Marketing Strategy: How Combining Paid Media and Conversational Marketing Can Accelerate Your Results
If your website receives enough organic traffic to feed lead generation, that’s great news!
But unfortunately, this isn’t the reality for most businesses.
Investing in paid media can give a kickstart to your marketing strategy (and also strengthen other efforts like Inbound Marketing).
A well-established paid media strategy combined with conversational marketing will bring better-qualified traffic to your business, more engaging leads, and higher conversion rates.
Want to understand how to achieve incredible results with this combination?
Check out the article we’ve prepared to maximize your results with digital marketing.
What Is the Importance of Marketing for Businesses?
Marketing is the foundation for the company as a whole, not just for brand and advertising purposes.
It’s through marketing that you can reach your audience, connect with them, educate them, and ultimately sell your product or service.
Here are some of the benefits marketing brings to businesses:
- The best way to grab the attention of customers, whether through digital or traditional marketing strategies.
- The main opportunity to build a long-lasting relationship with the customer.
- Marketing’s goal is to drive the company’s results, always thinking about low-cost and high-impact alternatives.
- Marketing actions are the best ways to stand out in the market.
- Well-structured marketing strategies help steer the company toward achieving great results.
- Marketing initiatives are based on data, not guesswork, and demonstrate authority, as you’ll have confidence in investing in actions that deliver results.
What Is a Marketing Strategy?
We talk about this concept all the time, but have you stopped to think about what a marketing strategy is?
When we mention this concept, we’re primarily referring to a set of actions aimed at achieving brand awareness, sales, and building a positive image for the brand.
But it doesn’t stop there—marketing strategy is what will bring you closer to your audience, build a relationship, and genuinely offer something valuable to consumers, not just “push for sales.”
A digital or traditional marketing strategy involves elements such as goals, target audience profiles, content creation stages, and performance indicators.
With a marketing strategy, you’ll be able to:
- Align your marketing team with the company’s objectives.
- Link your efforts to business goals.
- Identify and test what resonates with your target audience.
- Explore emerging trends.
How to Create a Marketing Strategy?
Now that you know what a marketing strategy is, let’s understand how to create one.
But before diving into the step-by-step process of building a marketing strategy, let’s go over the essential elements that will ensure it works.
Check them out:
- Marketing Mix (The 4 Ps of Marketing): Have a clear definition of your Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.
- Marketing Goals: Think about what your objectives are and the results you want to achieve.
- Marketing Budget: What will be the investment for each stage of the strategy and its costs? Think about how much you can allocate within your company to make the strategy work.
- Competitive Analysis: Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the competition. Think about how you can differentiate yourself from others and what you can leverage.
- Solid Personas: Personas will represent your customer and guide the creation of content and future approaches.
- Target Audience Segmentation: Once you’ve identified your audience and created your personas, decide how to segment the messages and content you share with them.
- Content Creation: Content is the key element that will drive your strategy forward, reaching the consumer.
- Good Marketing Channels: Content means nothing without a proper distribution channel. Invest in good channels and ensure you’re present in the ones your audience uses.
- Quality Tools: Having software tools by your side will help organize your marketing strategy, relieve your team from automatable tasks, and free up space for more urgent actions, increasing productivity. Additionally, these tools can enhance your strategy.
- Metrics and Key Performance Indicators: These are the aspects that will show you whether your strategy is working or not. Therefore, it’s essential to establish appropriate KPIs.
There are many elements to consider and organize, right? Now, let’s go over the step-by-step process to create your marketing strategy.
Attention: To make it easier for you to understand, we’ve already marked the stages of strategy creation where you can use the elements mentioned above.
Check them out:
- Build a Marketing Plan: Use the 4 Ps, budget, and competitive analysis.
- Create Buyer Personas: Remember, personas should reflect your target audience.
- Identify Your Objectives: Think about your marketing goals.
- Select the Right Tools: Choose the quality tools you will use in your strategy.
