Has the internet made awareness campaigns obsolete? Ant Farm Online's SVP shows how to effectively build user flow that will drive consumers into the sales funnel more reliably.
I come from an old-school, direct-sales background where leads are precious and few. It's been engrained in me to make sure that once a viable prospect expresses an interest in your product or service, the real work begins.
In creating and executing online advertising campaigns over the last 10 years, I have kept this philosophy in mind. I always try to build the user flow in an ad to lead the consumer to making a purchase decision. This hasn't always been easy, since many of my clients have hired me for "awareness" campaigns. But does an "awareness" campaign preclude us from bringing the consumer closer to an actionable commitment? If the bottom-line purpose of advertising is to generate sales, at what point do we stop focusing on sales as an ROI metric?
One of the challenges with online advertising is tracking a conversion to sale when the consumer ultimately buys through brick-and-mortar retail channels. While some online advertising successfully crosses the offline sales barrier, many brand marketers have simply given up on taking the consumer all the way through the sales funnel when advertising online. In fact, it would seem that the internet has killed the need for campaigns that have no more targeted function other than to make you aware of the brand.
This mindset has lead to many brand marketers to think of interactive display advertising as a "luxury" item that, while sexier than more-direct online advertising, doesn’t deliver the hard numbers. This, despite years of high-profile case studies that show the opposite is true.
The great majority of online advertising ads have the ability to convert and track users to a sale. Typically, we rely on third-party ad serving to help us determine whether our online ads are converting. This is certainly an important part of the process, but we also need to effectively build the user flow to make it easy to get consumers into the sales funnel.
Here are three tips in establishing a user flow that helps you better guide consumers into purchasing your products when experiencing your online ads:
TIP 1: ask for the sale
This homepage takeover ad has one glaring problem with it. There are approximately 786,000 pixels visible above the fold and this ad occupies more than two-thirds of the pixel space. Despite the graphic appeal and the high level of interactivity here, the ad has very little salesmanship going on. In fact, there isn't a visible call-to-action to click to a website, or even to buy the game.
In this ad, the marketer is relying on the game's content to do the selling. Not a bad strategy, but surely a more focused call-to-action to buy the game would help lift not only click-through rates, but conversions to a sale. With this much real estate, the ad needs to take advantage of the attention and create "intention" to click and to buy.
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