003. Paid Media KPIs for Each Stage of the Buyer's Journey

And all right, let's get started. Chad, this is gonna be the first event that you're getting into this. It's a very interesting format, and I'm getting excited about it as time goes by because I call it live. But it's really just a zoom meeting. And honestly, the audience is the future, you know, the future listeners of the event. Right. I'm posting these events on YouTube and eventually I would like to have, like, a podcast or something like that. So the idea is I start with a couple of topics and we go from there into, you know, if there's any questions or any comments from the audience. And you are more than welcome to participate if you want to. Right. The other thing that I would like to do is eventually have, like, guests beyond Leo, my partner and I, and just start discussions and, you know, talk about in general in marketing. And in this case, I know you are very knowledgeable in that too, so will be wonderful if you have a topic of your own or any questions you want to go deeper, that would be great. Okay. All right. How are you, Leo?

Fine, thank you.

Awesome. Awesome. So I have two topics for today to kind of like, be get us into the mood. The first one, it's more related to marketing strategy and is the KPIs that are relevant for each stage of the buyer journey. And I wanted to kind of like give everyone that is listening to this event a reference point. As you know, Leo, we have been working with a client lately where in this particular case has been Facebook ads. I guess it's because my training as engineer, I usually focus on hardcore metrics and leads and conversions are the things that matter the most to me when we are doing campaigns and in general, when you are doing demand generation, that's kind of like the main focus. However, as I keep diving deeper into how campaigns work, I have started wondering. To be honest, that's the word. I question myself and I test ideas if those should be the only type of campaigns that we run for a client only, and what is the value of the other kinds of campaigns that you can run on advertising? Just to kind of like, make a reference to content, because content behaves in that way too. You have different types of content depending on the stage of the buyer. Right. And you should adapt to that. And I want to use a model. Let me make a quick search here. Buyers journey to. To just share a quick image of this. Actually, from HubSpot, I will expect that because this is a very HubSpot concept. So usually when I say to prospects the word Buyer journey. I reflect to something like this. When a person or, or a company is looking to buy something, they don't usually start on, oh, I know what I want and I'm ready to buy. I'm just gonna select this vendor or this partner that I have worked in the past and I'm ready to take out my wallet and make the purchase. That doesn't happen for me. There's an example that I liked about it that is like thinking that you can ask a person to marry or a girl to marry you or on the first date, right? It will not happen. It will be weird. And if she says yes, then you might be in trouble, right? So this is very similar. There is a process on that purchase and it's not linear most of the time. Here is picture like it's something that happens, very linear. But it's not usually that way. Usually what happens is that there's a person, a company that have the symptoms of a problem. They are struggling with something and most of the time they cannot define what that problem is. They just show the symptoms. And that's when start searching for information about what's going on with them. And that's usually when they have the first touches with the brand, with potential brands, right? They see some explanations and they're not ready to buy. They're not looking for anything. You're just trying to understand the problem with what they have. Eventually they figure out the problem. They say, now I know what's going on and I need to find a solution. And this is another stage where they're exploring multiple options is called the consideration stage. And they're looking for potential solutions. And usually the other way that you can see it here is that your brand might be one of the options or the sets of the options, right? Not exactly the only solution. It's just one of them. A good example that I usually have is that if you are going to work and you're spending a lot of time going back and forth, you might start wondering, well, is there any way that I can go faster to my workplace? And one answer is a car. But it's not the only one. You can go on subway. On the subway, you can take a bus, you can just take a bike or you can just walk. Which is probably if you are having trouble taking a long time to get there is probably a solution that you have. So you might help someone to understand the differences between buying a bike and where do you park it versus owning a car versus leasing one. Even if you don't sell cars, Even if you sell motorcycles, for example. And finally, you have the decision stage where the person is completely aware of the problem as well as the potential solutions. And now they have picked one option and they're looking for, obviously in the marketplace, options to purchase. So that's in a nutshell, usually what happens on this journey, buyer journey diagram and for paid advertising, when, which is something that you can do. You can do campaigns on every single one of these three stages if you want to. However, usually our clients or people in general, marketers in general do not distinguish very well how do you measure success on each of those stages? And this is one example that I completely relate to, which is is easier or at least in your mind to say, well, I will start a campaign and my metric is going to be how many people actually purchase the product or service or how many people actually fill a form and ask for the information. But usually the right audience for those kind of campaigns are going to be people that is already here, right in the decision stage. So if you have a big crowd and you have a very innovative product like the one Leo that we were discussing last week, right, you have these very innovative product that is an insurance for, you know, the different kind of insurance in this case, and you are targeting the whole population that might be potential buyers and you are assuming that they're ready to buy, then that will happen. If your metric is conversions, you will struggle because maybe 90% of them or 95% of them don't even understand that there's a solution for this problem that this company is