- Review Your Media: Do the channels you’ve chosen align with your strategy?
- Audit and Plan Media Campaigns: It’s time to create content and establish performance metrics.
- Put Everything into Action!
To wrap up, you might be wondering who is responsible for putting this strategy together, right?
Well, you can count on a marketing manager—along with the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer), if the company has one.
Also, always ensure alignment with leaders in each team within the marketing department, such as content, paid media, design, SEO, UX, and finally, we can also rely on feedback from the sales team.
What’s the Difference Between Marketing Strategy and Marketing Plan?
We know that, in day-to-day life, we might end up using marketing strategy and marketing plan as synonyms, but this usage is incorrect.
A marketing plan is much more focused on “bureaucracy.” It’s a physical document containing the details about the actions needed to achieve the company’s objectives. It includes deadlines, values, and other specifics.
On the other hand, a marketing strategy is the action described in that document. In other words, it’s the “practical” part that will help accomplish the common goal.
That said, we can affirm that a marketing strategy is part of a plan, but not the other way around.
Types of Marketing Strategies
Marketing strategies and actions, of any type, need to align with the desired goal of the business. This is the factor that guides marketing decisions, and here we break down the types of strategy according to the objective.
Customer Acquisition
Strategies focused on acquiring customers are among the most sought after by brands, especially when they need to improve sales results.
For businesses looking to enhance customer acquisition, combining paid media with conversational marketing works very well, as it increases the quantity and improves the quality of traffic and leads.
With this, the results are transformative. We’ll discuss each of these tools and how to combine them later in this article.
Also read: Growth Marketing: Understand What It Is and How to Implement It
Brand Awareness
The strategy focused on recognition aims to position the brand in the minds of consumers and do so positively.
Here, marketing uses actions, language, and strategies to ensure that the brand is remembered at the moment of purchase or to gain authority as a market reference.
Also read: Event Marketing: What Are the Main Strategies to Attract People?
Lead Nurturing
The strategy focused on lead nurturing is ideal for businesses that already have a solid base of leads and need to communicate with them.
It’s also crucial for working through different stages of the sales funnel and guiding potential customers through the buying journey until they become clients.
These strategies can, of course, be combined, but the main objective should always guide the efforts and key investments.
What is Paid Media?
Paid media is defined as everything that involves advertisements created to promote a brand.
When we talk about paid media in the online environment, we are referring to the ads and campaigns created on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many other channels.
According to the American data research company eMarketer, it is expected that, globally, companies will invest about $517.51 billion in online paid media in 2023.
You might also be interested in the article “11 Examples of Facebook Ads: How to Choose the Best One.”
How to Develop a Paid Media Strategy
To develop relevant paid media campaigns, it is recommended to seek a specialized professional to ensure that your investment is well utilized and attracts high-quality traffic to your website and conversion pages.
Here are some tips:
- Understand the objective of each campaign;
- Determine the target audience you want to reach;
- Invest in good ads, with high visual quality and persuasive texts;
- Define your available budget and divide it among the channels you want to cover;
- Choose the formats within the platforms;
- Launch the campaigns and monitor the results;
- Conduct tests and invest in the ones that show the best results.
Following the logic of the marketing funnel: you need to generate a large number of leads at the top so that, at each conversion stage, a portion of the contacts progresses towards a purchase.
That’s why lead generation is important. And, more than that, generating qualified leads.
There are specific tools within paid media campaigns to ensure that ads attract a relevant audience. However, many times users who don’t fit the target profile are still impacted by the ads.
Combining the traffic generated by paid media with the qualification done through conversational marketing will bring much more interesting leads for your marketing and sales teams, and they’ll be much more interested in the solution you offer.
What is Conversational Marketing?
Conversational Marketing allows real-time, personalized conversations with your visitors, with the goal of helping them in their purchase decision process.
Through a virtual assistant or chatbot, you bring your visitor into an interactive conversation.
In this way, you capture contact data and qualify the lead by asking qualifying questions that generate engagement with visitors on your institutional website, landing pages, and blogs, boosting conversion rates.
How to Develop a Conversational Marketing Strategy
To create this kind of strategy, it’s important to understand the context of instant messaging apps, which have transformed how we communicate with others.
There are over 5.22 billion mobile phone users worldwide.
This has also changed consumer expectations when contacting a brand. Speed, personalization, and convenience are expected, and much of this is embedded in the digital world.
Companies are already aware of this: today, 46% of all advertising and marketing spending is tied to digital investment.
Tools like chatbots and virtual assistants are part of conversational marketing, allowing interactions to be personalized according to the user’s needs and responses.
This type of tool simulates a human-like, fluid interaction, much closer to a personal customer service experience.
The automation of processes and tools in conversational marketing is what allows interaction to scale, so there’s no limit to the number of engagements.
Result analysis is also simplified and much more reliable, as the data is recorded in the dashboards of the tools used.
To learn how to create a complete conversational marketing strategy, check out our article: Conversational Marketing: The Complete Guide.
Other Marketing Strategies
Remember that you won’t always have organic traffic on your side, as acquiring it is a challenge. Therefore, exploring new alternatives like conversational marketing and paid media could be the solution, but we shouldn’t stop there.
Within the marketing world, there are countless possible strategies.
We’ll just mention them here, but I recommend taking a closer look at our article on: Types of Marketing: 39 Strategies for Your Business.
Here are the strategies:
- Digital Marketing
- Offline Marketing
- Outbound Marketing
- Inbound Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Performance Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Mobile Marketing
- SMS Marketing
- Video Marketing
- Geomarketing
- Proximity Marketing
- Remarketing
- Real-Time Marketing
- Co-marketing
- Cross Channel Marketing
- Integrated Marketing
- Direct Marketing
- Indirect Marketing
- Strategic Marketing
- Operational Marketing
- Reactive Marketing
- Proactive Marketing
- Multi-level Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
- Utility Marketing
- Relationship Marketing
- Community Marketing
- WhatsApp Marketing
- Product Marketing
- Word of Mouth Marketing
- Internal Marketing
- Guerrilla Marketing
- Sensory Marketing
- Personal Marketing
- Viral Marketing
- Conversational Marketing
3 Reasons to Create a Marketing Strategy Combining Paid Media and Conversational Marketing
If by now you haven’t been convinced of the potential combination of paid media and conversational marketing, here are three reasons to invest in these strategies together:
Qualified Traffic
Well-designed and monitored paid media campaigns will attract the right audience to your website and conversion pages.
Segmented ads spark curiosity in the consumer, regardless of their stage in the buying process.
Once again, it’s essential to focus on the marketing objective.
The number of visits will increase, as well as the quality of this traffic.
Qualified Leads
Turning your contacts (leads) into qualified leads means focusing your sales team’s efforts on opportunities that are more likely to become customers.
With qualified traffic, the chances of converting qualified leads also increase.
If you also use conversational marketing tools, these qualified traffic visitors will receive personalized service and, as a bonus, your brand will capture valuable information right at the first contact with your company.
This is what conversational marketing aims for, with tools like virtual assistants and chatbots.
With automated yet personalized service, you can work more dynamically than with static forms, gather your lead’s data, and start qualifying the contact from the beginning of the interaction.
Short-Term Results
This combination of qualified traffic + lead generation delivers results in the short term since it enhances the conversion of consumers who are already at a more advanced stage in the sales funnel.
Get to Know the Leadster Proposal That Will Triple Your Lead Generation
If you’re already investing in media, we are confident we can improve your website’s conversion while keeping your current investment.
We’ve developed our own Conversational Marketing Methodology by combining 5 years of experience building chatbots with the best online conversion optimization practices.
Smart calls generate four times more engagement and three times more conversions, as you can offer exactly what the customer is looking for within the purchase process.
Want to learn more about the solution offered at Leadster and find out if it’s reliable? You can access a free demo here!
