PPC Targeting Tactics to Fuel Your Digital Marketing Funnel

The digital marketing funnel has been around for a while. It has changed a bit because of the evolution of the ‘internet.’ Conceptually, the funnel is a whole strategy consisting of many others designed to attract people and guide them to conversion.

It is an indispensable tool for any business that wants to increase its sales through measurable and scalable strategies. No wonder this funnel helps businesses run more efficiently by converting new visitors into lifelong customers. The digital marketing funnel can be complex if you don’t have the right tools and knowledge at hand. What it offers is something simple but marvelous.

Having a well-defined and unassailable funnel saves a considerable amount of resources, besides ensuring that your marketing efforts are tailored to support each stage. As a result, you will waste less time, energy, and money on things that are not high-yielding.

By the end of this blog, you’ll see how valuable a digital marketing funnel is and how you can use it to discover new perspectives.

Digital Marketing Funnel

Right from the start, we have been underlining the term ‘Digital Marketing Funnel,’ but what is it?

A digital marketing funnel is a step-by-step framework to move your visitors or prospect to pay customers. The typical marketing funnel has four stages, namely: Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, and Retention. Businesses use any or all of these stages to guide their marketing efforts.

Each of these stages employs a different set of strategies because not everyone has similar thoughts, and all of them won’t follow the same path through your funnel. So, let’s dive into the particulars of its stages.

Digital Marketing Funnel Stages

Often called as AIDA model, there are four digital marketing stages to this traditional funnel.

Stage 1: Awareness

At this stage, the person comes across your name, website, or products for the first time. This occurrence can happen in a variety of ways, including organic search, word of mouth, email, social media, reference, etc.

Stage 2: Interest

During this stage, the new prospect will start showing interest in you. They will read more about you on the website, consume content over social media channels, and learn who you are, what you do, and why they should choose you.

Stage 3: Desire

This is when your visitors would want to get your services or products. They will spend dedicated time getting to know you, consuming more content and media, or probably by joining your email list.

Stage 4: Action

The last stage is where prospects take ‘action’ and finally convert. The conversion process takes quite some time, as it depends on how you’re selling the product/service, setting the price point, and how conveniently you can resolve their issue.

Furthermore, this funnel can be looked at through the alternative lens of ‘the solution to your visitors’:

• Top of the Funnel(TOFU)
  Customers are aware of the issue but are not certain how to solve it.
• Middle of the Funnel(MOFU)
  Customers seek some education on what are the possible solutions and which is the best of all.
• Bottom of the Funnel(BOFU)
  Here’s when you show why your product/service is the ‘best solution’ they are looking for.

The basic idea behind the three stages is – to get found, engage, and succeed. But, the question that arises is how to reach the audience. Well, this could be answered clearly by engaging with the new Digital Marketing Funnel. According to the revised variation of the traditional marketing funnel, the new one focuses on a non-linear experience rather than a linear one. Additionally, it consists of more steps to success while thinking about the behaviors driving a user.

One way in which all this could make sense is by boosting your PPC campaigns to get enough results out of every stage.

PPC in Digital Marketing Funnel

PPC stands for pay-per-click. It is a model for online advertising where advertisers run campaigns and are paid a fee for every time someone clicks on their ad. In the current times, PPC has gained a lot of interest.

These ads run on almost every search engine, including Google and Bing. Here’s a simple example of PPC.

Do you see the top half of the screen? They are the ads that show the results of your commercial intent. Businesses use PPC primarily to drive traffic and increase inquiries and sales from their targeted audience.

When we look at it from a marketer’s viewpoint, all the efforts you put into the funnel have one goal in mind – conversion. This Digital Marketing Funnel isn’t designed to work beyond conversion, which is why many companies face the problem of nurturing a loyal audience that will stick with them for a long time. Thus, the new funnel is the flywheel that every marketer should welcome with open arms.

How Does This Funnel Work?

PPC in the digital marketing funnel offers three factors that boost all the stages and strategies. Here they are:

Speed

With more PPC input or force in the form of investment and resources, your funnel will generate results faster, especially in the key areas. For instance, you can improve customer service by introducing live chat services to increase satisfaction. This satisfaction, in return, will help you spread awareness via social proof, and customer feedback and eventually end up attracting more customers.

