Understanding how to optimize actual conversion in digital campaigns

Facebook has been a very important tool for small businesses in Myanmar. Since when the country opened to the world and foreign payment cards became easy to create, young small business owners and professionals started to use Facebook for digital campaigns from 2016. When they have bigger budgets, they started to explore other platforms such as Google Ads network and build up remarketing campaign by putting pixels.

Budget first thinking approach with random content selection

At first, everything starts with boosting a social media content by having budget first thinking approach like “oh hey I only have 100$ in my Mastercard, I will spend 10$ first to this post and see what the result will be”. That budget first thinking approach comes along the idea of casually selecting what content to promote. At initial period, it kind of give back a business output which they never had in the past like sale coming from social media. However, when it comes to calculate and correlate the relation between actual sale and advertising spend, ROI does not seen healthy. But since there is no benchmark to compare, nobody know whether the performance is good or bad.

Going into targeting and re-targeting phase

Later, with maturity of using the platform advertising features, small business owners start to learn more about targeting detail options and retargeting features. It is eventually way much better than random content advertising because it gives the owners potential target audiences which are more possible to purchase the product or service. Sale result is very immediate, and the ROI is pretty at first.

Ad Fatigue after too many retargeting

Since the retargeting is giving immediate sale impact, small business owners start to lean on that feature for long term of the business, by retargeting again and again to the same audience pool. With the same content, same promotion and same audience, the audience start getting fatigue and getting bored on seeing ads. Then the price owners must pay become higher. CPM becomes double and sometime triple. Therefore, it is very important for small business owners to know what market average CPM is and the rest CPV, CPE, etc.

Solution: creating consumer journey Ads

The fundamental understanding of marketing journey is never changed. It all started with awareness trigger. Then it goes into consideration and conversion stage. All marketing experts have different definitions for it. Some people call it cold, warm and hot stag of marketing. Below is the example scenario to understand the ads setting flow.

Assume you have a woman clothing brand, and you want to convert the sale from digital campaign. It is totally healthy to think how much success you want to get from an online campaign. Then it has to go backward thinking approach. If sale conversion is 1% of the campaign engagement data and if it is 1000 pcs of clothes to sell, you must get engagement of 100K unique people. Assume market average engagement rate is 3% of total reach, you must reach to 3M of people. There you go with target setting and balance to meet 3M by having favored options of interest and targeting option features. For FMCG brands with nation wide coverages, it all starts with broad targeting such as both gender from 18% and above. Of course, then FMCG usually should invest enough budget to hit a certain reach level because they are there not just to get conversion, but mostly brand building.

For small businesses are in different scenario. First, they do not have big budget for reach and building the brand. Second, they need conversion quick for immediate sale outcomes. No matter how different the scenario is, thinking approach between small and big companies is same.

Every business opportunity starts with seeing the ads. It is called awareness stage or cold stage. The smaller the audience group at the awareness stage, the smaller group of people will be converted to sale.  To explain that in short sentence, invest bigger in awareness to get bigger conversion.

If a small business has been using retargeting feature for like one year without doing awareness stage much, it is like trying to get water from the stone.

Different creatives for different stages

At every step of the marketing journey, interest of audience is not the same. At the awareness stage, there are so many people who has no interest at all on what you are selling. Maybe they are not realized yet what they want to purchase. In that situation, the business has to think and create content which are mean for gathering people attention who are potential to purchase the product. It is a bit generic at first. Mostly people prefer content that has emotional message at this stage.

Then at the consideration stage, content which show production function and testimonial are interested in a group of people who has successfully engaged the awareness stage content. There is a leakage stage where only few audiences will be there who engage. Then it goes into conversion stage and the people will be lesser. Conversion is good to be promotion content to finally cultivate the total sale.

Usually, each stage has big leakages and each stage still deliver business output.

This method has been there since the digital media advertising become a norm and easy to do for everyone. But some businesses are just remained to understand this approach and hope this will change your though on what you are doing with the ads.