Time and again, I hear people complain about how their search marketing strategy isn’t bringing them results. Are you one of them?

If yes, this blog is for you.

Today, everyone wants to launch their business on Google. Search Engine Marketing or SEM (also called as Pay per click Marketing) offers one of the fastest ways to do so. That’s mainly because search engines are a demand-fulfillment platform, which is used by the prospects to discover a business by searching for keywords specific to that business.

But that’s not all, when people want to make a buying decision they rely on the results they see on the first page of Google. In fact, 75% of people will never scroll past the first page on a Google search. This is where SEM as a part of your digital strategy can fetch you the coveted top spots on SERPs. Done right, it can get you the highest quality leads without having to wait for organic growth.

Yet, there’s a huge chunk of businesses that pour money into SEM campaigns that are destined to fail.

Why Your SEM Campaign Isn’t Working

Many marketers struggle to demonstrate ROI of their SEM campaigns and their SEO activities. If that sounds like your team, then most likely your campaigns are heading in the wrong direction.

WHY? Among a dozen of possible reasons, one of the most common is they probably don’t know what key performance indicators (KPIs) or Key Result Areas (KRAs) they should be looking at in order to gauge the success of their Search Engine Marketing efforts (PPC and Organic Search advertising). They either waste time and resources tracking the wrong KPIs or simply go by the ‘set and forget’ attitude.

Related Article– Step by Step Guide To Develop a Search Engine Strategy for Your Business

In other words, they start running campaigns without knowing what factors they need to track to see how well something in the Search Marketing strategy is or isn’t working.

Poorly Performing SEM Campaigns are a Drain on Your Budget

While it’s critical for businesses to feature on the first page of Google, it is an expensive exercise. Growing your ranking organically is time-consuming and cumbersome, which is why it’s also resource-intensive. Paid efforts, on the other hand, cost you money.

Therefore, whether by organic means or paid strategies, ranking on top of SERPs turns out costly either in terms of the time involved or money spent.

This is why you can’t afford to invest on poor SEM campaigns. As the CEO/CMO of your organization, you would want to make sure that your business can leverage search engines to get a positive digital ROI. To achieve this, you must have your team focus on the pre-defined KPIs and KRAs.

That said, let’s dive into how to properly measure your campaign performance by setting the right KPIs and KRAs for your SEM team. 

KPI #1 Identifying the search behavior of customers

People discover you on the internet by searching for the type of products/services you sell or businesses similar to yours. So the first thing your SEM team needs to do is find all the possible searchers that are using search engines to find companies like yours. How? By gathering all the possible keywords your target customers might be using to search for your business online.

For example, people find me by using keywords like “Digital Marketing trainer,” “Digital Marketing Consultant”, “Digital Marketing certifications,” “Digital marketing workshops” etc. Even more specific search queries would be “Digital Marketing certifications in Bangalore,” “Digital Marketing workshops near me,” or “Digital marketing consultant for SMBs in Bangalore”. These specific keywords perform better than the generic keywords mentioned before. So when I use these keywords to analyse, I can tell the intent of the searchers and who have better chances of turning into buyers.

So my tips for this step would be:

• Think of the most relevant specific and long-tail keywords instead of generic ones
• Use tools like Uber Suggest, Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, and Spyfu to help with keyword research
• Focus on less popular keywords as they offer greater scope of positioning you on the first page and your pay per click will be less

KRA – Your key result area to focus here is to find 100% of the keywords for your business and market.

KPI #2 Keyword segmentation

For the second KPI, your team must segregate the keywords as transactional, informational, and navigational keywords. Let’s see what these are.
Transactional keywords – These keywords are also referred to as “know” keywords and they are used by people who have already done their research, made a purchase decision, and are ready to buy.

“Digital marketing certification in Bangalore,” “Digital Marketing workshops near me,” and

“Digital marketing course fee in Bangalore” are some examples of transactional keywords that my prospects use in their search queries.

As you can see, these keywords are more specific and they may describe the intent of the searcher more precisely.

Informational keywords – As the name suggests, these keywords are used by people looking for information before making any buying decision.

These keywords typically contain words like “what”, “where,” “when,” “how”, and so on.

