I often have conversations with sales managers who say things like “digital or social media marketing doesn’t work for my industry “
The deeper I try to understand the argument the better I get their lack of understanding of sales funnels and digital marketing at its essence.
Thinking that digital marketing is just running an ad that converts is not nearly correct, although you get away with it at least for a while, it’s a recipe for disaster.
I will unpack some of my thoughts on things you will realize after working on both:
- Digital Marketing is not just running ads.
- You need to understand the stages of marketing and your funnel to deploy digital marketing successfully.
- If you have your funnel setup correctly it will not matter if you are marketing for B2C or B2B.
If marketing is telling people to buy your product or services and telling them why they should do that, these people are the same whether they are consumers or decision makers. Start by building your marketing strategy and your sales funnel. Then you will implement tactics on each level of your funnel.
A sales funnel in its simplest form is Awareness —> Interest—->Action
By setting up the appropriate goal at each stage and looking at digital or social media marketing as a methodology rather than a marketing plan itself, in this scenario most ads platforms offer similar options however, let’s take Facebook ads structure for example, and see how it can accommodate your sales funnel.
When creating a new campaign you will see 3 objective options: Awareness, Consideration, and conversion. Each objective has options that can be used in each step of your sales funnel, for instance:
Digital awareness campaign: to introduce the brand and its proposition, KPIs such as reach and impressions will be your success metrics. It’s important to track your campaign as it will be used to send to an advanced stage of the funnel if they are ready for your offer.
Digital engagement campaign: You are here to prepare to close the deal, you will focus on how it is beneficial for the client and why your solution is unique, the main idea is to target those who are more likely to show some interest. Your main KPI would be engagement which can be clicks, shares, etc.
Digital conversion campaign: You are trying to seal the deal with Warm and Hot leads by targeting the audience that is more likely to buy, this can include the audience who had an engagement with you or your previous ads in other stages of the funnel.
Patience is key here, where consistency over time is preferable over immediate growth that dies out over time. The rule would be people will see those ads according to the stage they are in and the exception is when they are ready to skip a stage to a more advanced step.
An example of that would be when you retarget the audience who engaged or interacted with your either awareness or engagement (consideration) ads and send them directly to a conversation call to action ad.
In this instance people who interacted with your brand awareness ad will go directly to the conversation ad, skipping the consideration ad as they already should be interested.
Conclusion: Simply digital marketing or social media marketing can be an important component of your marketing strategy but it’s not your marketing, for some businesses it can be their marketing plan but that’s the exception, not the rule.