Awareness, Consideration Conversion: How Customer Journey Can Improve Your PPC Strategy

The customer journey is something marketers must always be thinking about. As with any other channel, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising will only reap rewards when you align your efforts with the needs of the customer. By keeping user intent in mind, you can craft a PPC strategy that connects your business with more prospects.

Ultimately, this will help you get more traffic, more conversions, and of course, more profits. In this article. We’ll explore the various stages of the customer journey so you can learn how to tailor your PPC strategy for success.

Stages of Customer Journey and PPC Strategy

There are three key phases in the customer journey, which correlate to the stages in your marketing funnel:

1. Top of the funnel – The customers who are aware of their need for a solution.
2. Middle of the funnel – The customers who are considering different solutions.
3. Bottom of the funnel – The customers who are ready to commit to a specific solution.

Let’s look at them one at a time.

Top of the Marketing Funnel

Here, it is all about brand awareness, which can be broken down into two categories – exposure and discovery.

Exposure

At the top of the funnel, your potential new customers are exposed to your brand for the first time. We can measure this exposure with key metrics like the number of impressions, impression share, impressions lost, etc.

Think about the following:

• Relevant triggers – It’s important that your ad is being triggered by relevant search queries that you have bid on. If it displays for irrelevant terms, your wasted spend will increase.
• Low budget – Sometimes your ad will not be triggered for relevant queries simply because of budget restrictions or a low budget setting.
• Audience targeting – With greater focus, you can increase the clickthrough rate (CTR), and subsequently, you may also boost conversion rate. Knowing how to find the right audience is a vital part of succeeding with PPC advertising.

Discovery

Typically, a user’s first few website visits will be about content consumption, education, and research. They’ll want to learn more about a company before considering making any purchases.

Think about the following:

• Relevant Landing Page – After a user clicks on your ad, it’s important they arrive on a landing page that is relevant to the ad.
• Cluttered Content – The landing page must offer a clear message. Too much content or a poor user experience can deter people, causing your bounce rate to rise.
• Navigation – Make it easy for people to move throughout the website.

Middle of the Marketing Funnel

The next stage of the funnel is when people start to consider options in the market.

Consideration

Your site visitors may eventually become a customer, but first, they must figure out if your brand is the one they want.

Think about the following:

• Remarketing – Very few visitors will convert on their first visit to a website. Remarketing can help you track visitors and entice them to return.
• Convey value – As prospects do more research, you can spread awareness to nurture trust in your brand. You must prove you have the solutions they need.
• Previous interests – Did a visitor spend time looking at specific products or categories? You can offer personalized recommendations based on this information.
• Related websites – Consider other websites related to your products. Could you display your ad on those sites?
• CTA – On your landing pages, use calls-to-action to encourage people to subscribe to your email list.
• Brand storytelling – People love a good story. With clever copywriting and blogging, your brand can use brand storytelling to forge a bond with your audience.

Bottom of the Marketing Funnel

The third and final phase is when you can convert prospects into customers.

Conversion

The conversion is the ultimate goal of any PPC campaign. It isn’t always about clinching a sale, as there are several types of conversion depending on your campaign goals:

• A purchase order on an e-commerce website
• A form completion
• Email newsletter signups
• Leads
• Downloads

Think about the following:

• Brand loyalty – The conversion is not the end – it is the beginning of a lasting relationship with your new customer. Ideally, they will come back and eventually become a repeat customer and loyal brand advocate.
• Quality – Your PPC strategy must strive to maintain a high-quality level for all your products and services.
• Engagement – Track the customer journey to see how engaged people were on the road to conversion. Look at your bounce rate and think about how to improve it.

The Importance of Customer Relationships

Once someone converts to become a customer, several factors can impact the post-sales relationship. Your customer service, communications, and order fulfillment will determine the levels of customer satisfaction. Ultimately, if you do it right, you can encourage more customers to return, which delivers greater customer lifetime value (CLV) for your business.

Think about the following:

• Make them feel special – Email marketing is a great way to nurture customer relationships. You can offer useful information, discounts, and exclusive promotions that make your customers feel valued.
• Stay in touch – By keeping people updated, they are more likely to come back.
• Consider pain points – Strive to improve your customer service levels by identifying problems and addressing them in an efficient and effective manner.

Your PPC Strategy Must Focus on Retention

Conversions are great, but if people only buy once, and then never return, something is wrong. It will cost you a lot of time and effort to maintain your business.

When customers have a great experience with a brand, quite often they will return. Better yet, they will share that experience with their own audiences, which can earn you more business through referrals.

It’s difficult and expensive to continually build a new audience, and so you would be wise to invest more in developing a PPC strategy that encourages people to stick around.

Think about the following:

• Brand recognition – Use display ads to build brand awareness, exposing your message, products, and services to more people, more often. Eventually, you will build trust and recognition that can help persuade people to purchase.
• Google Ads Remarketing – The remarketing lists for search ads allow you to target your previous visitors on the Search Network. By customizing search ads for these visitors, you can target them on Google and Google’s Search partner sites.

The Customer Journey is the Key to a Winning PPC Strategy

People are hard to please. They want personalized content and tailormade solutions. If brands can offer that, audience engagement can surge. On the other hand, brands that don’t have a targeted PPC strategy will struggle to connect with an audience.

If you want a winning PPC strategy, you must think hard about the customer journey. Think about each stage of it, and consider what people are experiencing at that stage. It will take a little time and effort, but you stand to gain a lot from doing this.

Also, don’t look at conversion as the end goal. Your future relationship with customers can be worth a lot to your business, so it’s important that your PPC strategy has a strong focus on customer retention. With a customer-centric focus from start to finish, you can win customers over, and then keep them coming back for more.