Some examples are “What is digital marketing”, “how to set up a Google ad”, “how to create a Facebook ad” etc.

These keywords have high search volume, but they aren’t much helpful when it comes to direct conversions.

Navigational keywords – People that use these keywords are aware of your brand and searching specifically for you. They must have interacted with your content before and found it helpful enough to search for more information. Some examples include keywords like “Digitechniks blogs”, “Digitechniks webinars”, “Digitechniks course”, etc. that people use to reach my services on my website.

KRA – The key focus here is to achieve a clear-cut distinction between transactional, informational, and navigational keywords.

KPI #3 Create blogs using informational keywords

Informational keywords serve to target people who are just beginning to realize their need for a product/service. These keywords are used by them when they are searching to know more about a topic, a problem, product, or service.

Therefore, the best way to leverage these keywords is to create blogs that answer the “how”, “what”, and “ways to” types of queries. When you use informational keywords having high search volume to write blogs which answers the problems or queries of your potential customers, they will start seeing you as trustworthy, become your loyal fans and begin to take or recommend your products or services whenever they require.

KRA – Your main focus in this step should be to increase the blog traffic by 10-30% every month.

KPA #4 Start ranking your website Services and Product Pages for transactional keywords immediately

Once you have the list of transactional keywords, take action on them immediately. To do that, you must start using a paid strategy like SEM or PPC to rank in the top three positions in SERPs for all transactional keywords, right from day one.
Because these are intent-driven keywords, if you wait for months to rank for these keywords, you lose out to your competitors.

KRA – This is where your efforts should be able to put your website on the top three positions on SERPs.

Related Article– 8 Steps to Develop a Google Ads Strategy for Any Business

KPI #5 Put systems in place to collect data

In this age of data, collecting data of customers and prospects must be a top priority for businesses. This step is critical in order to get a steady supply of high-quality leads and improve the outcomes of your search engine marketing campaigns.

You can do this in a number of ways. You can use email capture or opt-ins on your website pages, landing pages, or blogs which will collect the visitor’s contact information. You can also set up pixel (Google, Facebook, Linkedin, Quora etc)  which can be used to collect the cookies. Later you can retarget or nurture the non buyers and convert them to buying customers.

Remember, the ultimate success lies in collecting 100% data for which you have spent on search engines.

KRA – Here you focus primarily on collecting 100% of data of your prospects and customers.

With all of this in mind, it’s important to ensure that your team uses all five KPIs to build an optimum performance measurement system rather than looking at each one of them in isolation. That’s because when you look at all of the KPIs and KRAs, it paints a more complete picture to clearly indicate when and where the progress is happening and when and where any improvements are needed. This performance measurement system can help your business leverage search engines to get a positive digital ROI.

Also, Read 3 Step Digital Marketing Strategy for Customer Acquisition Funnel Validation

Are you spending money on blogging, getting articles written for your business, and pushing them on social media? Have you been thinking of setting aside a budget for video creation because video content is the hottest trend in content marketing right now?
But before you do all of that, have you validated your business model? In other words, do you know for sure if your product/service is fit for the market and you’re marketing to the right audience? If not, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

Content Marketing Fails Are Expensive

Today, 9 out of 10 businesses use content marketing, and yet a majority of them fail. In fact, many companies are heavily investing in content marketing without getting adequate returns. A 2015 study by Kapost found that businesses wasted a whopping $958 million on inefficient content marketing.

The obvious question is: WHY? There could be a whole array of reasons for this as every business has their own problems and challenges. But we can all agree that if you’re trying to market a product/service before knowing whether it has a demand among prospects or not, there’s a high risk of failure.

So, what do you do? Take a step back from content marketing.

This might sound like an unpopular opinion. Every marketing guru out there and every other article you read on the internet might be telling you that you need to do content marketing. And you need to do it now!

But here’s the thing: Content marketing costs money. At a stage where you’re just kicking off your branding efforts, you don’t want to spend a lot of money. Especially if you’re a small or mid-size business that runs on a limited marketing budget, you need to first make the money that you need in order to sustain.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not asking you to give up on content marketing entirely. It’s all about doing it at the right time. And, the right time is after you have:

Validated your business model

Before you start content marketing or even before you start thinking about branding for your business, it’s important to know whether your product/service has an acceptance among your target audience.