solving in a very innovative way and is bringing to the market, right? So if you focus all of your budget, all of your efforts on the decision stage and your metrics are conversions only for a broad audience that is not familiar with the brand, then you will have some struggle with conversions in general because a very small fraction of them will convert. Does that make sense? Right. So actually platforms like Facebook, nowadays, LinkedIn, just to name some on social, which I think better reflect the changes or the metrics that you need to pay attention to help clients or help the advertisers to make these decisions and to select the right kind of campaign depending on the stage. And again, for those of you that are just listening to this in the future, I will try to be as descriptive as possible here. I will share my screen and just show you an example of what I mean by that. And I have it. I like the one on Facebook. LinkedIn has a very similar approach, but this is what I mean by having the right Metrics for the right kind of objective. So they usually break down the idea in the same way, Right? This is what makes advertising for a person that had never done it before so challenging that when you try to advertise from your Facebook page, you usually are given one or two options and you might not have an idea of what stage are you really trying to reach. You might be asked, boost this post or get more people to like your page, or get more people to your website and all those different objectives or offer something, you know, make an offer, make a sale. All of those different objectives are for different audiences that are on different levels of their buyer journey. Right? And they have different metrics. They are not, they are not measured the same. So just to give you an example on awareness, it will be wrong to measure conversions or even traffic itself because your main goal is to be known. This is the softer part of the campaigns and these are the ones that I do the less. Again, I think it's just because I have this more practical kind of like looking at advertising, but I shouldn't, because there is a place for a company that needs awareness campaigns. And that's when the product or the service will or the company itself is brand new. When you don't have positioned the brand properly. And if you are committed to a channel like social media, then you will need something like this. There are different, you know, they have different variations on this because one of them is something called Reach, which is I want to get as many people as possible to look at the ads and therefore be touched by the brand. So it can be one of the goals. And when you select this, the way that the campaigns get optimized, meaning the way that you make them better, is reaching to as many people as possible with the budget that you have. The campaign itself will not care that much if people like the page, if it goes to the website or if actually purchase, because that is not the goal. The goal is to show the brand to as many people as possible and everything else will be secondary. Right? So these are very valid KPIs, these very valid metrics. And therefore campaigns. When you're in a situation where you have a company that is brand new to the market or an existing company that is bringing something that had never been used before, that is trying to present something to the public that had never been offered, these are the cases where campaigns like search ad make no sense because nobody's searching for those terms. So awareness campaigns and therefore the KPIs will be people remembering seeing the ad, people being Reached out. And I'll give you an example of how that look like here. Like when you finally go into what will be the metric of success, how the campaign is going to be optimized. You can see here that for a reach campaign, the objective will be reach. The objective will be reaching as much people as possible with the budget that I have available. And this slightly different variation of brand awareness, and this is very hard to measure, honestly, I don't know exactly how Facebook kind of like measure this. Probably what they're doing is they're doing surveys, asking people, do you remember seeing this brand? And if they say yes, they are like, well, well, we are doing the job. This is a slightly different objective because here, ad recall lift is if you can remember seeing the ad. So in this case, you are more into making sure that actually you make an impression on a person's mind, not just to say, well, I'm sure that I showed this ad to this person because it was on the feed. But if that person never recalls seeing the ad, then what was the point? Different ideas, but the same goal. The goal is I want to put the brand out there. And the kind of ads that you bring to these kind of campaigns are more about your company, about your why, why are you different? What makes you exciting and new and innovative. And it's not as much as, you know, quote today or call us now, because that is not the intention. The intention is to put the brand out there for me will be the equivalent to PR effort or use some branding effort. Very interesting. Now, one of the goals of this kind of campaigns is that going back to that buyer journey, some group of people that is showing symptoms of a problem that have never heard of your brand before, become aware that there's a solution or that there's a problem that they have. And these companies help them in how to understand. So they have seen the ad once or twice and they remember it. But now you want to go along with the other bracket of people. Either those that were not aware now are considered a solution, or you are just targeting people that right now is aware of the problems, but is not aware of potential solutions to solve those problems. And that's when you go into the consideration stage, which is all about engagement. It's all about going more than just remembering the brand. Like I remember Coca Cola, for example, or Amazon. Right? It's more about understanding what is exactly what that company or that brand does. And I need to understand it a little bit more. So again, here, classification will depend on the kind of company that you are. And I might object to some of this classification because for example, for me lead generation on Facebook is more conversion than consideration. But putting those things aside, this is the general idea. One kind of consideration campaign can be traffic. And traffic means I just want people to visit the website. It's a very soft kind of goal because you are not at this point worried with do they ask