Turn Traffic into Leads by attracting them out from their channel to your marketing destination
<aside> đź’ˇ How Can This Help?
You know your customer and you identified where they may be swimming, the traffic channels. Now, it’s time to stop on their way, raise a post to capture their attention and direct them to our marketing material, where we sell them our product.
This acts a pre-frame for the pitch or the sale. It is the tactic you use to attract and direct Traffic out of the Traffic Channel to your Marketing Material.
The main aim of your Traffic Bridge is to grab attention and direct traffic to your sales point. Also, to warm up the prospects so they are in the correct frame of mind to be most receptive to your offer.
Designing you Traffic Bridge depends on two things: a) Your Target Customer, b) The Traffic Channel
If you’re attracting traffic from an Interrupted Traffic Channel, like Facebook, you can’t be selling or you don’t have time to explain a lot of things, you need to be super catchy or they’ll pass out at you. However, if you’re throwing your Traffic Bridge on a Search Traffic Channel, then, you know your customers are looking for a solution (they already know their problem), so you just want to display your unique Value Proposition.
“The secret of the best fishermen is not to know how to have and use the best fishing gear, it is to think like the fishes."
Understanding your Target Customer desired end result is crucial to know how to design the Traffic Bridge. Put yourself in the shoes of your ideal prospect.
Begin with the end in mind: what is the desired end result and find out the path to arrive to that result. Can you identify different milestones? These milestones will usually be the steps in resolving obstacles or problems that one might encounter in achieving the end result. In other words, each step means bringing the prospect closer to their desired end result.
To know some of these milestones, you can go to YouTube, Facebook, sign up on forums and look at posts and videos; see what your niche prospects are talking about. Do a search on Twitter and find the burning topics and questions. Look what your competitor is offering. What products are being sold on Amazon; look at the comments.
If you’re throwing your Traffic Bridge to a Traffic You Own, then it gets even easier, since there’s already a prior relationship and they’ll be more likely to consume the Traffic Bridge. This is one of the reasons why it’s important to aim in converting every Traffic into Traffic You Own.
A Traffic Bridge comes in many forms, it can be an information, a test, results of a questionnaire, a cheat sheet with key steps, a price calculation, a framework, a simple online tool, a quiz, a video, an interview, a webinar, an Ad copy etc. It also can be free or paid. An Ad in Facebook is a Paid Traffic Bridge, but an email sent to your list of customers is Free.
Depending on the traffic temperature you identified, the traffic bridges will be different. We always recommend to build 3 traffic bridges based on your target traffic temperature:
Within your Traffic bridge, you’ll need to craft a compelling message that grabs the attention of your target market. Once you have their attention, the goal of your message is to compel them to respond.
Your copy consists of:
The effectiveness of your Traffic bridges depends in your traffic channel. If you’re targeting traffic from an interrupted traffic channel, like any social media platform, then you need to design that traffic bridge to be catchy, to avoid selling and to be short. Whereas, if your traffic channel is of an informational type, like a news blog post, you can expect the target customer to consume more info which gives you opportunity to educate and sell.
The most important factor in making an effective Traffic Bridge, is the way you communicate the Keywords related to your Value Proposition. This is important as it improves your CTR (Click Through Rate) metric by improving your Quality Score. By improving your CTR you’ll end up paying less acquiring customers. This is very important to understand, because you will have to design your Traffic Bridge (ex, ad copy) and Marketing Material (ex, landing page) based on the keywords.
From the VP we formulated in the Solution-Product Phase, perform  by listing 50 keywords related to your VP from each of the below types of keywords:
Broad match:
Broad match means anytime someone types in a keyword phrase that includes that keyword. If your keyword is more than one word, it will be independent of the other. For example, if you bid for the keyword: dog training, you will always be bidding whenever someone uses a phrase that includes both words “dog” and “training” no matter how it is used. If someone keys in “best training for a dog” you will be bidding for that phrase
Phrase match:
With phrase match, you will be bidding whenever some types in a keyword phrase that contains all your keywords, but they’ll have to be in the right order. In our example “dog training,” the keyword phrase has to include dog training in that order and not separated. So it would not work for: “best training for a dog” but it would work for “best dog training.”