Check out our 3-Step Customer Acquisition Funnel Validation method to learn how to do this.

Identified the right audience

No business is born with the ability to know their audiences. This knowledge is gained through digging in deep and doing your research. So create the ideal profile of your target audience based on age, gender, demographics, location, interests, educational status etc. Then streamline your focus on those who have the problems that your product/service can solve. These are the audience you need to target. They will be interested in your product offering and willingly engage with your content because they will find it valuable.

Understood the various targeting options

It’s worth taking the time to understand how targeting works on Google and social media. For example, Google Ads and Facebook give you options to segment and target your audience based on factors such as demographics, interests, purchase behaviors, device usage, buying intent, search terms, and so on. With the help of these targeting features, you can reach a local or global audience effectively.

Read the Blog on How to Target the Right People with Right Content- 5 Step Digital Marketing Strategy

Moving from Clicks to Conversions

Though content marketing is not something you should invest in right at the beginning of your branding process, you will still need to create some content pieces to get started. These content pieces will play a vital role in your customer acquisition funnel and help you set up a business validation and branding process. Here’s a quick glance at how to incorporate content in this three-step process

Reach – This is where you design the lead magnet, which is a free offering that hooks your audience by providing solutions to 1-2 burning problems that your target audience is facing. This could be in the form of a workshop, webinar, case study download, ebook download, a competition, or contest, to name a few.
Register – In this step, you create 3-5 personalized content pieces that serve the purpose of convincing your audience to buy from you. 
Regain – This is where it’s time to earn back the cost of creating the content for the previous two steps. How? By ensuring 5% of your lead magnet leads convert into paying customers.

The key formula to keep track of progress in this step is: 

Cost per Acquisition (CPA) < Cost of the Irresistible Offer (IO) => Validation

Let me break this down.

Your CPA or Cost Per Acquisition is what you spend on digital marketing activities divided by the number of sales.

If your CPA is less than the cost of the Irresistible Offer (an offer that your prospect can’t refuse, such as limited period trials, free demos, inaugural discounts, etc.), it means that your product/service is being accepted and you have the license to reach more people and can start your content marketing to reduce your CPA furthermore.

if your CPA is more than the cost of the irresistible offer or if your tripwire conversion is less than 5%, then you need to tweak either your target audience or customer acquisition funnel till you arrive at a point where your CPA is less than the cost of the irresistible offer or 5% Tripwire conversion rate.

For a more detailed understanding of this three-step process, check out this blog post

Related Article–

Low-Budget 3 Step Digital Marketing Branding Strategy for Small and Medium Scale Businesses 

Ultimately, your end-goal is to convert. All your branding, digital marketing, and social media efforts should boil down to getting people to become paying customers. You want your company to make money from these activities and not waste your time and resources. This is why you must invest big bucks on content marketing and distribution only after you have validated your business model and customer acquisition funnel and don’t make the mistake of investing on content marketing for the branding process. Knowing that you have what it takes to turn leads into real conversions, you can scale your efforts effectively. 

Do you create content that exclusively caters to your target audience? Or, are you casting a wide net with your content and hoping whoever notices becomes your prospect?

If it’s the second one, then you’re flushing your money down the drain. The reason is simple: If you’re not creating content that appeals to the right people — those who are most likely to buy your product/service — no one is going to see them and be persuaded to take the action you want them to take. The result? You spend time, money, and resources on content creation and distribution while getting minimal to zero returns

So why do businesses fail to target the right set of people before pushing their content on social media? That’s because most of them don’t have adequate knowledge of the targeting options that exist on social media.

Related Article- 11 Step Content Creation Strategy To Convert Your Contacts To Contracts

Not Targeting Often Derails Marketing Campaigns

According to a survey, lack of content targeting and relevancy generates response rates that are 83% lower in an average marketing campaign.

