Win At Paid Advertising With a Marketing Trifecta: Brand Awareness, Lead Generation, and Retargeting
At three points in a customer’s buying journey, it is absolutely essential to grab their attention:
- When they’re looking to learn about your industry
- When they’re debating a purchase
- When they’re ready to buy
At each of these key moments, whether you’re selling directly to consumers or B2B, you have an opportunity to put your name front and center.
But how? To successfully connect with your customers at every step in their journey, you must align your advertisements’ objectives with their needs.
A Quick Refresher On Key Terms
You likely spend the majority of your time and energy on growing your business and not the vocabulary of digital marketing. To help you get acclimated to the concept of aligning your ad objectives with the customer journey, here are three quick definitions.
- Brand awareness: This form of advertising ensures your audience knows who you are and the value of your product or service.
- Lead generation: Lead gen encourages users to provide information, so you can specifically target interested customers.
- Retargeting: When you retarget your audience, you put specific ads in front of customers wherever they travel online next. At this point, you’re trying to encourage them to convert.
How Digital Marketing Strategies Work to Win Customers
It’s nice to know these terms, but each objective is only as effective as the marketer who uses it. Digital marketers spend countless hours learning from the campaigns they run, adopting new tools, and implementing more and more sophisticated and nuanced marketing techniques that separate them from the competition. The more experienced your digital marketing and social media ad agency, the more likely that you’ll receive more than a surface-level approach.
To get started on the path to success, discover the marketing strategies and techniques best suited to each of the three aforementioned objectives, and find resources to learn more about implementing these ad objectives in all seasons.
Brand Awareness
Making audiences aware of your brand includes refining your business’s primary message: who you are and what you do.
Display advertising and forms of social media paid advertising are particularly effective for this stage, as users spend a great deal of time browsing websites and scrolling social media. Keep in mind that you also want to ensure that these ads include outstanding art and copy, which contribute heavily to your audience’s perception of your brand.
- Go deeper: “Brand Awareness: A Vital Part of Your Digital Marketing Campaign” and “5 Digital Marketing Tactics for Brand Awareness”
Lead Generation
Display advertising and certain types of social ads continue their effectiveness at this stage to present the value of your business’s services and products during the shopper’s decision-making process. A paid search campaign is also particularly useful here, as customers seek out more information to make a purchase and end up seeing your business at the top of search results.
The use of major paid media platforms such as Google and Meta also afford your business a trove of data that not only helps you target the right audiences for these ads, but also help you understand your audience based on who interacts with your ads.
Effective design again becomes particularly useful here, as well. Your lead generation will require both a thoughtfully produced ad and a functional website for form fills, sign-ups, and other methods to capture user data, especially in a world without third-party cookies.
- Go deeper: “5 Digital Marketing Tactics that Drive Lead Generation” and “A Cookieless Future: What We Know About Google and the Removal of Cookies”
Retargeting
After you’ve developed a certain audience that is ready to move beyond deliberation, it’s time to encourage them to take the final step. Once they’ve visited your website, you can serve your ads wherever they go online, including other websites and social media.
When users click on your retargeting ad and return to your website, the calls to action you’ve included in your ads should be emphasized here as well to encourage the conversion.
- Go deeper: “Retention Marketing Tactics for Your Business”
What the Data Says: These Three Objectives Must Be Used Together
It is important to use a variety of digital marketing strategies, including blogs, social media ads, paid search ads, display ads, and more to connect with your target audience and meet each of your campaign’s’ objectives. However, it is equally essential to implement a strategy that harnesses the total impact of brand awareness, lead generation, and retargeting together.
A comprehensive digital marketing strategy, also known as “full-funnel” or “omnichannel” marketing, must include all three objectives to guide users toward conversion. Your ads make your audience aware of who you are; they help them make choices and find opportunities to connect; and when they’re ready to buy, they show them how.
But don’t just trust us. Trust the data about marketing strategies that address all points in a consumer’s journey.
- For consumer goods, “full-funnel strategies see up to 45% higher [return on investment] and 7% increases in offline sales compared to marketing campaigns across a single purchase stage” (Think With Google).
- For B2B and B2C businesses, “that added upper-funnel marketing efforts to existing mid-funnel campaigns were able to boost return on investment (ROI) by 70%. And brands that added upper-funnel tactics to campaigns that covered the middle and lower funnels were able to raise ROI by 13%” (Think With Google).
What You Should Expect From Your Agency’s Digital Marketing Strategy
You now understand the basics of an omnichannel digital campaign that draws in your audiences and nurtures them as they move down the marketing funnel. However, simply running these campaign types without ongoing optimizations and refinement will not produce the results you want. For that, you need a digital marketing agency well-versed in paid media.
Your agency team will ask themselves these questions on your behalf:
- How can we continue to grow the business?
- Where is there room for improvement in this campaign?
- What have we learned from past successful campaigns?
- What new, innovative strategies can we leverage?
- How do we beat our competitors who are also digital-marketing savvy?
Digital marketing is a block of clay, ready to be molded to your vision. The tools are available. You only need to select an agency that can artfully transform your business’s marketing into something truly special.
Peter Mishler, senior digital copywriter at iFocus Marketing, is dedicated to using language to help clients find their audiences. He is the author of two books: a Kathryn A. Morton Prize-winning collection of poetry, from Sarabande Books (2018) and a book of reflections for public school teachers from Andrews McMeel Publishing (2021). His poetry has appeared in many national publications, including The Paris Review, and he is a contributing editor for Literary Hub. New to marketing, Peter taught English for 15 years.
