You have a new client, and it takes a while and a lot of research to design your marketing plan. Many SEOs or Digital Marketers begin by asking questions about goals, target markets, etc. Others go and check the client’s analytics data and do market and competitor research.
A quick hack to get you started in assisting your client by providing him or her with a road map, is to utilize the Customer Journey Funnel. This funnel has many names, and I think it is worth listing some of them to avoid confusion. Some of the names are as follows: marketing funnel, sales funnel, customer acquisition funnel, customer purchase funnel, and so on.
The most important thing to remember is that the funnel always begins with the Awareness phase.
So how does this work?
Assess your client’s website as to where in the funnel process the organization is at. For example, a start-up company and/or brand new website with not much online marketing history, places your initial strategic marketing efforts in the Awareness phase (Exposure and Discovery).
Within the Awareness phase, efforts are focused on letting people know of the existence of the organization and the site’s products or services. Many activities are conducted during this phase, one of them is the IMC Plan (Integrated Marketing Communications), among other activities such as inbound marketing, organic search, branding, social, PR, etc.
If the marketing plan consists of advertising a specific product or service (instead of just the website as a whole) as in the case of a new product, then the awareness phase is also utilized as well.
Find out where in the funnel your marketing efforts should be placed, and share this with your client, so a clear road map can be established from the beginning, in that no other marketing tasks are allocated where they don’t belong.
Also, many times you will discover that a lot of effort has been placed in the awareness phase, but nothing has been done to move down the funnel, which is knowing when your visitors have already become aware of the product or service and are at the “consideration” stage. In this case, the visitors are now convinced that the product or service matches their needs. At this point, there is no need for more awareness efforts, instead a call-to-action is required to guide them towards your goal: buy the product, sign up for your newsletter, attend an event, download a book, and so on.
On the other hand, if the website already has an established presence and an awareness with the public, and the goal is to keep those consumers or visitors coming and happy, then the marketing efforts should focus on the fifth phase: Customer Relationship. This phase could consist of customer service fulfillment, provide communication such as posting announcements on Twitter or Facebook, email follow-ups, webinars, events, newsletters, post project survey and cross selling, just to mention a few.
Lastly, with websites that are well-known with thousands of subscribers and visitors, the goal is most likely to “Retain” customers or visitors to your site. The goal here is to keep giving them a great experience so that they will keep coming back. In this case loyalty programs, memberships and customer specials, and so on, should be used.
How to measure awareness:
Tactics for measuring brand awareness consist in forecasting percentage rates taken from the current percentages we already have in all our social channels (including the website).
For example, to set up goals on twitter, you would like to use the benchmark that already exist by going to analytics.twitter.com
To measure the awareness metrics we is recommended to set up the goal first.
Example 1. (Social Media Awareness measurement in percentage rate):
- Double tweet repressions (this means 100%) for the next month (you take whichever today’s date is, and set the start day from today–March 12, 2016– to the next month: April 12, 2016.
So the final goal to measure awareness metric based on twitter impressions would look like this:
- Increase tweet impressions by 100% by April 12, 2016
Example 2. (Website and Brand awareness measurement)
Measuring the website traffic over time can reveal insights into brand awareness. For example, the “Direct” Metric in Google Analytics tracks the number of people who typed the URL into their address bar, used a browser bookmark, or clicked a link in an un-tracked email. Monitoring this over time will give us an indication of changes in brand awareness.
For my Next Post: I will create a suggested list of Online Marketing Tasks that could be executed at each phase of the Marketing Funnel.