How to Use Paid Ads to Attract Customers at Different Funnel Stages
"Yeah, I tried paid ads. It doesn't work."
As marketers, we have heard this so many times. Small businesses that can benefit from the correct paid advertising campaign often avoid it. Why? Many of them think it is only a long-term benefit, and they should focus on it later.
Meanwhile, those who put even small budgets on paid advertising are already generating their leads. So, the problem lies in poor analytics or irrelevant tools, not in the advertising model itself. Yet, when it comes to efficiency, it depends on various factors. There's no one-stop solution, but successful campaigns always have a pattern.
First and foremost, you should dive into the essentials and best practices of the customer acquisition funnel for your store. After examining this approach, you will see how to drive revenue one stage at a time. Our next step will be learning how to make the most of your paid advertising campaigns, again, aligning them with your funnel. In other words, you won't miss out on anything important and ensure you did your best.
Paid Ads: Connect Strategy With Funnel
Let's start with good news: you don't need to try all the tools. Many SMBs (like Shopify merchants or small e-commerce startups) leverage the Pareto principle. It means 20% of their effort will gain 80% of the result without blowing the marketing budget.
The first pillar of efficiency is your strategy. It makes you able to systematize campaigns and establish a consistent process that will grow your customer base week by week.
Simply put, the strategy is an answer to "how I will achieve my goal." It is important to keep in mind that strategy doesn't guarantee the achievement of your specific goal. But it helps you move your business in the right direction, whether your goal is to drive sales, increase brand awareness, or increase website traffic.
A good strategy is impossible without an accurate funnel. There are many users in it who may be interested in your product, but their number will decrease after each stage. To minimize the percentage of "not interested" leads, you should tailor your messaging to each funnel stage.
From Theory to Practice
When your paid advertising strategy is keyed to your funnel, you will be able to:
● understand your customers’ behavior
● segment campaigns by user intent
● evaluate the marketing performance more accurately
● identify risks and gaps in your sales cycle
● predict the cost of attracting a new buyer
Your main goal will be to align advertising content with customer intent for each funnel stage in practice. Let's take a look at real-life applications of channels, tools, and metrics that will help you on each funnel level of the AIDA model.
What Is the AIDA Model?
AIDA (derives from A – Awareness, I – Interest, D – Desire, – A – Actions) is a well-known marketing model used to address specific problems of any audience type. Invented more than 100 years ago, it still works because it is keyed to human behavior and psychology patterns.
The logic behind this approach is simple: you set a cognitive trigger for each stage of your AIDA funnel and adjust them based on your statistics. It helps you better understand your customer, develop new marketing strategies and scale your operations. And yes, it is applicable to any type of business.
Let’s see how you can put it into practice.
Awareness: Meet Our Brand
Users know nothing about your shop, brand or company, but they have already faced a problem you can solve. At this stage, you should provide them with guidance content. How-To's, checklists, pro tips, and ultimate guides work well. Seed them through your platform, third-party blogs and media.
Another useful format is promo videos (without any call-to-actions) dedicated to addressing your general audience's problems. Customers become loyal when they see you as a subject matter expert.
Audience: cold
Goal: introduce your brand to your future fans
Trigger actions: website/page visits, social media page views, video views and comments
Channels: SEO, Content Marketing, Google Contextual Ads and Facebook Targeting Ads
Metrics: CTR (click-through rate), CPC (cost per click), views and bounce rate
Interest: Engage Your Future Fans
Here we shift the emphasis of your ads from your brand to your direct offering. Keep in mind that we still avoid aggressive sales tactics. At this stage, you convert visitors into leads, engaging with people who leave their data in some contact or subscription form.
Now remarketing comes into play. Show your ads to people who have already visited your website. The best way here is to combine Facebook and Instagram remarketing with display ads on third-party websites. A golden rule of remarketing – do not annoy your customer. Make sure your campaign is extending your value proposition, not duplicating it.
Audience: semi-cold
Goal: engage a customer with direct offering
Trigger actions: social media page follow, newsletter subscription, contact form submission and specific page view (i.e. "about the product")
Channels: SMM, cold lead generation, Google Ads (Remarketing), Google Contextual Ads and Facebook Targeting Ads
Metrics: CTR, email open rate, lead database volume and CPL / CPA (cost per lead/acquisition)
Desire: Fuel the Demand
When someone is interested in your product, your next step should be to help your future customer learn more about it. While medium-sized businesses often connect chatbots for this stage, you can manually implement it directly in Facebook Messenger.
At this stage, remarketing campaigns will help you remind customers about a product, while free samples or personal sale offerings will push them to the next funnel stage. The best way to feel the need for something is to try it out a bit. Weave this approach in your paid advertising strategy.
Audience: warm
Goal: engage people to buy the product
Trigger actions: shopping cart adding, website registration and promo newsletter subscription
Channels: Chatbots, cold calls and remarketing with Google Display Ads
Metrics: CPA, conversion rate, cold calls conversion and promo newsletter subscriptions
Action: Closing the Deal
Congrats! If you’re at this stage, your revenue has increased, and your funnel strategy has paid off.
Consider the approval rate (AR), CPA, ROI, average check size and abandoned carts as key metrics. Adjust content for previous stages regarding conclusions from this one.
If a user has reached the bottom of your funnel but has not purchased a product, it is not their intention that changed. Perhaps the user is hesitating about the price or simply forgot to finish the checkout. What should you do? Offer them a special price within remarketing campaigns as a gentle reminder of your product.
Audience: hot
Goal: tackle the doubts and risks
Trigger actions: product order
Channels: email marketing and Google Display Ads remarketing
Metrics: CPA, AR (acceptance rate), average check and ROI
Analyzing data from ad campaigns
Any true marketer will tell you that the most important part of any ad campaign is the data you get after running an ad. The only way to know if a campaign was successful is to set metrics and then track them.
To do this, first, you need to create separate reports and review your Google Analytics metrics for each stage. The transition between stages will decrease slightly, and that is ok. But if you notice that you have significant gaps, double-check your content for each stage of the funnel.
Also, make sure you avoid frequent mistakes, including:
● Extra steps. Do not complicate your funnel by having too many categories. Every step you include makes potential customers more likely to fall out of your funnel.
● Focusing on a static customer. If a lead doesn't move to the next stage for a long time, exclude them from your funnel and stop wasting your time. If you spend too much time trying to convert customers that just don’t want to make a purchase, you are wasting effort you could be using on customers that are more likely to convert.
● Bouncing leads. Every move in your funnel should be towards the sale. If you are not following a straight path it becomes hard to track your conversion rates and you can even end up losing potential customers.
If you like this content and think this is useful, I have covered this topic in my book with extra suggestions, different advertising strategies and pro tips
