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Turn a Cold Lead To a Hot Lead with Paid Traffic

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Turn a Cold Lead To a Hot Lead with Paid Traffic

There are three primary temperatures of traffic. It’s important to think about each type as you build your digital marketing strategy. If you’ve heard Ryan Deiss talk about how dating and marketing are similar, you’ll get these right away. If not…keep reading! You’ll see how easy it is to turn cold leads into hot leads.

What Is Cold Traffic?

Someone who knows nothing about your product is a cold lead. Honestly, a cold lead might not even recognize they have a problem. If they are aware of a problem, they might not know a solution exists.

  • Cold traffic isn’t ready to engage.
  • Cold traffic isn’t ready to buy.
  • Cold traffic might not even want to hear from you.

You might be thinking, “why waste my time and ad spend trying to win over someone who doesn’t even want to hear from me?” Because…they actually DO want to hear from you, they just don’t know it yet.

Marketing Is Relationship Building

I feel strongly that digital marketing is relationship building. Think about any new relationship. They all start out cold with what Ryan Deiss calls a glance. You see someone from across the room that looks interesting. They glance back. It’s just a moment.

What’s the next step? Go and introduce yourself. That’s what paid traffic does. It introduces your product to the prospect.

Know Your Target Audience

Before marketing to anyone, you should create a buyer persona. At Digital Marketer, we call it the Customer Avatar. Completing a Customer Avatar Canvas helps you know the prospect to a point where you know:

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  • What their goals are.
  • What their pain points are.
  • Their hobbies and interests.
  • Where they hang out.
  • Their dreams and plans.
  • What keeps them up at night.

If your marketing speaks to those issues, you’ll start to turn that traffic into warm traffic.

What Is Warm Traffic?

What Is Warm Traffic?

At the warm traffic stage, prospects don’t need to know about you, your product, or your brand to be considered warm leads or warm traffic. They do, however, need to be aware that they have a problem.

Warm traffic is any potential customer who has identified an issue and they’re interested in having that issue addressed in some way.

Examples of warm traffic include:

  • The minivan mom who realizes, “I need an oil change.”
  • The newly wedded couple who decides, “We’re interested in buying a new house.”
  • The overworked attorney who says, “I want to go to Tahiti.”

In other words, warm traffic is a potential customer who has identified a need.

What Is Hot Traffic?

Hot leads are the folks that are ready to go. You’ve “turned a glance into a stare,” as Ryan would say. You’ve introduced yourself and gotten the number. Now you’re ready for the first date!

  • Hot traffic wants to engage.
  • Hot traffic wants to subscribe.
  • Hot traffic wants to convert.
  • Hot traffic wants to buy!

As you might expect, this is the most valuable traffic. It’s also the most expensive.

How To Turn A Cold Lead Into A Hot Lead With Paid Traffic

Quality leads don’t flow into a business on accident. The lead generation strategy you put into place has to gradually warm them up. At the cold lead stage, your job as a marketer is to put the message in front of them. The Facebook ad, Google ads, or whatever, has to be something that’s attractive to them and captures their attention.

This all goes back to the Customer Avatar or buyer persona. You’ve got to know your target audience before you can craft a high-converting offer.

What Is A Sales Funnel?

[insert sales funnel graphic]

The sales funnel is a concept that has been beaten to death. But it’s prerequisite to understand because it is a natural sequence. It is the way people think before they make a purchase.

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You have to understand the sales funnel before you can get good at lead generation.

Why? For every single purchase you’ve ever made in your entire life, from buying a stick of gum to purchasing a house, you have unconsciously gone through this funnel.

Top Of The Sales Funnel: Awareness

At the very top of the sales funnel is awareness. Remember the cold lead who was blissfully unaware of the problem you provide a solution to? Well, they’ve just realized they have that problem. Now, the potential lead is aware and enters your sales funnel.

Example: “Ouch, my back hurts.”

Your solution might be spinal surgery, chiropractic care, or a pain relief cream. The warm lead now has a vague awareness of your participation in the solution.

Sometimes awareness starts inbound, like when your prospect goes to the search engines and asks a question.

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In many cases, awareness can actually be catalyzed through outbound advertising. You could run Facebook ads that speak to back pain and ways to relieve it. (Due to Facebook compliance issues, be very careful what claims you make!)

