this company’s marketing campaign, a prospect might first encounter an advertisement, such as the banner ad shown in the following figure.
Source: https://www.menshealth.com/sex-women/a19548045/boyfriend-voice/
Clicking the ad shown in the first figure takes the prospective customer to a landing page, shown in the next figure, that explains the benefits of doing business with LasikPlus and makes a call to action to book a free consultation.
Source: https://www.lasikplus.com/lasik-250-discount-deal/
Selecting the call to action to schedule an appointment takes the prospect to a page where the prospect chooses the most convenient LasikPlus location for his or her consultation. After that location is chosen, the prospect is taken to a calendar page where a time for the consultation can be chosen, as shown in the final figure in this sidebar. The last step in setting the appointment is the entering of name, email, phone number, and birth date to confirm the appointment.
Source: https://www.lasikplus.com/ischedule.html#/schedule/Austin/4%2F6%2F2020
But it doesn‘t stop there. The LasikPlus campaign continues via email. Separate emails are sent to confirm the consultation appointment, teach the prospective Lasik candidate a bit about the procedure, and to remind the prospect of his upcoming appointment. Also, notice that LasikPlus graduates the prospect from a cold lead to a consultation rather than asking the person to pay for the procedure immediately after seeing the ad. This campaign moves the prospect seamlessly and subtly toward the conversion.
The most important takeaway from this section is that a campaign is a process, not a single event that is made up of numerous steps and parts. Digital marketing campaigns might seem complicated to you now, but rest assured that campaigns can be extremely simple, and we cover everything from asset creation to traffic and measurement in this book.
Understanding the Three Major Types of Campaigns
Although you may have many business goals that you want to affect through your digital marketing, you’ll find that you can meet most objectives with three broad categories of digital marketing campaign: Acquisition, Monetization, and Engagement.
Each of these types of digital marketing campaigns has a very specific role to play in your business, as follows:
Acquisition campaigns acquire new prospects and customers.
Monetization campaigns generate revenue from existing leads and customers.
Engagement campaigns create communities of brand advocates and promoters.
The following sections explain these types of campaigns in much more detail.
Campaigns that generate new leads and customers
If your goal is to raise awareness for the problems you solve or the solutions you provide, or if you’re just looking to acquire new leads and customers, you need an Acquisition campaign.
FIGURE 2-1: Acquisition campaigns move prospects from the Aware to Converted stages.
The stages of the customer journey that Acquisition campaigns complete are the following:
Make Aware: To bring in new leads and customers, you need to reach out to what amounts to complete strangers. You should structure Acquisition campaigns to reach prospects who are completely unaware of the problem you solve or the solutions you provide.
Engage: The movement from Make Aware to Engage is often accomplished by providing value to the prospect, usually in the form of entertainment, inspiration, or educational content, before asking her to buy something or commit a significant amount of time. This is known as content marketing, a strategic marketing method focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent material designed to attract, retain, and ultimately drive a customer to a profitable action. Content marketing consists of a broad spectrum of activities and types of content, including blogging, videos, social media updates, images, and more. We cover content marketing in more detail in Chapter 4.
Subscribe: At this stage, the prospect has given you permission to market to him. At the very least, he has connected with you on social channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, and others) or, ideally, has become an email subscriber. The Subscribe state is a critical stage to reach in the relationship because you can now continue the conversation with more content and offers.
Convert: The transformation of a prospect from being merely interested and subscribed to converted is the final stage of an Acquisition campaign. At this point, the prospect has placed trust in your organization by giving you either money or a significant amount of her time. Don’t forget that your marketing should be gradual and seamless, particularly online, where you must often build trust with someone you’ve never actually met. If this final stage of your Acquisition campaign involves a sale, it shouldn’t be a risky (think expensive or complex) purchase. The goal here is to simply transform the relationship from prospect to customer.
Note that Acquisition campaigns are not about profit. Although you might be making sales at the Convert stage, the goal of those sales is not return on investment (ROI) but on acquiring leads and buyers. This idea can seem counterintuitive, but keep in mind that customer and lead acquisition is different from monetization. These two campaign types have different goals, tactics, and metrics.
