Digital Marketing for Covidpreneurs

Good on you for pursuing that personal project and setting up your website, and welcome to the Covidpreneurs Club! 🎉  (just coined that term).

If you want to save time and energy, I encourage you to read until the end of this post. 

Take my friend Marge as an example. The other day she rang and said she had just finished the Google Ads Certification but she actually didn’t know how to proceed or what to do next. “What about Instagram or Facebook ads? How much does it cost? Which one is better? What about Email Marketing??”

I know, there’s a lot to consider in this landscape, and it can sound daunting—but trust me, it doesn’t need to be.

The basics

When trying to understand and navigate through the digital marketing options, there are a few concepts that make all the difference. 

Before that though, just a quick disclosure: My weird Business degree swapped the Marketing courses for IT ones (thankfully!), so what follows comes from my professional experience plus many hours of online education.

1. The Marketing Funnel & The Buyer’s Journey

I know they are probably not the same thing but to me, they both illustrate the same point from different angles. Most of the time.

The Buyer’s Journey model says that when it comes to buying something online (E-commerce), or enquiring for personal services (Consulting/Freelance), you (the buyer) go through a process that consists of at least three stages:

1. 😕  Awareness stage
2. 🤔  Consideration stage 
3. 😛  Decision stage 

Now please close your eyes for a second and visualise the last time you made an online purchase. 

First, you probably had the need of getting something. Or maybe that need was put into your head by a friend (or an advertisement). This corresponds to the Awareness stage, where you don’t necessarily know the solution to your problem, nor whom you’ll end up buying from.

After you knew about the product you wanted to get —or the specialist you needed in order to fix your issue—, you probably started researching about different prices and specifications. This is called the Consideration stage, where you find and compare candidates that could help you to achieve your goal.

Finally, the Decision stage is where you go with the winner and attempt to buy the product or contact the specialist. I say attempt because sometimes a successful sale (or enquiry) takes more than just a keen visitor.

The Marketing Funnel is kind of the same thing but seen from the business’s eyes:

1. \ : /   Top of the Funnel (~Awareness stage)
2.  |:|    Middle of the Funnel (~Consideration stage)
3.  Ṿ    Bottom of the Funnel (~Decision stage)

But there’s a catch. Marketing Funnels have holes on them, and their bottom level is very narrow (including yours).

This means that an important part of your potential customers will fall out of the funnel before turning into a sale—inevitably, at some stage of their buying journey.

Don’t worry, by mastering these concepts along with a few more techniques, you will make your funnel look more like a solid, fat, lubricated pipe.

2. Search Intent, branded and unbranded terms

As you already guessed, some tools and platforms work best at different stages of the Buyer’s Journey. I’ll probably get more into juicy strategies in further posts but first, we need to talk about Search.

You want your website to rank first on Google, which is hard and/or expensive—right? Well, not necessarily (also a further post).

For now, just be aware of the difference between the following searches:

1. 😰  — “how to listen to podcasts while doing house chores”
2. 🕵️‍♂️  — “best wireless headphones in 2020”
3. 🙈  — “airpods free delivery”

You guessed it again! These searches correspond to different stages of the Buyer’s Journey. How did you notice? Because by reading the query, one can infer different Search Intents.

When getting started with Google Ads (or SEM), most newbies focus exclusively on the third stage: Your company name or your own name—we will call these “branded terms”.

This approach is fine (and most likely cheaper), but keep in mind that you’ll be missing on a whole lot of funnel volume (top and middle levels). What you could actually do, is to bid for what we'll call “unbranded terms” (eg: “best wireless headphones in 2020”). This could increase your traffic drastically—although I wouldn’t suggest you do this until you know what you’re doing as it could get expensive.

3. Impressions, Clicks, CTR, CPM, PPC, CPC, WTF…

Yeah, I know, those acronyms seem very technical and difficult—they’re not, just bear with me...

Impressions are the number of times your ad gets shown to potential customers, either on Google (as an item on the results page, among others), Instagram or Facebook (think of Promoted posts), and it can also refer to emails on your audience’s inbox.

Clicks are just the number of times those impressions were clicked on.

Click-Through Rate, or CTR, is nothing but the division between Clicks and Impressions.

Please note that different platforms and campaign types will charge you differently, depending on different things. That’s why is important to measure and compare these campaigns with different metrics.

For example, in the “Awareness stage” you might just want to use Instagram Ads to tell people who you are, without begging for a click. In this case, Facebook will charge you by impressions. Therefore, in an Awareness Campaign you want to keep an eye on the CPM, or “Cost Per Thousand Impressions”.

Similarly, in the “Consideration stage” you might want to drive traffic to your website with Google Ads or Facebook Ads. No worries, they’ll definitely help you do that and then you’ll have to pay them per each click on your advertisement (PPC). Therefore, in a Consideration Campaign you want to look for the CPC, or “Cost Per Click”(more on this in a later post).

4. Traffic Sources & measurement

👍  Well done, you’ve made until here! The following will be way easier to digest.

One of the few University lessons that stuck with me over time is “What is not being measured can not be improved” and It applies really well to Digital Marketing. 

Properly identifying your website’s traffic sources will help you to tell what is worth your time and what isn’t.

Having Google Analytics properly installed on your website is something you definitely want to do rather sooner than later. Especially if you plan to invest in Paid Digital Marketing. I would also recommend installing a Facebook Pixel, for retargeting purposes (for another post).

💡  Pro Tip: If you want to track organic (unpaid) impressions on Google, you should also set up a Google Search Console account and connect it to your Google Analytics.

Considering the Google Analytics’ convention names, it is very useful to acknowledge at least the following traffic sources:

• Direct traffic: Visitors that visit your site by typing your URL into their browser, or through an undefined channel (hard to tell how they got to know that URL though).
• Referral traffic: Visitors that visit your site by clicking on a URL on another website (eg: Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, etc.)
• Organic Search traffic: Visitors that discover your website by searching a term in a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo) and then clicked on your listing.
• Campaign traffic: Visitors that visit your website through a dedicated campaign or by clicking on a link with certain tracking parameters.

Most important point

Being aware of the Buyer’s Journey and its three main stages will help you to save time and money, and will also help you to tell which  Digital Marketing Tool makes more sense at each stage (or Funnel level). In the same fashion, it is also very useful to understand the difference between search intents. 

If you haven’t done it yet, I’d strongly suggest configuring Google Analytics in your site ASAP—and definitely, before start throwing money blindly into Google Ads or Facebook Ads and wishing for the best. No measurement, no improvement.