In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget, I explained how to analyze the cost of your marketing funnel. Today, I'll follow up with some specific funnel ideas to help you formulate your own plan.
Understanding Previous Marketing
Here's a tricky question to think about... Do you measure ad success by the number of people it brought into the store, or the amount of sales?
I assume you'd prefer to measure by the sale amount, but not all advertisements work that way. Some ads are designed to bring in a lot of foot traffic and rely on the skills of the sales associates to up sell. These are the typical loss leader ads; in November we might even call them Black Friday ads.
Previously successful ads should be repeated. It doesn't matter what medium the ad was placed, you should repeat a derivation of it, or even the same exact ad again sometime in the future. Novelty or ads with shocking headlines won't get the same results the second time around if you target the same audience. Other ads might not age well if you wait too long before reusing them.
As I said yesterday, the ads that reach the most people are your top-of-funnel ads. The cost of these ads should be as low as possible for the large numbers of people that see them. Top-of-funnel ads could also be referred to as part of your brand recognition marketing, which is usually designed to maintain top-of-mind awareness.
The Different Ad Mediums
There are many reputable online advertising opportunities that could build interest in your website and lead customers to your store. Many of these advertising opportunities are not right for retail jewelers, but when you identify the right opportunities you'll be spending your advertising dollars well.
Some of these online campaigns include AdWords, AdWords Express, Facebook Ads, Yelp, Twitter. If you have larger ad budgets then you should also consider Pandora Radio and Spotify.
All 7 of those online advertising methods are at the top of the funnel because the audience reach is so high compared to the cost. I admit that Pandora Radio and Spotify are not easy to buy in to; the last time I checked they were more than $10,000 per month, but they reach a lot of people, therefore the cost per person is pretty low.
Similarly, depending on how you set up your campaigns through Facebook, Twitter, and AdWords you might be spending pennies per click, or several dollars. You should strive to keep the cost of top-of-funnel activities down in the pennies.
Yelp Costs
As of this writing, Yelp ads have a cost range of $0.33 to $0.71 per click. I consider their service to be a little bit inside the funnel, not necessarily at the top. That's because of how they do their audience and keyword targeting. There's also an expensive labor cost for Yelp when you factor in the time it takes you to come up with ads.
AdWords Costs
Speaking of audience targeting, you can achieve really fantastic audience targeting using AdWords, but the setup takes a long time and has a high labor cost.
AdWords Remarketing banners are the worst black hole of time expense because they require creative talents, ad copy, and imagery. After that, you then need a website and AdWords wizard to implement them. Thankfully, the remarketing budget you spend with Google is nominal every month, but that labor setup cost easily gets into the thousands.
Don't get me wrong; I love Google AdWords Remarketing, I just loathe the setup. Remarketing is defiantly a bottom of funnel activity.
Facebook Costs
Simply boosting a post on Facebook will get you a large, rather random audience exposure. Normally, I would tell you not to bother boosting a post because it's a waste of money on a really broad audience. However, broad also means top-of-funnel and as such the cost per person is really low.
Facebook targeting is currently easier than Google AdWords. With a few hours of work you can build up very specific groups of people in your targeting and save those groups for use in future ads.
Simple Facebook Audience Examples:
- Top of funnel: People interested in jewelry, who live in your state
- Middle funnel: People interested in jewelry, who live in specific towns you select
- Middle funnel: People interested in jewelry, who live in specific towns you select, within an age range
- Bottom funnel: Only people who already like your page
At the time of this writing, I'm managing Facebook campaigns that are placed at all levels of the funnel. Facebook is charging $0.03 per user engagement on some campaigns while others are set at a max bid of $5.00 per engagement. Setting up the audiences took a few hours with a high labor cost, but I know over time we can amortize that cost with several campaigns.
Blogging Costs
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention blogging as an advertising method. It would take me pretty long to get into the specific costs of blogging that I usually explain in my hour long blogging seminar, but suffice to say that that cost per each high quality, in-depth blog post is around $340.
Although that seems pretty high, you can also amortize that over several years and watch how easily it attracts organic traffic. I've measured many blog posts that attracted more than 3,100 organic visitors over 3 years.
Organic traffic is certainly a top-of-funnel activity which you can clearly see in when you calculate the cost per visitor to be $0.11 or less over time.
Email Costs
Because of the ability to highly target your customers, I consider email marketing to be a bottom-of-funnel activity. The labor costs are high when you create the content. The labor cost is really high when you create artwork or take photos for an email, or it can be as low as the estimated $340 labor cost I mentioned above for blogging.
Depending on your strategy, you can send specific emails to segmented lists or you can send out a general email blast.
Some Email Types:
- Current Fashion Trends and New Jewelry. Send this one once per month
- Latest Celebrity Jewelry Statements. Send this one once per month. Could include celebrity weddings, and red carpet
- Current Events. This is sent once per month to detail the next 30 day calendar, but it's also sent the week before, and a few days before an event as a reminder.
Email marketing is not going away, and it brings people into your store to spend money. That's why it's at the bottom of the funnel.
Conclusions
Long term marketing campaigns take a lot of planning. Make sure you assess the cost of your media buy, the labor involved, and the potential audience reach for every advertising method you use in your marketing.
Not only is this a smart way to evaluate how your money will be allocated, but it also helps you realize what your expectations should be for each ad using in your overall marketing plan.
