Considering the Purchase Funnel as a core part of your paid search campaign strategy is essential to the long term success and sustained growth of your campaigns. It accurately tracks the behaviour of a customer throughout the buying/lead process. Therefore, it is important that the strategy is designed to reach customers in every part of the funnel, personalising the message based on their needs and delivering it accordingly.
The main objective is to meet the customer’s needs, reaching them with the right message at the right time. Depending on the product, you can also create a need and offer the solution which may have been previously unknown to them. You can then create demand with paid search campaigns, display, and/or paid social media campaigns.
Awareness
At this stage you can create awareness about the unknown solution and provide a solution for their needs. Content is very important here so give as much information as possible about your product or service and create a story that engages the audience.
It can be done with paid search and display campaigns on Google and social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter depending on the product or service. On search engines you target people actively searching and researching around the theme with more generic keywords, on social platforms you can target them based on their behaviour, interests, job titles and industries, offering great content in videos, white papers and blogs. You can use a more generic landing page where you can display more information about your company, products and services.
Research
Research happens when people already have a need, so here it is important to deliver a solution
Research/Opinion
Here people already know that they need something but they haven’t yet formed an opinion, so at this stage they are unaware of the solution. You can help by delivering specific content or messages with the right solution for their needs. To make people consider your product you also need to work on showing how you are different from your competitors. Again, It can be done with paid search and display campaigns on Google and social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. What changes here are the keywords and the message you use to reach people, it can be quite general but very assertive regarding the solution offered. The landing page can be more specific to the category of the product and service, with all the options visible.
A case study from Argos shows how a correct approach at this stage could lead to incremental revenue. Here, through organic and paid search, Argos offers product information with prices present in the Google shopping price list. At this moment paid search keywords has a lower priority to optimise the budget spent. Instead, Argos has dedicated landing pages and categories, offering high quality images and videos about the product and user generated reviews. This enhances the user experience and gives them different options, which help them know and understand the product better.
Consideration
Consideration is a very important part of the funnel as it is where people start to make a decision. They already know about you but need to do more research in order to make a decision. Therefore, it is important to have great visibility across all channels, paid search, display and social media. Campaigns will be linked to the product and service category landing page, as at this stage the audience is still considering options so showing more options, you give them choice. At this stage Argos offers product guides to give more in depth information and all the information needed about the product.
Decision
With a better idea of what to buy and where, you can target the audience at this stage with longer tail keywords containing more information about the product or service. The strongest channel here is paid search with remarketing on search engines and social media platforms. You can target the audience that has already visited your website with a very tailored message and target long tail keywords with more information about the product/service, therefore you can direct them straight to the specific product or service page as you know exactly what they are looking for. Again, visibility here is essential.
Users will also be looking for information about the buying process such as: delivery, payment and so on, thus the Argos provision of service delivery is excellent. They also offer a GPS functionality, allowing users to find the nearest store and check stock levels.
Purchase
When a customer purchases, you know the whole purchase path from the beginning, thus you now have valuable data that you can use to personalise your future interaction with this audience in order to make them loyal to your brand. Here it is possible to have one to one communication as you also have all of the details of the individual.
After purchasing, Argos also built a post-purchase loyalty method by rewarding customers who complete a purchase by offering a gift voucher.
Another case study from Reval Hotels Group, the biggest hotel chain in the Baltic countries, shows that you can drive great results when you tailor your message and content to your customers needs. With extensive keyword research and implementing unique campaigns with optimised landing pages, the conversion rate increased by 20%, cost per booking decreased by 300%, ROI increased by 400%, number of orders went up by 35% and revenue increased by 16%.
Ana de Lemos
