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Many businesses focus almost exclusively on sales when building their customer base using digital ads. It makes logical sense and for some brands, it can work fine. The temptation is there because it’s easy to quantify and it delivers money directly back into the business.
Some have a broader view of the wider ‘buying window’ of a new customer, giving them a lot more flexibility in how they look to fill their pipeline. Taking the time to learn more about your customer buying window can let you build a full marketing funnel that is thinking months and even years ahead to keep customers coming over time.
One of the main issues with only running sales campaigns is that you are relying on your ad campaigns, to do all the heavy lifting. When you consider that an ad may be in view for only a second, a lot is riding on your ad to convert that potential customer there and then.
So what if you could use ads to get your target audience into your ‘ecosystem’ and have unlimited opportunities to convert for the same price as a conversion ad?
Here are 3 alternative campaigns to run to fill your upper funnel.
Newsletter subs
If you have a newsletter then this can be a goldmine for your customer acquisition. A well-executed newsletter that provides value is a hugely effective way of upselling your customers further down the line. The key here is to focus on the value given rather than immediately trying to sell, you don’t want to run campaigns to build your audience for them to churn as soon as you start sending them emails.
Social Followers
If your social media followers are the right audience then it’s not a vanity metric but a captive audience consuming your content. Whilst you can no longer optimise campaigns to directly drive new followers, boosting your organic posts can bring your content to your target customer group which almost always leads to an uplift in followers.
Website Traffic
Every buyer is once a browser so having them on your site allows them to build familiarity with your brand and leaves you front of the queue when they are ready to commit. If you have installed your tracking pixels you will be able to target them with different ads later, knowing they are aware of who you are and what you offer.
A real-world example from one of our clients. We work with a renowned wellness coach with multiple TED Talks under his belt. After testing various conversion-driving campaigns to sell online workshops, we struggled to scale efficiently so we changed our approach.
By running campaigns to capture leads, we have added thousands of new subscribers to his newsletter which does a better job at converting than an individual ad would do. He now has a lifetime of opportunity to sell his 'product' to an audience that is already engaged with him.
This is considerably cheaper to run as well and when paired with a dedicated strategy to offer value and promote his services through the newsletter, it’s a hugely powerful way of ensuring he has an audience that goes beyond any short-term sales campaign.
Conclusion
So should you switch it up and move away from sales campaigns? Not necessarily, but if you are a brand that looks to engage and sell to your customers through multiple touchpoints then it’s worth considering how you can use paid advertising to support your strategy at each step rather than investing solely in the last stage of acquisition. Thinking creatively about your customer ‘buying window’ allows you to nurture your customers through the acquisition funnel and if done correctly can give you a sustainable flow of new customers as you look to scale.
If you want to know how we approach marketing for specific industries, we have the following guides you may be interested in.
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