commercial support or do they start a live chat conversation? I just want to know that they visit the website, maybe visit a couple of pages, spend some time reading and maybe they just go out. Because that's what usually happen. A lot of people just visit the website, understand the offer and then say well, that's interesting and they just bump out. So it can be a goal out of itself. And you can see it here, right? You can say, well Emilio, it means that if I try to advertise for the consideration stage, I will not be able to get some leads, I will not be able to get some business. You might, but that is not the goal. The goal is in this case, for example, landing page view. That's how Facebook and LinkedIn has a very similar way attribute performance. Meaning at least I want to make sure that the person from all the options on an ad actually click on the link and visit the website. And now I know that they have spent some time there on the website. And you can have similar, similar objectives. But for the Facebook page, this is one probably the part that it gets more complicated for social media platforms, which is. And the reason why I usually try to move my own clients into conversion and that I'm rethinking that idea, which is the rest of the objectives are important if you are doing something on the social media platform, right? For example, if you say well Emilio, what about engagement in general? Well, what Facebook for example calls engagement has to do a lot with the Facebook page, not your website. So they will try to help you out with post engagement, right? If you have some posts on the page and you want them to stand out and get more traction, you can pay for post engagement. You can pay for page likes, right? Actually people liking your page, you can say well, I can do that too Emilio, on my own. And yes, but when you do a pay large campaign, you select the kind of people they want to show the paid right. And usually going to be your ideal client profile. Your buyer Personas, not random people or your friends and family, which not might be the right buyer, right? I see a lot of people that start brand new efforts and there's nothing wrong with it. They Obviously will ask their friends and family to support and build up some momentum, which is great. But after that, what you really want. Followers are the kind of person that will ultimately buy from you so you can share with them content that is valuable to them. So you might select that population directly here, or you can tell them, you know, I want to promote this event that I have. But all these kind of consideration efforts are worth spending only if you're going to do something with your Facebook page. This is part of the reason I don't usually recommend those. Because in our particular case, if we help a client to get followers or to just get some engagement on some particular post, but they are not consistent on being on the page and interacting with people that actually ask questions, then all that effort will be wasted because they are sending them to a place, we are sending them to a place where they will not be able to do much later after they click on that post or they follow that page. These objectives are great, but only if you have the intention to continue to communicate with the clients on the page at all. There are some other variations, right? If you are in the app world, you have an app, at least you can make people aware of the app, download it. Facebook considered app installs like consideration because in reality conversion for them will be when you actually use the app for a long time, you download it. It's not necessarily just a conversion. Some people will argue that video interaction, right? People actually watching a video or a portion of it will be consideration and so forth. So this is the strongest part. But again, this is where you put your ebooks, your guides, where you promote your content that you have on your website, where you laid out the kind of solutions that you might offer, but not necessarily ask for the sale, and finally you have conversions, and this is the kind of campaign that we do the most. It's very similar because at the end of the day, the ad looks the same. But the difference is how do you measure success, right in this one, even when people might like the page, engage with the post, visit the website, what you are trying to accomplish at the end of the day is that that person fills a form or pick up the phone or start a chat conversation and a pricing page, that's actually commercial intent. And these are the ones that we obviously promote the most or kind of like focus the most. But again, I'm rethinking all of that because going back to that example that I was showing you, if you are a company that is brand new and have brand new products and your audience have never heard before of your solution and your company then putting all your effort and and using only conversions or leads as your leading metric will put away all the group of people that will see the ad and they will be like I don't get why I need to. I need this. Right? Or the ones are linked to. Well yeah, but is there any other solution out there? Right? How I pretty much here you are asking for the marriage like using that analogy without actually getting some time to explore together. If your buyer and you are a good fit right on the conversion. That's where you can say buy. Now that's where you can say here are the many, many customers that are happy with us. That's where you get the to ask ask for a demo. Not here and here your metrics here will be reach how many people remember seeing the ad, how many people have been touched with the advertising here consideration will be engagement. How many people visit the website or like the post or like the pages or view the videos. What I want here is buzz action but non serverless results Here the there's. I'm not looking for a specific outcome but finally I work on conversions and this feed out of itself because if you work on awareness then the next time that someone sees an ad it will be more inclined to. If it's interest for them to actually engage with it. And if they engage then you have audiences of people that have liked your page, engaged your post, saw your video or visit the website that if you offer, if you present them an offer will be more open to hear about it. Right? To actually engage because they have been primed through the process. So this is the shifting and this is going on. I will test with my clients and I can see Sarah here. So this is going to something that we're going to discuss Sarah, maybe for our next session.

