You must look at paid traffic as a SYSTEM.
This system is made up of multiple advertising campaigns that work hand-in-hand to acquire leads and sales for your business.
Every campaign has a specific objective… whether it’s to:
- Introduce your business to people in your market who have never heard of you before (indoctrination)
- Convert a site visitor to a lead (acquisition)
- Sell a high-dollar product to some of your best, repeat customers (monetization)
These campaigns work together to build a relationship with prospects… to turn strangers into friends, friends into customers, customers into repeat buyers, and repeat buyers into raving fans.
If you think about marketing as a relationship, a true relationship, not some imaginary person on the other side of a computer screen…
Not only will this article make WAY more sense, it will CHANGE the way you market, BUILD relationships with your customers and GROW your business…
Good News: It Doesn’t Have to be Overly Complicated
You just have to understand WHO you’re talking to, and at WHAT stage you are in your relationship.
You would never ask a person that you just met to marry you (or maybe you would?!).
The same thinking applies to traffic… you would never ask someone who just learned about your business for the first time to buy your $10,000 product.
This is where most people go wrong. 
They go straight for the sale without warming up the traffic in any way.
You have to use traffic to build relationships with people, just like you would in the real world.
You have to have advertising campaigns in place that automate the building of these relationships.
So, how do we classify our audience by “relationship”?
- How does this affect the type of ads those audiences see?
- What do those ads look like?
- What offers do they see?
- When do I actually ask them to buy?
We’ll address all of those questions in this post…
But First, Let’s Talk About “Temperature”…
At DigitalMarketer, we look at traffic in three different temperatures:
Cold, Warm, and Hot—pretty creative, huh? 🙂
Cold Traffic: People Who Have Never Heard of Your Business
This is where you find NEW blood for your business.
If you have a brand new business you obviously MUST start with cold traffic.
If you have an existing customer base, website traffic, existing leads, etc., it’s still essential to run traffic to cold audiences or you’ll continue to swim in the same pond of existing leads and customers.
But, this doesn’t mean that you take your core product straight to cold traffic.
That’s like meeting someone at a bar and then asking him or her to marry you.
You MUST build the relationship FIRST and THEN ask them to buy.
Think of cold traffic as the “Hello, nice to meet you. My name is Molly and here’s a little bit about me…”
Cold traffic is where you go to introduce your brand to your target market, to give them value, and show them that you know what you’re talking about.
Goals of Cold Traffic:
- Introduction/Indoctrination (Introduce your brand and establish credibility)
- Pixelling (So that you can run ads to these people later – learn how to pixel website visitors and our system for turning those people into buyers here)
- Segmentation (If they click on a blog post about email marketing, we know that they’re not JUST interested in Digital Marketing, they’re specifically interested in Email Marketing…. and we can make them a more relevant offer. Learn how we do this by clicking here.)
Warm Traffic: Your Acquaintances
These are people who you’ve introduced yourself to and they’ve shown interest in return.
They could be:
- Leads that opted-in to your email list (that you’ve uploaded to a traffic platform)
- People who have visited your website (and you pixeled them!)
- Facebook fans, Twitter followers, YouTube channel subscribers, etc.
These people are familiar with your business and market, but they weren’t interested enough to buy yet. They need to be convinced.
Maybe they read your blog and visited your YouTubere channel on how to play the guitar, but they didn’t opt-in or buy on your site.
You’re going to run ads to your warm traffic that encourages them to convert to a lead or buyer.
You’ve already introduced yourself, they’re familiar with who you are and what you’re about, so it’s time to make the move.
Goals of Warm Traffic:
- Generate Leads
- Low-Dollar Sales (Convert leads or interested people into low-dollar, Tripwire buyers… and hopefully they’ll take the upsell, too!)
Hot Traffic: Your Buyers
These are people who have bought something from you. They’ve already committed. They know you really, really well.
Now, you’re either wanting to increase their value as a customer (get them to buy again) or reactivate them (remind them that you still exist)!
Most of your communication with hot traffic is going to be through retargeting ads and email marketing.
The main function of paid traffic is to reach your cold and warm audiences… to acquire buyers at break even or better. But, you can use paid traffic to reach your hot audience, too.
(RELATED: Crafting a Digital Advertising Plan)
This will mainly be for follow-up or to see if they’re interested in another product.
Goals of Hot Traffic:
- High-Dollar Sales (get them to buy another product or to buy more frequently).