Added friction

Remember that the customer journey should always be smooth. Ask questions to yourself like is the communication hampered in some way? Can your product/service easily be found in the search? By improving a number of these factors, you can create a seamless customer journey with minimum digital touchpoints. These attempts will improve your conversion rate while reducing problems like abandoned carts or unfinished purchases.

Efficacious use of budget

Your company doesn’t have to make more profits by winning at PPC advertising, but a larger budget could certainly help you do well. If you have a bigger budget, your digital platforms may do well. However, all this and your success depend on how ably you manage and optimize PPC campaigns.

The success of PPC campaigns is a mix of several factors, which can take months to show results. Still, one thing that stands out among all the ins and outs of managing and optimizing your PPC is ‘targeting.’ What is PPC targeting, and what can you do to fuel the digital marketing funnel?

PPC Targeting

PPC ad targeting is the most powerful tool to reach the best audience for your offerings most cost-effectively and efficiently. If you think that pay-per-click is limited to Google Ads, then you are wrong. Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other such platforms extend smart targeting options. Here are some examples to help you recall PPC ads you might have seen.

Now, can you recall what PPC on digital marketing platforms looks like?

This time, it’s you who needs to do it to reach an audience that will be your asset. Let’s look at what must be done to power every stage of the funnel so that you finally become a ‘brand.’

PPC targeting tactics

As marketers of tomorrow, know that you can make use of any channel depending on who your prospects are, which channels they use, and the kind of targeting options available on it. Here are three top PPC targeting tactics suggested by Amy Bishop, Owner, Marketing Consultant, and Cultivating. The three-step strategy is meant to work on multi-channel targeting options, ultimately offering you these advantages:

• Opportunity to understand your audience.
• Determining their ways to purchase.
• Ensure that you’re targeting the audience at every stage.

Let’s take a look at the tactics that you should start practicing right away.

Know your target audience

Marketing isn’t what it is without knowing your audience’s personas. If you have the personas handy, good for you; if not, ask a few questions to yourself about your target audience’s potential.

• What is your audience solving for?
• Where do they get the information or solution?
• Which characteristics make them a perfect target prospect?
• Which indicators prove that they are in-market?
• What influences them to purchase a product/service?

Along with finding the persona of your targeted audience, use what you already have – the data. Use the data from social media platforms to identify information like top purchasing demographics, etc. Other resources to gather persona data include:

• Google Analytics demographics insights
• Google Ads audience insights
• Google Analytics conversion data

Campaign design should support your funnel

Gaining prospects means you need to support their journey from the start to the final conversion. The only thing to figure out is which channel belongs where in the funnel. Rather than focusing only on one channel and its flow, try to consider a new approach for every stage in the funnel. For instance;

First, work on your potential customers and target options that you don’t know about yet. Following this, look for ways and options that’ll allow you to capture more prospects by selling solutions for their problems. At the final stage of the funnel, target options to convert traffic into leads and sales.

Ask these questions while analysing your design:

• At what stage is your prospect?
• What information do they need to move on to the next stage?
• Which of the available tools or actions do you need to meet their information needs?
• How will you tackle it to create an audience?

Considerations to improve your campaign

Even after following the mentioned steps, if you’re facing a few ups and downs, you might be committing these mistakes:

• Lack of data
  Platforms thrive on data, and with increasing PPC implementation every day, there’s no way you can ignore ‘data.’ Appraising the right data can help you boost your bidding strategy, ultimately providing you with a larger pool audience.
• Not optimizing your funnel for higher conversion
  Even if you’re at the bottom of the digital marketing funnel, it is possible to optimize PPC. Consider a trial and error strategy because it’s worth testing your campaigns to figure out what’s bringing in results.
• Not testing for a better qualifying audience
  Having first-party data is important, but it’s much better to include qualification grounds around it. Analyze their behavior and feed data to your platforms simultaneously.

Make your digital marketing funnel work for you

The key to improving your digital marketing funnel is by including a highly advantageous tool for targeting – PPC. All you have to do is know your audience by going beyond their personal data. Understand and work on the path they choose to purchase or that you simply make for them. Lastly, design a campaign that supports these paths and the overall goal of the funnel stages.

Do you need help developing a PPC campaign for your digital marketing strategies? Seek opportunities to engage with experts. Specialists can help your brand grow and evolve to meet the needs of today’s customers.