Be Tactically Aggressive
Being tactically aggressive does not mean reckless; it refers to your ability to scale quickly based on results. Further, budget, technology, and goals will dictate your tactics, NOT what everyone else is doing.
Before jumping into the fun advertising tactics, I believe it's essential to think about engagement and how to interact with the leads generated by the ad-tactics.
There is much discussion around engagement tactics these days, and at what point in the customer journey you should focus your engagement. The truth is everywhere. Engagement happens at every stage of the customer journey, and more importantly, on the consumer's terms. If you've developed your martech correctly, you will dramatically reduce your engagement issues.
Active engagement relies on understanding the following items;
• The individual customer
• The customer's profession, hobbies, and behaviors
• How to connect seamlessly across all channels and devices
• Where customers spend their time online and offline
Understanding the above items better will help your engagement to become more and more personalized.
Now, moving closer to developing your specific ad-tactical approach, there is another critical item to consider with regards to your media mix and spend, and this is where within your marketing funnel to focus your financial assets. Investing in upper regions of the funnel (Awareness, Interest, Desire) will allow you to reach a more diverse audience through branding and awareness campaigns, and in turn, making these consumers more likely to convert later down the funnel.
While conversion rates tend to be lower in these areas, they are vital in providing leads into the lower regions where conversion rates will increase. Without these top-funnel functions, your leads and revenue will begin to tail off and trust me; you don't want to try to restart top of funnel activities on a tight budget.
Since you are not getting as many immediate conversions in these regions, it is vital to have the correct tracking in place to manage, analyze, and refine these efforts properly. While it is difficult for some executives to see the full value of investing in this area, having the correct tracking and attribution in place will allow you to define and present data to those stakeholders accurately, in addition to increasing your financial performance.
I think most people understand that not every company can afford to invest a lot of their marketing budget in top of funnel tactics out of the gate. However, when considering future marketing budgets and all the customer awareness and acquisition (digital, TV, radio), take some time considering allocating more of your budget in connecting with prospects at the top of the funnel based on demographic and interest targeting. As you gain performance data, you will begin refining the targeting, and it will pay future dividends in the lower funnel as your campaign matures and gains momentum.
With your newly updated strategy, it's now time to have some fun by looking at your approach to the marketing funnel and what you can aggressively afford. Use AIDAA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action, Advocacy) as a basic framework to develop and refine based on your goals.
The below outline is not a comprehensive or almighty list, but it will get your juices flowing based on goals. It's quite common to see companies rushing to implement new and shiny tactics that competitors and others are using, but don't fall into that trap. The outcome is seldom what you are anticipating, and as a result, you may consider the tactic a fail, when with the proper goal alignment and timing, it could be a huge hit.
Keep in mind that while I’m showing the below items of AIDAA separately, in reality several of these items may be combined depending on your activity.
Awareness
Developing brand awareness or a connection with your product or service. How do we make buyers aware of our products or services? Your marketing focus is on demographic and interest targeting.
Self-Interest, News, and Curiosity
SEO - keyword targeted and friendly content
SEM
Lookalike audiences
Programmatic
Paid Social Media
YouTube and digital video
Television
Radio
Website – Strong value proposition and easy to navigate
Public Relation
Interest
Moving beyond the connection and into the benefits of your product or service. Developing sufficient interest to encourage the buyer to start researching further. Your marketing focus begins to shift to branded targeting.
Claims, Testimonials, Demonstrability, and Science
Website – Create landing pages for what consumer is searching for
Email Marketing – Educating the consumer on specific product topics and offers
Retargeting and Remarketing
SEO – Create content for particular issues supporting SEM
SEM - Branded and Non-Branded
Television
Radio
Desire
Making an emotional connection and bonding with your brand personality and solutions. Your marketing goal is to move the consumer from liking it to wanting it.
Claims, Testimonials, Demonstrability, and Science
Website – Make sure that the site is trustworthy
Peer Reviews and Ratings
SEO – Make sure that you rank #1 on your branded keywords
Case Studies
SEM (Branded and Non-Branded)
Action
Moving the buyer to interact with your company and taking the next step, i.e., purchasing your product, downloading a brochure, joining your newsletter, making a phone call, or engaging in live chat.
Offer - What you’re providing in exchange for the consumer’s action
SEM (Branded)
Search Remarketing
Display Remarketing
Social Remarketing
Website – Conduct A/B testing to increase conversions
Landing page testing
Checkout Cart and Infeed Tactics
Amazon Advertising
Advocacy and Retention
Your marketing focus begins to add behavioral actions to demographic targeting, lookalike audiences, more in-depth segmentation, and personalization.
FOMO - The Fear Of Missing Out
SEM (Branded)
Dynamic Product Ads
VIP Gifts
Branded Merchandise
Remarketing on all channels
Personalized account based marketing
Custom audiences
Social Media
Email
Newsletters