Awareness is built, conversions are generated.

Awareness and Conversions are a perfect dichotomy of Search Engine Marketing (SEM). These terms identify the two key strategies for a majority of Pay Per Click (PPC) ad campaigns you will find on Google. 

Awareness focuses on the act of growing recognizability and comfortability to increase the brand popularity, and in turn, ideally, generate leads and sales of a brand, service or product. On the other hand, conversions focus on meeting the potential customer at a specific place in the marketing funnel, typically closer to the very bottom. These two methods are entirely different, but they often work well together when the campaign keyword planning is executed efficiently and effectively.

Building Real Awareness

Building Real Awareness takes time. The building process is comparable to the construction of a house or office building. We begin by surveying the project as a whole; this helps us identify all the pre-existing weak and strong points already in place. 

Next, we make the necessary adjustments and begin to form our foundation. In our case, we use Google Keyword Planner to brainstorm and research relevant keywords. There are different types of keywords: short tail, long tail, industry-specific and negative. We will only focus on creating a list of +/- 20 short and long-tail keywords. Now, it is time to get creative!

The next step is to segment the keywords into Ad Groups by using the keyword grouping skill, which can be seen as raising walls in a house to create and separate rooms. At this point, we have a structure to start building our image(s) and copywriting, which we compare to adding the plumbing and electrical wiring. 

Now, it is time to paint and furnish the house now that we have the structure. Industry-related blogs, customer testimonials/reviews, high-volume FAQs or successful client projects results will decorate our house to welcome visitors to the comfortable, functioning and appealing home we have built from scratch. Also, we can use A/B testing to allow us to make data-driven decisions that will serve as final tweaks to perfect our house.

Remember that a majority of all the people in the world will never see your ad. So, stay focused and attentive to the people you want to invite into your house, the ones you know are interested in what you have to offer. Make your home as welcoming, relatable, informative and encouraging to that group of people as possible.

The ad will be your first impression. Therefore, do not let it be your last!

Generating Real Conversions

Generating conversions relies heavily on paying attention to detail. Conversion ads are Google ads that have the sole purpose of encouraging, promoting and enticing the intended audience to perform a specific task. For example: sign up for an email newsletter or click here to get a discount on this product. CTAs are key in producing conversions.

When strategizing these keywords, conversion keywords will generally be long-tail and have a potent position near the bottom of the funnel. We will use actionable words, verbs and suggestive phrases when writing our ad copy. There are two pivotal questions to ask when developing this strategy:

1. How do I reach the right person to interact with the ad?

2. How do I make sure the user experience is enjoyable and easy to convert?

Discovering the right audience is critical to all SEM ads, but most importantly for conversions. The ads will reach your target audience by utilizing the most specific focus keywords and keyword search types. The target audience will already have a significant level of interest in what you have to offer. 

It is critical to ensure a simple and pleasurable user experience for your audience. Every little detail is important: background color(s), font color(s), font type(s), font size(s) and especially the verbiage used in your copywriting. A conversion ad must include a CTA. The fewer steps it takes to reach the ad/conversion goal (click-through rate structuring), the greater its effectiveness will be.

Concluding Real Awareness and Conversions

Awareness and conversion ads are still two of the most effective forms of digital marketing that we have at our fingertips. Ultimately, they each serve different strategies but can complement each other well in a large-scale campaign. Our four main search types (broad, modified broad, phrase, exact) are extremely useful when establishing helpful guidelines within the ad groups and can be utilized in all ad campaign types.

We know that it takes time to build a name for your brand, gain trust, exhibit professionalism and increase accountability. Awareness is a marathon or triathlon; it is not a traditional race. We know it takes concise and relatable details to give helpful directions. A conversion ad is a detailed map that offers our target audience a shortcut.