- Activation (remind a customer who hasn’t purchased in a while that you still exist… or see if they’re interested in a product that’s different from what they purchased).
Types of Ads & Offers for Each Traffic Temperature
You wouldn’t say the same thing in the same way to someone you just met versus your spouse of 10 years.
Think of your traffic strategy the exact same way.
The graphic shows different types of offers to run based off of traffic temperature:
This is the WHAT:
- What you’re going to talk to these specific people about in your ads
- What you’re going to try and get them to do
Let’s look at some real-world examples…
Cold Traffic Ads and Offers
As you can see in the graphic above, there are plenty of different types of “offers” to talk to your cold audience about.
You can run them to…
- Blog Posts
- Social Media Updates
- Content Videos
- Podcasts
- Primary Research
- Case Studies
- Lead Magnets (yes, sometimes you can ask cold traffic for their email address, but only if the offer is very, very enticing)
- Quiz/Surveys
- White Papers
But where?
Here are a few examples of paid advertisements to cold traffic:
In the image above, we’re running Facebook ads to a cold audience (interests like MailChimp, Aweber, Constant Contact, etc.).
If they were to click on the ad above, they’ll land on our blog to read about email marketing.
We know that these people are interested enough in email marketing to be included in the audience of the various email service providers above and we’re not being intrusive.
We’re sending them to the blog to teach them something and establish ourselves as a credible source.
In the image above, you’ll see promoted content. You’ve probably seen them at the end of blog posts around the web.
Content distribution companies like Outbrain, Taboola, nRelate, and Disqus allow you to pay to place your sponsored content below other, related content.
This is a great way to distribute content at a high volume to people who have never heard of you before.
In the image above, Beauty and the Boutique is giving makeup tips in an effort to educate the audience, and then retarget to buy.
Here, we’re running YouTube ads to a content video about blogging.
Warm Traffic Ads and Offers
Let’s revisit this graphic, but this time we’re talking about the warm audience.
What are we going to talk to these people about?
- Lead Magnets
- Quiz/Surveys
- White Papers
- Free or Paid Webinars
- Flash Sales
- Low Dollar Offers (Tripwires)
- Product Demo
- Branding Videos
- Book (Free or Paid)
- A La Carte Service
- Software/Plugin
- Free Trial
- Events
Since these people already know who we are, we can start to make the transition into acquiring them as a customer.
For example, we ran a flash sale for our email countdown software to our Facebook website custom audience, and data custom audience (we uploaded our email list).
In the example above, we’re using a flash sale for a piece of software to convert leads to buyers and even website visitors into buyers.
We were able to come out and ask them to buy directly because we had already built the RELATIONSHIP. This is the logical next step.
In the ad above, GoDaddy is offering a $1 trial to people who visit their website. This is a great way to convert a website visitor into a trial customer.
In the above ad, Adroll is exchanging a report on attribution model for your email address.
Above, HipChat is offering a free trial for their chat services. Another great offer to make to people who you’re connected to—I like their Facebook page and have visited their website.
Hot Traffic Ads and Offers
Let’s revisit this graphic, but this time we’re talking about the hot audience.
Again, communication with buyers in terms of traffic is going to be minimal compared to the traffic you run to cold or warm audiences.
You’re asking your buyers to either buy again, buy something else, or just to remind them you’re still around.
What offers can you make?
- Events
- Paid Webinar
- High-Dollar Offer
- Done For You Services
Here are a few examples:
In this ad, we’re speaking to buyers (previous Traffic & Conversion Summit attendees) and asking them to buy tickets for the 2015 event.
NOTE: We called them out in the copy, “T&C Alumni,” by segmenting our message based on their buying history.
And we had impressive stats for this ad:
Spend: $1,083.50
Revenue: 52 Tickets x $497 = $25,844
ROI: 2208%
In this ad, we were also selling Traffic & Conversion Summit tickets, but we segmented the audience differently. We were speaking to DigitalMarketer Lab members here.
Traffic is a SYSTEM, and you must use multiple advertising campaigns and offers to develop a relationship just like you would with a friend.
If you’re able to conceptualize traffic as I’ve explained above and think about your audiences as cold, warm, and hot—you’ll be able to create traffic campaigns that dynamically function to move a cold prospect to a big buyer in no time.
Keep in mind WHO you’re talking to and WHERE you’re sending them. Keep the image below for reference:
