3 Steps You Need to Know to Achieve Marketing Success

The famous ‘three A’s’ have long been a psychological approach to dealing with a problem, typically when it comes to addiction or criticism. However, we have found that the 3 A’s can also be applied to digital marketing as a way to test, measure and achieve your success.

In the marketing industry, the three A’s allow you to try out various strategies and compare the results at each stage. In the end, the campaign that performs the best at all three levels is ultimately the one that you should continue pursuing.

When it comes to creating goals for your marketing strategy, these are the three golden A’s to abide by:

1. Awareness
   
2. Acceptance
   
3. Action
   

Ask yourself: what do you want to accomplish with your marketing strategy? Is it getting the word out about your company? Is it getting people more comfortable with your services or brand? Or is direct action—calls, emails or purchases—your priority? Whatever your goal is, these are the steps that will get you to where you want to be.

Here is how to use the three A’s to achieve marketing success in three easy steps.

The first step in a successful digital marketing strategy is growing your awareness. This is the starting point for any company doing a remarketing campaign. Awareness is essentially getting your name out there in front of people, making them aware of your brand and services. You want your name to be recognizable and familiar.

Goal for awareness: The goal for spreading awareness is earning a higher number of impressions and views. The more impressions you are getting, the more people are seeing your name and becoming familiar with your brand. If you are running multiple tests with different text ads, whichever has the highest impression score will be your best bet moving forward.

How to drive awareness: There are several ways how you can increase awareness of your brand in the digital space:

• Remarketing Ads
  
• Display ads
  
• Branded Text Ads
  
• Video Ads
  
• Email Marketing
  

How to measure awareness: in all fairness – awareness is one of the hardest things to track. However, online advertising platforms allow to track impressions and views . The more impressions you have received – the more people you have reached.

Eventually, these impressions will turn into clicks, downloads, or clicks. This will indicate that people are now are approving of your brand and are in the acceptance stage.

So, your audience is aware of you. The next step is achieving acceptance, which is primarily about getting your audience familiar and comfortable with your brand. You’ll need to be in front of their faces in a variety of ways, driving the point home that you are a knowledgeable, trustworthy and qualified company.

Goal for acceptance: While the goal for awareness was increased impressions and views, the goal of acceptance is to drive engagement and grow your click-through-rate (CTR). With basic analytics tools, you can see how many people saw your listing (or social media post, email, etc.) vs. how many people actually clicked on it.

The bad news is that your click-through-rate is always going to be low when it comes to remarketing; however, the good news is that this is totally normal, and you shouldn’t worry about it. In fact, 1% is actually a very healthy CTR. The people who have moved from awareness to acceptance are the ones who are engaging, clicking and driving legitimate traffic to your site, and that’s who you should focus on moving to the next step.

How to drive acceptance: One way to accomplish this is through engagement. When you can get your audience to move from awareness to acceptance, you’ve managed to win their trust on a basic level. You’ll see this when customers start connecting with you in various ways, including:

• Interaction on social media
  
• Watching your videos
  
• Sharing your content
  
• Subscribing to and opening emails
  

How to measure acceptance: Depending on the method you are measuring, there should be settings within the program or social media platform to track the number of shares, clicks and views that particular page or post had. Documenting these results in a file and comparing results week after week will show you if your acceptance rate is increasing, decreasing or staying stagnant. Then, adjust accordingly.

The final stage in a successful marketing strategy is action. Getting consumers to commit to taking action means you have to be in front of them when they are searching. Paid text ads, prominently placed organic results and local listings will all help people get on your site, but do not guarantee they will bite. Action is driven by a well-designed website with the target audience in mind.

Goal for action: The goal, obviously, is getting viewers to take action, therefore growing your client base. This is most likely in the form of phone calls and email sign-ups, committing to your services. Hopefully, this leads to a return on investment in your marketing budget. Action is not possible without first achieving awareness and acceptance, making all three steps equally important.

How to drive action: While different niches have their own “selling points,” there are several common things that make taking action much easier for the user:

Have a phone number that is prominently displayed , so they don’t have to search for it
Make sure your website is easily navigable for mobile devices , where many people do searching
Have a clear call-to-action that motivates them to buy in
Provide proof of professional accolades , such as affiliations, reviews or awards
Ensure that your website has a logical flow that will make it easy to use
How to measure action: Measuring action is the simplest of the three A’s, because you simply have to keep track of the number of leads your business gets from your marketing efforts. This can be the number of calls you received, appointments booked or online forms filled out. You can either track this by hand, or you use Google Analytics if you set up call tracking. Any way you are seeing business come in from your marketing campaign means you successfully accomplished the action part of your plan.

Thinking through your marketing game plan is essential to success, and setting up clear goals for each of these stages is ultimately what will get you there. When it comes to creating and running a digital marketing campaign, try using the three A’s to do it yourself and adjust accordingly. Of course, we also recommend letting the experts—like us at Locallogy—handle it for you while you focus on your business.