This is why a business owner or marketer must do some prep work before launching their business on social media. Here’s a checklist of some key things to do before putting your content on social media:

• Learn about the different targeting options available on social media
  Spend some time to understand how to play with different targeting options available on different social media platforms. For example, Facebook allows you to segment the audience based on the actions your visitors take on your web Assets and Create a lookalike of the action takers and also You can target your audience based on their demographics, interests, purchase behaviors, device usage, buying intent, etc. With the help of these targeting options, you can reach a local or global audience like never before.

Related Article– Facebook Ads Strategies that drive 5X Percent Results

• Identify the right audience
  Create the ideal profile of your target audience, based on age, gender, demographics, location, interests, educational status, etc. Then narrow it down to those who have the problems that your product/service can solve. These are people who will be interested in your offering and who you need to target.

• Validate your business model
  Before you begin the process of marketing on the web and social media, it’s critical to know whether your product/service has an acceptance among your prospects. Our 3-Step Customer Acquisition Funnel Validation method can help you nail this.

Related Article– 3 Step Digital Marketing Strategy for Customer Acquisition Funnel Validation 

Now that you have some idea of the things you should do prior to jumpstarting your content creation and distribution process, let see how you can put all of these into practice through an easy-to-follow 5 step formula.

5 Step Targeting Strategy

Step #1 Assume

Begin by identifying your target audience based on social media customer variables. After you’ve created an ideal customer profile, it’s time to design lead magnets and show this lead magnet to your audience on Social Media Platforms.

In case if your audience cannot easily be identified on Social Media, find out the search behavior of your target audience and target them With an irresistible offer on Search Platforms

Step #2 Collect

In this step, you need to collect 100% of the data of action takers — these are people who consumed your lead magnet or irresistible offer or took any form of action in any of your web assets. This data can be collected in the form of cookies or contact info.

Step #3 Segregate

After you have the data of people who have consumed the lead magnet or an irresistible offer and who have engaged on your web assets, you need to create a custom audience to segregate them based on their actions. Data segmentation can be done based on who are visitors, who are leads, who are buyers, and non-buyers.

Step #4 Convince

After segmentation in the previous step, now focus your attention on converted and non-converted groups. Create 3-5 specific content pieces personalized and optimized for non-buyers. Push this content to attract the people who didn’t convert in the last step. These content pieces should be created with the goal to convince non-buyers to become buyers.

Monitor the performance of your content and check the conversion rate. Ideally, at least 6% of your target audience must convert into paying customers. Lower than 6% conversions mean that you need to tweak either your target audience or customer acquisition funnel and repeat the process.

Related Article– 6 Steps Customer Acquisition Formula

Step #5 Scale

Now that you know what your ideal convertible audience looks like, you have reached a stage where you can scale your content marketing efforts. On Social Media ad Platforms, this can be done by creating lookalikes. Through this, you can target all the people who look like your ideal convertible audience.

You can create lookalike audiences from custom audiences on Social Media ad Platforms, which then, will recognize the key similarities between your ideal audiences and find people similar to them to target in new campaigns.

Additional tip

In social media marketing, the opportunity lies in reaching your ideal buyers, but your fortune is in retargeting. Therefore, have a retargeting strategy where you can reach at least 80% of the audience you have identified in the ‘Assume’ step using email marketing or social media retargeting platforms.

Related Article– 6 Simple social media hacks to convert contacts to contracts 

A strong targeted content strategy is a must for you if you’re looking to win a long-term game in social media and branding efforts. These five steps will ensure that you’re putting your money where you have the highest chances of getting good returns. The advantage of this targeting strategy is not limited to just creating targeted content. You can apply the data and customer profile from this exercise to other marketing tactics, from email marketing to PPC advertising.

Is the time you’re spending creating content and posting them on your social media pages worth the effort?
Is your content reaching your target audience?
Is it generating any real business for you?
If your answer to these questions is “I don’t know,” then it’s time to step back and figure out what you may be doing wrong. 
In my experience, the number one mistake most people make in their social media efforts is they fail to validate their customer acquisition funnel before launching their business on social media platforms.

So, what is customer acquisition funnel?

It is a process or a framework that allows you to convert prospects into customers. It is essential for every business to have a funnel in order to acquire customers.

