How to build an online campaign for the awareness stage in 2 days

Selling online is not easy. Everybody who works with online sales spends a lot of time creating, executing and refining strategies that, by the end of the day, target to increase or maintain the sales numbers.

The term ‘conversion’ became a buzzword and, if you are a digital marketer and haven’t been living in the outer space for the last decade, you’ve probably been asked about this metric several times.

The interesting fact is that conversions are just specific points along the buyer journey. They are important, but a lot more can be done when marketers think about the strategy as a whole. What we mean is that although it's important to track your conversion rates, you can also increase your direct sales by increasing your brand/product awareness and bringing more visitors to your page, for example.

So, speaking the 'marketing language', the secret lies in understanding your buyer's journey and doing your best to help your customers to go through it with as minimum friction as possible. The first stage of this journey is called 'The Awareness Stage', and today we'll see how to build an online campaign targeting buyers during this specific stage.

We borrowed the graphic below from HubSpot to illustrate what we're talking about, but we encourage you to read this quick post if you want to have a better understanding of the subject. So, let's do it.

1. Understand your audience (6h)

It probably sounds silly, but this must be the first step in any online strategy. You want to have more people aware of your solution, right? But you don't want just any people, you want potential clients. How do you find them?

1. Create a spreadsheet with your client's main characteristics: industry, role, age, websites they read, activities they perform at work, their pain points while performing these activities, and whatever else is relevant for them.
   
   
2. Bring relevant data to this spreadsheet: Check your Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or any other analytics software that you have, and bring quantitative information. Talk to clients, salesman, and whoever else can give you good insights that could validate your assumptions with qualitative data.
   
   
3. Create the buyer persona(s) for your campaign: Use all the information that you have gathered to create, at least, one buyer persona for your campaign. Buyer personas will help you to create your content in the future.

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2. Define target audience and campaign goals (2h)

If you created multiple personas, this is the time to prioritise. Who you'll be targeting in this campaign? Which persona(s), and why? It's important to have a clear definition here, as this will be the base for creating the content strategy. Remember that campaigns should be relevant the audience, so choose to target one or more personas that face similar problems at the same stage of the buyer journey, awareness in this case.

In the meanwhile, spend some time understanding and defining the metrics that will represent success in your campaign. Your main goal is to Increase Awareness, but how you'll do that is what you'll be looking for here. For example:

1. Increase website traffic from 500 daily visits to 2.000 daily visits until 01/01/21.
2. Increase website traffic from the organic source in 30% until 01/01/21.
3. Increase direct eBook downloads for eBook "Example Awareness eBook" in 80%.
4. ...
   
   

3. Define content strategy (8h)

This is probably the most intense part of your plan. Based on your Personas you'll define the keywords to target, as well as a list of subjects, and channels. To make this easier, I will share what are, in my opinion, the basic channels that are worth some efforts if you haven't tried it yet.

1. SEO: Inspect your entire website looking for SEO opportunities. Optimise your headers, descriptions, links, keywords, and so on. If you happen to be more savvy about SEO you can also start working your website overall performance and performance on mobile. Read this great material if you want to learn more about SEO.
   
2. eBook: A very popular term nowadays is lead magnet. In summary, you should create some kind of relevant material that will help your potential buyers to get aware of a problem they have. Pick the most relevant pain point you identified from your audience research and write about it. The secret here is to create something that will spread without extra efforts because will be very relevant.
   
3. Blog: If you don't have a blog, it's time to start one. Define a frequency and start writing about the problems your potential buyers face in their awareness stage. Always remember their pain points and help to solve that. Be consistent. Define a frequency and follow it and the results will come.
   
4. Google AdWords: A great support for any campaign is investing in the Google Search Network. It's easy to create, it's strongly related to your keywords, and allows you to optimise it with time.

So, this is it. You've created an awareness campaign in two days, and from now on all you need to do is to stick to your plan, optimising your strategies and never forgetting to engage with your clients. Always remember that it's all about providing relevant information, and you'll build your online presence consistently.

This campaign is just the first step. Now you can repeat this process for other personas and, in a few months and some extra steps, you'll have a very reliable traffic machine.

Liked the article? Have more examples or tips? Contact our team of experts as we would love to hear from you!