“Where do I start?”
I hear that question a lot — for good reason. Even if I’m just barely scratching the surface of what’s possible with paid traffic in this ten-part series, the work to be done can seem overwhelming.
Fortunately, there’s an easy way to know what to do next.
If you’re already getting a decent amount of traffic to your web presence (website, offer funnel, lead gen front end, online store, etc.), then the place to start is with retargeting.
Simple, behaviourally-based retargeting is an effective way to recapture potential value from existing traffic. To know where to start, work backwards from the point of conversion.
Here are two examples — one simple, one more complex.
Imagine a blog post with high-quality content that has an opt-in offer with a lead magnet embedded in the content. “Click here to get free report X that’ll change your life forever.” Let’s assume that blog post get 100 visitors per day, and 5% opt-in for that life-changing lead magnet.
The immediate thought is that the opportunity for retargeting is in the 95% who didn’t opt-in, but I would disagree. Rather than retarget the 95% of site visitors who didn’t opt-in (most likely with a slicker version of the same lead magnet), I would add a qualitative filter. To qualify for retargeting, someone needs to stay on the page longer than ten seconds, and not opt-in. That’ll reduce the size of the audience by half — at least — which also means reducing your cost to retarget by half — at least — while simultaneously increasing the quality of the audience you’re retargeting.
Next, I would offer a lead magnet that’s congruent with the page the prospect visited, but not the same lead magnet someone already said no to. (Remember, people vote with their behavior and they already voted no.)
Instead, I would ask myself what problem the person who read that article was trying to solve, or experience that person wanted to have, and then craft a lead magnet about that.
What’s important in this example is that I’m focusing on an existing, high-quality pool of prospects who have demonstrated with their behavior that they’re more likely to engage than a random prospect ‘off the street’ (or newsfeed).
Now let’s look at a more complex example that’ll better illustrate what I mean by work backwards.
Imagine you own a ski resort with a website where guests can book their rooms online, and you have a reservations department where guests can book by phone.
A typical buyer’s journey might look like this:
- see an ad that promotes seasonal special offers
- send traffic to a special offers page on the website
- link special offers to the online reservations system
- choose dates, room type, and other preferences
- pay online
- see a confirmation / receipt page.
If you own a typical resort, you will convert somewhere between four and six percent of site visitors to buyers online, meaning for every hundred prospects who clicked on the ad, 4-6 will pay online (and approximately the same number will book by phone depending on the property / demographic).
The typical way to boost sales is to add more people to the top of the funnel, sending more traffic to the special offers page on the website. That’s simple, and at first glance, it’s perfectly reasonable.
What if, instead, we worked backwards. We know there’s some percentage of people who see the option to pay online but don’t. I think we can agree that it’s reasonable to expect a person who has made it all the way to the checkout page is more engaged than a prospect who has clicked on an ad.
So that’s where we’d start. We would try to get inside the head of those prospects and ask what’s preventing them from moving forward.
- Is our checkout page wonky?
- Is any of the text confusing?
- Perhaps they’re just not comfortable buying online and would rather talk with someone instead?
To test this idea, I would retarget prospects who have seen the checkout page and not purchased with an ad showing a photo of a friendly-looking reservations agent with the resort’s toll-free 800 number prominent and easy to read.
(Pro tip: to test my hypothesis, I would make that a unique 800 number and use a tracking service like CallRail to track those reclaimed conversions.)
Once that was setup, I would move one level up. And then another level. And another level. All in reverse order.
My belief, consistently proven campaign after campaign, year after year, is that the deeper someone gets into the buyer’s journey, the more valuable that person is to your business. And if I have $100/day to spend on paid traffic, I want to make sure I’m spending that on the highest quality prospects first!
Your homework is to map your buyer’s journey from start to finish (step by step), and then identify the last step before a person becomes a customer (or a lead if that’s more appropriate). That’s where you’ll start.
Ask yourself:
- What is she thinking at this point?
- What are her concerns?
- Potential objections?
- What could you offer to reinforce your credibility and demonstrate your empathy
- How could you make her decision to move forward easier?
For extra credit, repeat this exercise for 1-2 more steps in your process. Remember, the closer you are to the point of conversion the higher potential value a prospect has to your business. Respect that, and spend your ad dollars accordingly.
NEXT: Leverage Your Strengths, Match Your Content