You don’t have to wait around for people to become aware. You can create awareness with paid traffic. Once they are in the awareness stage, it’s your job to start driving them down to interest.

The Interest Stage

At the interest stage we use content videos, blogs, downloadable PDFs, etc. Whatever you think is going to engage your prospect and start getting the wheels turning.

  • You want to establish authority
  • You want to be the thought leader
  • You want to be the trusted resource.

To do that, you should provide top quality content. Use the acronym “E-A-T” when you consider what kind of content to produce. EAT stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust.

The content you create for your target audience will not only move them into the interest stage, but move them to the next level, which is consideration.

Warm Leads and Consideration

You’re one step closer to earning a qualified lead! At the consideration stage the warm lead is now willing to look at solutions. But that doesn’t mean they’re willing to look at your solution.

Consider all the options available. Referring back to our example, the potential customer has a whole spectrum of options. On one extreme is back surgery. On the other is a pain relief cream.

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If you’re the authority and they trust you, they’ll trust you to begin prescribing what the solution could be. But please remember that prescription without diagnosis is malpractice.

What you should do in your funnels and with your content, is give people the opportunity to engage with your solution. Let them know that you understand what they’re going through. Let them know that you’ve overcome the issues they’re facing.

In other words, don’t put offers in front of them too soon.

Putting an offer at the consideration stage is too early. It’s like asking for marriage on the first date.

From the consideration stage, prospects move to intent.

The Intent Stage

This is the stage in the sales funnel when your potential lead decides to take action. As an example, someone knows they’re going to buy a car. At this stage, they need to figure out which car to buy.

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The shift from intent to evaluation, the next stage in the sales funnel, is fairly fast. Why? I think people lack patience. We’re all used to immediate gratification. So moving people from intent to evaluation is generally easy.

From Evaluation to Purchase

Although the time between intent and evaluation is short, the shift requires tactical content. At this stage, your content marketing should be focused on creating content such as

  • Features lists
  • Pricing calculators
  • Comparison charts
  • How-to videos

The content you create should help the prospect make the most logical decision: to purchase your product.

Why Paid Advertising Trumps SEO

I hate to beat up on SEO. But the truth is with organic traffic, you’re at the mercy of the search engine. Who is searching for your product? What are they searching for? Where will the search engine place your product?

Another disadvantage of SEO is that it’s generally all top of the funnel.

The benefit of paid traffic is that you get to speak to people at every single stage of the funnel using paid ads. This isn’t true for other advertising mechanisms.

With paid traffic, you get to place your ads wherever you want.

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Realize that the further down the funnel you go, the more expensive traffic becomes. That makes sense, right? At the bottom of the funnel people are ready to buy. In many cases, the hot lead has their wallet out, their credit card in hand, and they’re ready to click that “Buy Now” button.

“The Bottom Up Funnel”

My business partner, John Moran, coined the term “the bottom up funnel.” What we recommend is for marketers to start at the bottom of the funnel.

Think about all the steps in the funnel. It can be tedious to layout a content marketing strategy to meet all the needs of your potential customers. When you implement your marketing efforts at the top of the funnel, you spend a lot of time, effort, energy, and money to move cold leads down the sales funnel.

The push from awareness to interest to consideration can take months! From consideration to intent can take event longer. Think about buying a car. Once you decide which car you want to buy, you may have to research interest rates on loans, or you may want to save money for the down payment.

If you invest all your time and effort to drive people from the top of the funnel downward, they may get to the bottom of the funnel and you suddenly realize you marketed to the wrong buyer persona. They’re not the right fit! Or your price isn’t right. Or maybe the offer isn’t attractive enough.

Driving traffic to the top of the funnel first means you’re always learning the most important lesson last.

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We want you to learn the most important lesson first.

It will be expensive. You’ll pay more in ad spend to learn that lesson. But when you learn the most important lesson first, you can slowly travel up the funnel. Once the sale has been made, you know what to say, what to charge, how to engage people and convert them into quality leads.

The best recommendation I can give you is to build your funnel from the bottom up. Start with the intent stage and work your way up. With all the benefits of paid traffic like speed, advanced analytics, laser-targeting, and optimization, your paid ad campaigns will be much more effective if you do.

Want to become a traffic master? Click here to find out how!


NOTE: This content came directory from DigitalMarketer’s Paid Traffic Mastery Certification.

1647898917 803 4 Benefits of Paid Traffic You Cant Afford To Ignore

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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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