How effective are door to door salespeople, telemarketers, or those representatives blocking off sidewalks seeking donations? Most would rank these sales strategies somewhere between inefficient and annoying. This negative perception is due to a business relying heavily on generating sales from “cold” consumers.
Cold consumers are those who know little to nothing about the brand as they haven’t had the time to develop an affinity for the products or services offered. When presenting a sales pitch, it is difficult for cold consumers to buy in and complete the purchase fully.
The opposite of a cold consumer could be considered a “warm” lead. Warm leads have been exposed to brands and products multiple times. They have an understanding of what is available and may have already considered a purchase. They haven’t been pushed by aggressive sales techniques to make a purchase and have instead experienced quality time to find a product or service of interest and evaluate, allowing them to decide on their own time.
Designing a strategy to turn cold consumers into warm leads should be at the forefront of any agency planning to support a brand or service through digital marketing. Expecting consumers to convert after placing a single ad in market is unrealistic. Creating a funnel of engaging content, utilizing remarketing, analyzing behaviour, and defining intent while segmenting your audience based on these benchmarks will considerably improve your return on investment.
Begin by targeting cold audiences within your target audience with engaging content. For the sake of this explanation, let us imagine you were utilizing a 30-second video. Facebook automatically tracks and reports on video view data making videos a great way to measure engagement and intent. Using the data generated in this initial campaign, you can begin to segment your audience for remarketing. Look at metrics like 3-second video views or plays to 100% as these metrics will help you segment your remarketing audience by intent.
With this type of information, you can plan your next phase of the consumer funnel. Consumers who watched 3 seconds of your video may need more exposure before being asked to convert, consider serving them a link to an engaging blog post, or another video. The segment of the audience that watched 100% of the video is “warmer” and may be ready for a dedicated conversion ad. Build these audiences within Facebook’s Audience tab and plan your funnel.
It comes down to taking the time to consider how to prime your audience for success. What steps do you need to take to make sure you are curating an audience that is familiar with your brand so that when the time comes to convert, you or your brand aren’t coming off like a telemarketer or door-to-door salesman. Invest in a Digital Marketing Agency that offers professional services to better navigate worthwhile and effective advertising efforts. Take a little time to consider the data that is available to you and begin to hone in on members of your audience that are valuable and quit it with the cold calling.