Related Article– 6 Steps Customer Acquisition Formula

Either businesses don’t have this kind of a funnel or they have this funnel but fail to validate it on social media. How do you do that? That’s what I’ll talk about in this blog post.

You’re Pouring Your Resources Down the Drain

A study by AdParlor, a leading social media advertising technology firm, found that most companies wasted 20-50% of their social media budget. And, it’s not hard to see why.

A vast majority of businesses simply hop on as many social media platforms as they can and try every trick in the book without validating their business model. They go ahead without clearly understanding whether their product/service is being accepted by their targeted audience on social media or not. As a result, they end up spending a lot of money on running ad campaigns, creating blogs, videos, and a ton of other marketing assets that ultimately don’t generate any value.
How do you fix this problem? Here’s the master tip for success: Identity, collect the data, and sell irresistible offers.
I’ll explain how to achieve this in a step-by-step process. But first, let’s see what this master tip really means.

Related Article– Facebook Ads Strategies that drive 5X Percent Results

Decoding the Mastery Tip

Identify, collect the data, and sell irresistible offers — in other words, it means that you should be ready to give away freebies (lead magnet) in order to convince a prospect to let you collect their contact information, and then pull them into your funnel with the help of an irresistible offer.

The freebie or free offering is also referred to as a lead magnet and it could be in the form of a workshop, webinar, case study download, ebook download, a competition, or contest, to name a few.

The purpose of the lead magnet is to hook your audience, and a great way to do so is to address a couple of their pain points and offer solutions to remedy them. After they consume the free offering, it’s time to put forth your irresistible offer.

An irresistible offer is something your audience can’t say no to. Essentially, it’s about giving people more value than what they are having to spend on your offer, so it’s too good to refuse.
Some examples of irresistible offers include free demos, limited period trials, inaugural discounts, pre-launch offers, free consultations, and so on.

Things to remember:

• Identify the right audience

Profile your target audience and then narrow it down to those who have the problems that your product/service can solve. These are people who will be interested in your offering.

• Identify their pain points

Spend time to know what problems are bugging your customers, what’s keeping them up at night? If you don’t know the problem, how will you offer a solution?

• Test the demand

Are your freebies being accepted by people? Are these free offerings aligned with the needs and aspirations of your target audience? For example, if you created a free webinar that no one attended, you simply wasted your time and money.

• Time it right

After you collect the information from your target audience, you sell the irresistible offer within 1 week. Why 1 week? Because the faster you act, the sooner you can recognize the viability of your product offerings and tweak the loopholes in your strategy till you see the desired results.

• Keep sale in mind

Let’s be real — your marketing activities are ultimately aimed at boosting your sales figures. When you don’t approach social media with sales in mind, it’s easy to get caught up in vanity metrics and lose focus of the end goal. Remember, it’s not about reaching more people; it’s about how many people buy from you in the first touchpoint. Now, let’s talk about how to implement this master tip.

The 3 Rs of Customer Acquisition Funnel Validation

Step #1 Reach: Find Your Target Audience

Irrespective of the size of your business, before you invest time, money, and resources on social media, you need to know who your target audience is and where they are and what is the Strategy to collect their data. This exercise will help you to narrow down your choices of platforms and let you answer the following questions:

Related Article– 10 Most Powerful Digital Marketing Strategies for 2020

Activities in Reach Step are as follows

1. Assume your Target Audience based on Social Media Customer Variables 
2. Design Lead Magnets and Show them (Lead Magnets Should Solve burning Problems)
3. Collect 100% of the data  (either Cookie or Contact Info) of the action Takers 
4. Use Email CRM to Store the Lead Data and Use Social Media Ads Platforms to Store the cookies

Reach Step will enable you to identify the ideal prospective customer for whom you can easily sell your product or services. Now the next step is to make them loyal to your brand, so that they buy from.
The free offering is also known as a lead magnet and it can be a free workshop, webinar, case study download, ebook download, a competition, or contest, to name a few.
The lead magnet serves as a hook to capture your audience. And, this is where you apply the customer insights you developed in the first step. Ideally, your lead magnet should address 1-2 of your customer needs and offer solutions.

