concerns.
2. Forward the issue to the right person.
3. Take the issue off public channels and resolve it in a timely manner.
Social Media
Bouncing Much of the success of social media marketing is the frequency of “touches.” If you’re on more than one social channel, and people see you on multiple channels, you create a j-curve of exposure. That’s what we call social media bouncing:
A social media follower on one channel is exposed to your brand on another channel.
Take Taco Bell, for example.
First, you see them on a billboard. Then you follow them on Twitter.
What are the terms you need to know as a digital advertiser?
Traffic Temperature
The classification of the audiences you target with your digital advertising campaigns as cold, warm, or hot.
Cold Traffic
Audiences targeted with ads that have no prior experience with your brands, products, or people. Ads targeted at cold audiences introduce the business to the prospect and establish trust and authority in an effort to build awareness.
Warm Traffic
Audiences targeted with ads that are aware of your brands, products, or people but have not yet converted to a customer or haven’t purchased in a long period of time.
Ads targeted at warm audiences should be designed to convince a prospect that you have the superior solution.
Hot Traffic
Audiences targeted with ads that have previously purchased. These audiences know your reputation and have used your product or service.
Ads targeted at hot audiences should convert a customer into a high-ticket or repeat buyer. Most ad campaigns to hot audiences will be conducted through retargeting.
Retargeting Campaign
An ad campaign designed to reach customers and prospects with a message and offer that is based on their previous behavior. That behavior might be an opt-in to a lead form, a purchase, or a visit to a page on your website.
Ad retargeting is available from ad platforms such as Facebook and Google.
Frequency
How many times has an ad been shown to the people you’re targeting.
Ideally, you want to keep the frequency below 10. If people to see the same ad too many times, it becomes annoying and can lead to ad fatigue.
Relevance
The Facebook metric calculating how relevant your ad is to your target audience. In Google Adwords, it’s called “quality score.” It measures people’s engagement level and how much they like your ad.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The number of clicks divided by the number of impressions on an ad and any other call-to-action. The higher the click-through rate, the more prospects you will be moving from stage to stage in the customer journey.
Cost Per Acquisition of Customer (CPA) The amount of advertising spend divided by the number of customers generated. Drill down on this metric by calculating CPA by by traffic campaign, traffic source, and more.
Cost Per Lead (CPL) The amount of advertising spend divided by the number of leads generated. Once again, drill down on this metric by calculating CPL by traffic campaign, traffic source, and more.
Cost Per Click (CPC) The amount of advertising spend divided by the number of clicks on the ad, ad set, or ad campaign. Believe it or not, this is the least important of these four metrics.
Cost Per 1,000 Impressions (CPM) The amount it costs to reach a million people. When you’re creating a campaign to extend your reach or build brand awareness, this is the metric to use.
Summing Up
Digital advertising is a key tactic for digital marketers because it gives you control over your traffic flow. To succeed, though, you need to create different campaigns for each stage of the Customer Journey—and you need to understand the “temperature” of each stage. Get that right, and you’ll soon be driving traffic like a pro. But your digital marketing mastery doesn’t stop there. Not only do you want to be driving traffic to your onsite content and landing pages, you also want to engage your audience in social media. And that’s just what we’ll cover in the next chapter.