You know Emilio, it's, you know, sometimes customers really fall in a trap to only measure conversions and I do think that's a wrong approach at the end of day. Of course you are doing all these to make a sale, but it's not the only thing you need to measure. As you mentioned, you need to measure all the parts, you know, in the buying journey. Actually I want to add as well that in the buyer's journey I would add another two stages that are also important. I'm sure it's not part of this process that Emilia is considering now, but awareness, consideration, of course, as you say conversion but I also add adoption and advocacy. That's also something that you want to immersion in that you know, in the buyer's journey and adoption when you finally got the customers, but you want them to stick around and repeat the sales, to sell them more and more. And the strategy for this is to this goal is to give them the best services that light them with post sales customer curve on social media you can do this by driving engagement as you mentioned, with your brands, product, service, etc. And the last part, the last stage that I would add, it's also advocacy. This is also that really customers love you, they love your brand. You keep growing organically, you grow through recommendations and you have very happy customers willing to give you a review, a testimonial because you know they will not do it unless they are really, really happy with you. Of course this is past the sale. I do understand that. But I also put it on the bias journey. That's part of the buyer's journey.

Yes, no, no, I completely agree. There's a couple of images that I love to share about this, right. Is one is the, you know, I tried, I tend to gravitate into this one because even if it's not a circle, I think it better shows that idea that Julie are sharing, which I like a lot, right. Is the. You start with strangers, people that is not aware of you and they're not aware and you're not aware of them, you don't know who they are and through that awareness they get attracted to you. Visit the website, visit your Facebook page, visit your landing, your LinkedIn page. If you're a B2B and they know you, but you don't know them and eventually you know them, they become leads, you have information about them and you start at some point commercial conversation, they become customers. But as you are saying Leo, the best or the best source of revenue is going to be repeating customers and customers that recommend you with other buyers, right. And then become promoters of your brand. And that feeds back the circle, right? Those promoters bring new strangers and that's when you don't, you know, your marketing efforts come more from referrals or from mouth to mouth referrals than anything else. Which is the best channel? Of course. But when you don't have that because you don't have enough clients yet, then you might rely on advertising. For example, precisely.

One of the KPA's to this stage is referrals, influencer activity, positive words and mouth to mouth or the nps. The net promoter score is also a very good KPA that you can measure in this stage.

That is correct. That is correct. And this way is A way of showing is the same idea, right? You have the three stages and you have stranger prospects, customers and promoters. And it's a fly, they call it flywheel, right? Because it starts spinning faster and faster and it just keep momentum because you are feeding a virtual cycle here out of the people that promote your brand. So I completely agree. Probably tools like Facebook will not show you something like that because promoting to current clients is something that follows the same path. Right. If you have a new offer for a current client, you start with awareness. We also have this. And obviously they gotta be happy with you to be open to those conversations and they will consider and they will convert. But I completely agree there's more than just the conversion. It's actually retention and cross selling and getting referrals out of those clients. That's awesome. So just kind of like a summary of this idea. Is that what a good KPI or a metric to follow for an advertising effort? It doesn't matter if you're doing on search engines or if you're doing it on social media. The answer is it will depend on the kind of campaign and that depends on the journey or the buyer's journey. Right. Usually leads are greatest metric that you can get for conversions. But I will challenge that. It's not obviously not the only type of campaign that you should do. And especially if you have no presence or very little presence on any social media, probably you should invest some money and effort on educating your potential buyers with awareness and consideration campaigns. And the metrics will be different, right? Awareness will be reach, ad lift and consideration will be traffic, engagement. And those are valid, valid metrics for that stage in particular. Does that make sense?

I will only add the ultimate rule of quality is that you cannot improve what you cannot measure.

Yes.

It is very, very important to measure all the stage in your process so you can improve your product. You're offering everything to the market.

