Develop a Strategy

Everything starts with strategy. What you do differently and better than your competitors. This is the reason people will buy your products, use your services or join your organization. Strategy needs to be applied to everything. Your ads, your landing page, your entire website, even your brick and mortar store.

Drive Traffic

Next you want to apply the strategy to your ads, emails, influencers, thought leadership and PR. This is important because getting people to click on ads is not hard. Getting the RIGHT people to click on ads is much more difficult. You don’t just want anyone to visit your website, you want people who are likely to buy your products, use your services or join your organization.

Make Sure Your Landing Page Converts

For the same reasons as in step 2, you want to apply the strategy to your landing pages and website. This is important because driving traffic to your website is easy with paid ads. Getting people to buy stuff is the hardest part of marketing. The most common reasons for this are a poorly designed landing page, price or people just don’t want what you are selling. We can’t do much about the last one, but for the other two you need a website that is optimized for conversion (buying stuff).

Learn From Your Heatmaps and Analytics

Now that you have a great strategy, great ads and a great landing page, you need to see how well they do in the real world. This is what your analytics and heatmap data are for. Analytics will tell you how well the landing page is performing: how much time they spend on the page and what page they go to next. The heatmap will tell you how well each section of a landing page is performing: What paragraphs people like the best, what buttons are being clicked (or not), etc, etc…

Optimize and Repeat. Again and Again and Again…

After reviewing the information from the analytics and heatmap report you will want to adjust your strategy based on what people are responding to and what they don’t like so much.

Then you want to remove ads that drove little traffic and did not bring engaged visitors while creating and testing new ones with the revised strategy.

Lastly, you need to make changes to the landing page based on both the new strategy and using what you learned from the heatmap data. Sometimes changing a picture or making a button a brighter color can have a massive impact on conversions.

Rarely do advertising and email campaigns perform well on the first try, usually it takes 3 to 6 months for them to get fully dialed in. Once you run the ads you need to look at the data and adjust. This is where the data comes in. You need to find the ad channels that work best for your organization and fine tune them so the perform better.

A good rule of thumb: Your spend should cost between 8% to 15% of the revenue generated from the ads. To do this, determine exactly how much revenue each ad channel is driving (because actual sales or clicks are the true measure of success), then optimize accordingly.