Exact match:
Exact match is when your keywords match exactly with the keyword phrase being searched. In our example only when [dog training] is typed in exactly will your ad show up.
The more the message matches the audience, the better your advertising results will be. This not only ensures your resources will be better spent but also makes the high-quality prospects feel as if you are talking to them personally.
Search terms can be more or less detailed. You can just look for a general term, such as “water,” or be more specific, such as “bottle of water” or even more exact such as, “where can I buy a bottle of water?” (Today, more and more people are putting complete questions into the search engine)
You also have to define the words you absolutely want to exclude. For example, if you are giving a course on dog training, you may want to exclude the searches for “free courses”. Therefore, you should exclude the word “free” from all the searches.
My advice is to arrange similar keywords into ad groups. Ad groups will group all the keywords that will have the same ad copy. Now you can test different copy on all those keywords in the ad group.
The best framework for ads is a headline followed by three lines, with the last line being your URL. The headline must have your keyword, because it relates to the person’s search. The second line should always give some benefit, and the third line should give some feature or offer that motivates people to click on the link. You’ll need to decide on the copy required to entice an action, a call to action (CTA), like “Start Your Lean Video Course” or “Get Your 1-1 Mentoring Now”, “Get Your Ebook”.
There’s one key thing to make sure all your Traffic bridges have: one clear objective and metric
Avoid this step and you’ll be seeking what Allan Dib in his book “The 1-page marketing plan” refers to as a happy accident.
Here’s an example of an accident ad:
If you can notice, they’re trying to throw every copy, the benefit, the list of what they do, and their features in one traffic bridge (an Ad in this example), hoping to find a qualified prospect click it for an accidental sale.
To build a successful Traffic bridge, you need to do marketing on purpose by identifying the currency and the metric. The currency represents one thing you need the prospect to do, like clicks, or views, etc. The currency is the metric you need tack along the way to make sure you reached to your objective.
When asked about purpose, most founders have objectives along the line of branding by saying “getting my name out there” or “making people know about my product and services”. They might be around marketing by saying “getting people to call in for a quote”. Definitely, you need an objective for your traffic bridge to be effective but more importantly, you need only one objective. You cannot possibly do multiple objectives with one ad.
The objective of your traffic bridges is to “Attract” rather than trying to sell directly from your ad. You need to simply invite prospects to put their hand up and indicate interest. Your CTA will be “what you want them to do next”. Do they call your toll free number to order? Do they call you or visit your website to request a free sample? Do they request a free report?
Your copy should also be customer-centric. We all hate being in a party seated next to someone who just can’t stop talking about himself. We can’t wait to escape. Similarly, it’s a big mistake as an early stage company to have an inwardly focused advertising where all you focus on is a prominent logo and company name, a laundry list of services, claims of being the leading provider. All of these things are shouting, “look at me!”. As a startup, you copy need to be about your potential customers, speaking about their needs, problems, thoughts and emotions. You should always focus in entering a conversation that is already going inside their minds You should resonate at a deeper level to stand out from the crowd otherwise you’ll be a background noise.
Focusing on direct advertising, your marketing copy can be in any of these forms:
Choose your traffic form from the below types (give option for each type of channel). In the currency, our focus is attention, so write “attention” and your metric is CAR, customer attraction rate.
Write down the keywords that you would like to rank for or to focus in using. For your marketing copy, choose among using any of the below marketing copy types:
Finally, determine 3 CTA’s that you want your customer to actively engage with your traffic bridge form. This is highly dependent on the traffic channel type.
Now that we designed the best traffic bridges to attract and convert traffic from being potential customers to leads, now we need to either do more marketing or sell them our solution using our Marketing Material.
In the next chapter we’ll design the marketing material and the expected flow we intend our users to take.
<aside> đź’ˇ SAMPLE CHAPTER
This is a sample practical chapter from the StartHack Framework ~ the most practical path to P/M fit.
You can grab it here:
Febe - For Entrepreneurs By Entrepreneurs
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