Step #2 Register: Capture Your Audience’s Attention

Register contains the below activities which are intended to convert the data that you have collected in the previous step into your loyal fans.

Related Article– 6 Simple social media hacks to convert contacts to contracts

Getting your audience to notice you among your competitors takes some extra effort and this is where you can truly make a difference.
Sales and marketing expert, Jill Konrath says:
“In order to get customers to consider changing from the status quo, you have to give them a good reason,”
In other words, you have to show them a promise of value. And, a great way to do this is by giving them a free taste of your product/service, which will convince themselves to buy from you. This allows you to pull them into your customer acquisition funnel.
In this Step, activities are as mentioned below

1. Data Segmentation (Visitors/leads/Buyers/Non-Buyers)
2. Create 3 -5 Personalised Content pieces to convinces your audience to buy from you 
3. Reach at least 80% of the audience who you have identified in the reach step using email Marketing or Social Media Retargeting platforms

Step #3 Regain: Start Selling and Monitoring Your Process for Success

This is where you start seeing the result, aka the sales figures. So, how do you know this system that you’ve put in place is working?

Once they have consumed the lead magnet and the register content, it’s time to present your irresistible offer. Smaller percentage of the start becoming loyal after consuming lead magnet and the register content. These loyal audiences will be ready to buy your offerings.

Show them irresistible offers and keep track of CPA.

Related Article– 11 Step Content Creation Strategy To Convert Your Contacts To Contracts

NOTE : An irresistible offer is, as the name suggests, an offer that your prospect can’t refuse. Some examples of this include limited period trials, free demos, inaugural discounts, prelaunch offers, free consultations, and so on

Here’s the key formula to keep in mind at this stage to check if everything is on the track.

Cost per Acquisition (CPA) Should be Less the Cost of the irresistible offer => Validation
Let me break this down.
Your CPA or Cost Per Acquisition is what you spend on digital marketing activities divided by the number of sales.

If your CPA is less than the cost of the Irresistible Offer (IO), it means that your product/service is being accepted and you have the license to reach more people.

Ideally, 5% of your lead magnet leads should convert into paying customers in this step. Less than 5% of conversions means that you need to tweak either your target audience or customer acquisition funnel till you arrive at a Point where your CPA is less than the cost of the irresistible offers. As you can see, your social media marketing activities shouldn’t be a shot in the dark. It can — and should — create tangible results for your business. And it’s possible to achieve such results through a process to validate your product/service on social media. How long should it take? Depending on your business and the needs of your target audience, it could take anywhere from one month to 24 months. 

But once you put this process in place, you’ll be able to evaluate what’s working, what’s not working, and what should be changed in your customer acquisition and social media strategy.

Are you putting off your branding efforts due to low budget? Or, are you spending money on marketing and not getting returns?
If yes, you’re not alone. For most small and mid-size businesses, their marketing budget is limited and planning their cash flow often features on top of their agenda. As such, making correct estimations and proper decisions about investing on branding efforts can be challenging.
At the same time, branding and creating brand perception are critical activities that can help your business to thrive and grow. It has been found that presenting a brand consistently across all platforms can increase revenue by up to 23%.

It’s not hard to understand why — the more people that know about your business, what product/service you provide, and what value you offer, the more in demand you’ll be. This is where branding helps you stand out among your competitors.

“I’m doing everything but I’m not seeing results”

This is something that I almost always hear business owners complaining about. They tell me how they have been trying every marketing tactic in the book but still aren’t getting their desired results.
Here’s why. 
Often, businesses try to jump into doing everything — blogging, making branded videos, content marketing, and so on — in order to generate brand awareness. While these marketing tactics are effective, they are quite expensive. And, if you aren’t sure about the viability of your product/service or the actual need of your offerings among your target audience, you’re on the road to disappointment.
This is the biggest mistake most businesses make — they start pouring money into marketing activities without validating their business model first. As a result, they end up spending thousands without seeing the outcomes. 
The truth is that when you’re on a tight budget as a small business, it’s even more important to spend it well. If you have Rs.10, 000 to invest in social media campaigns, how you spend it will determine your success or failure.

Related Article– Facebook Ads Strategies that drive 5X Percent Results

That said, here is a 3-step marketing and branding strategy that will fetch you great results on a budget.