Yeah, that is correct. So that's what I have for that topic I'm really, really passionate about. And Sarah, I know this is your first session, so if you have any questions. Hi. If you have any questions, all you know, it doesn't have to be about this topic, just put it on the chat and I will try my. I will try my best to answer it back or if you want to just come out of the mute and just ask for it and that will be, that will be good too. The idea is to, you know, have a kind of conversation around everything, marketing, sales and customer success, as Leo was saying. So feel free to do that. Our next or my next topic. I know this is very, not a strategic but very high level in terms of, you know, a strategy for marketing. The next one is way more tactical or is more related to technology. So I will, I will dive into it right away. Let me go. This is something that I found very interesting. Let me go to sales hop and I will share my screen here and find the right document meeting links. Oh, well, I will show you on our website. There you go. I will share my screen right now. So especially for those that will be listening to this in the future, technology is increasing, you know, changing the way that we interact with people. And especially for B2B. This might apply too for B2C to some extent, but especially for B2B. Some buyers or some prospective buyers are evolving how they request information. So the traditional way is you have a form and after someone fills a form, then they might expect an email from you, or you might send an email or just pick up the phone and ask if they have time. But in our busy days today, it's very rare that someone answered the phone and is ready to have a conversation. Or if you send an email, then you want to have a meeting of sorts, especially if it's kind of like a digital event, then you will have some back and forth between you and the prospective buyer on day and time and the topic and the medium that you will use for that. So there is a very convenient tool. This one is from HubSpot, but you know, it can be from many other suppliers. I know probably the most popular one beyond HubSpot is something called Calendi that actually allows a person to schedule the call or schedule a conversation right away without actually filling a form and, and then going back and forth with the email. For example, in our case or for my case, I like to offer both options, right? Just because some people might be not interested on actually setting up a meeting yet. They just want a quick email conversation. But it might be that your business is geared toward meetings and it will be way more efficient to do something like this, right? You offer a window in your time. You select something like, Well, I have 30 minutes or one hour block available. And obviously it will change depending on the time zone of the person. So if you are Eastern and that person is specific, it will adjust and it will offer these brackets. And then you ask probably kind of like the same questions that you have on the form, right? I want to know who you are, I want to know your company, I want to know your website or phone number, and what do you Want to get out of this conversation, right? And I will do this a test and it will confirm here and both you and your prospective buyer will get an invitation for a meeting. In this case in particular, HubSpot has an integration with Zoom and so it will link your personal, personal Zoom link or meeting. And I think they are in the works for Google Meet probably. And it's very convenient. You already have the meeting. You don't have to go back and forth. You already have the information, the email, the phone number, and they could just log in. And in the past, this kind of solutions were, you know, available just on. You have to pay for the, for the access to the software. Not anymore. Now let me go to our portal. They have made this feature free for every user. So you just have to have a portal. It's free. You create your link here and you create for your person and you follow the same process that I described, right? You put your name and let me go and kind of edit here. Put your name, your blog slots the information about your Zoom account, if you have one. And if not, you just offer the phone and the timetable or the day and time that you are available and the questions that you want to have and that you will have it. So it's very convenient for, you know, now that we are used to having these meetings over Zoom or over Google Meet or medium like that to prevent units kind of like very efficient. So they precisely because of COVID all that offers that. And the other tool that they release is something called quotes. Let me try to look at HubSpot quotes. Oh wow, I'm getting something else. Yes. So this is very interesting because if you are using the CRM, which is free, it allows you to quote right away from the CRM. So it will take the information from the client that you already have. If you already have the contact name, the company, you can create some products right away, easy, something simple and you can send the quote and they can. It will have expiration that you can put your purchasing terms and they even have a link with stripe so you can charge online if you want to and get the payment. So again, this tool, it was something that was not available for free, but now it is because of this time something again very convenient nowadays that is harder to get together. And if you, especially if you have the information of your potential clients on the CRM, you can take advantage of this, right? So it's something interesting that I found during the week and those are the two things that I have for today. I don't know if you, Leo, have any topics that you want to discuss?

Oh, no, nothing else. I think you have very good topics now.

All right, Sarah, do you have any questions, any comments, any things that you want to ask for? No, I'm sorry I was a few minutes late, but excited to learn from you every week. Yes. No, I will do it every week. I will try to be super consistent on this one. Right. To keep me accountable. And I will try to share every, every week in advance a few hours before some of the topics. But if you feel, you know, there's something in your mind that you want to discuss, I will try my best to be prepared and try to, you know, answer what I know and what I don't know. I will point out in the right direction on resources or maybe any person. I will try to invite over time guests and discuss specific topics. I'm thinking about SEO and content because I have a couple of good friends that might discuss that. And another on email marketing which gonna be good training too. So expect a lot of surprises there. Very well. So that's all that I have for today. Leo, any final comments?

Thank you very much, Emilio. I really appreciate, as always, I really.

Enjoyed this conversation with you, man. All right, everyone, have a great week. Follow more of these episodes on our YouTube channel and and if you want to hear more, subscribe to these Zoom events. There's a registration form in our website and I look forward to talk to you next week. Have a great day everybody.

Have a great day. Thank you. Bye bye.