Step #1 Reach: Find Your Target Audience

Irrespective of the size of your business, before you invest time, money, and resources on social media, you need to know who your target audience is and where they are and what is the Strategy to collect their data. This exercise will help you to narrow down your choices of platforms and let you answer the following questions:
Activities in Reach Step are as follows

1. Assume your Target Audience based on Social Media Customer Variables 
2. Design Lead Magnets and Show them (Lead Magnets Should Solve burning Problems)
3. Collect 100% of the data  (either Cookie or Contact Info) of the action Takers 
4. Use Email CRM to Store the Lead Data and Use Social Media Ads Platforms to Store the cookies

Reach Step will enable you to identify the ideal prospective customer for whom you can easily sell your product or services. Now the next step is to make them loyal to your brand, so that they buy from.
The free offering is also known as a lead magnet and it can be a free workshop, webinar, case study download, ebook download, a competition, or contest, to name a few.
The lead magnet serves as a hook to capture your audience. And, this is where you apply the customer insights you developed in the first step. Ideally, your lead magnet should address 1-2 of your customer needs and offer solutions. 

Step #2 Register: Capture Your Audience’s Attention

Getting your audience to notice you among your competitors takes some extra effort and this is where you can truly make a difference.
Sales and marketing expert, Jill Konrath says:
“In order to get customers to consider changing from the status quo, you have to give them a good reason,”
In other words, you have to show them a promise of value. And, a great way to do this is by giving them a free taste of your product/service, which will convince themselves to buy from you. This allows you to pull them into your customer acquisition funnel.

Related Article– 6 Steps Customer Acquisition Formula

In this Step, activities are as mentioned below

1. Data Segmentation (Visitors/leads/Buyers/Non-Buyers)
2. Create 3 -5 Personalised Content pieces to convinces your audience to buy from you
3. Reach at least 80% of the audience who you have identified in the reach step using email Marketing or Social Media Retargeting platforms

Step #3 Regain: Start Selling and Monitoring Your Process for Success

This is where you start seeing the result, aka the sales figures. So, how do you know this system that you’ve put in place is working?
Once they have consumed the lead magnet and the register content, it’s time to present your irresistible offer. A smaller percentage of the start becoming loyal after the consuming lead magnet and the register content. These loyal audiences will be ready to buy your offerings.
Show them irresistible offers and keep a track on CPA.

NOTE : An irresistible offer is, as the name suggests, an offer that your prospect can’t refuse. Some examples of this include limited period trials, free demos, inaugural discounts, prelaunch offers, free consultations, and so on.

Here’s the key formula to keep in mind at this stage to check if everything is on the track

Cost per Acquisition (CPA) Should be Less the Cost of the irresistible offer => Validation
Let me break this down.
Your CPA or Cost Per Acquisition is what you spend on digital marketing activities divided by the number of sales.
If your CPA is less than the cost of the Irresistible Offer (IO), it means that your product/service is being accepted and you have the license to reach more people.
Ideally, 5% of your lead magnet leads should convert into paying customers in this step. Less than 5% of conversions means that you need to tweak either your target audience or customer acquisition funnel till you arrive at a Point where your CPA is less than the cost of the irresistible offers.

Additional tips

Take one week at a time before you start investing more heavily in your social media and branding efforts. I recommend you start with a limited budget for the first week and target limited people. Do the math and calculate CPA and see if CPA is less than the cost of the irresistible offers.
If that’s not the case, then go back and tweak either your target audience or customer acquisition funnel. Observe the results over the next week. This process should be repeated till you hit the ideal CPA< less than the cost of the irresistible offers. When you approach your branding and marketing strategy in this way, you’re more likely to know where your money is going. But most importantly, it gives you a solid understanding of your business model’s validity and the viability of your product/service, so you don’t end up wasting your marketing budget without gaining market acceptance.

Related Article– 10 Most Powerful Digital Marketing Strategies for 2020

After all, it just makes the right business sense to make sure that your offering meets your audience’s needs before going all guns blazing with your marketing and branding efforts. Even more so for businesses that run on low to medium resources.