CASE: PPC, Social Media Marketing in Sri Lanka for leads

A Startup will face their biggest challenge in growing their business by struggling to find new customers. No matter how good and innovative a product is, if the target audience doesn’t hear about it sales will see no growth.

That’s why it’s crucial to advertise the brand first to turn heads and get people to know your products.

Most importantly, when you are through at least a 6 months period of heavy marketing, you are ready to win the trust of potential buyers while promoting your products.

Here, we will look at a case where a business needed to get its first customer and had to explore the unknown to make progress. We will explain the case that we worked with one of the agriculture products companies that started a business in a new venture.

We utilized major paid advertisement platforms; PPC (Google), Social Media (Facebook, Instagram), and Retargeting.

Challenge

A startup venture that took root from a strong agriculture background faced the challenge of getting their first USD 25,000 B2B customer into their business with a very minimal budget. As a tea exporter that’s getting into business with decades-old giants was a brave move during the pandemic.

Their challenge to the agency was not the number of leads that had to be brought in through online advertising, it was the type of client that needed to show interest in their business.

Unlike targeting based on a specific geographical location with a specific demography and interests, we had to make sure people from the FMCG industry saw the ads and responded. The priority was driving the right people to their business.

Solution

We had to first develop their brand presence online which started off with the website and then moved into social media and Search Engine listings.

Moreover, to drive new people who are interested in importing Ceylon tea we suggested they start online advertising since they are unable to travel out of Sri Lanka.

Framework / Funnel

We have chosen specific platforms to make our efforts worthwhile and the marketing budget is not wasted for just impressions.

Analysing the customer’s psychology we have classified the target audience journey by Awareness, Consideration, decision, and action. Approaching them as much as possible to get them to reach out to us.

Using detailed targeting we have narrowed down the ads to specific geographical locations.

Once a visitor is brought to the customized landing page from a specific location (Country) based on the language spoken in the area, we retarget them on social media while Google ads do their job continuously from its end.

Social Media Advertising

We have created the social handles for the brands and connected the tracking where we are able to target users who visit specific pages.

Even with the iOS update we managed to adjust the tracking to send data directly from the website to the Meta platform for high accuracy in detailed targeting.

Google Ads

Due to budget limitations we have utilized only Search ads for the brand including the setup of the business listing on Google.

Since Google is the most widely used search engine in the world we spent the majority of the budget on Google ads compared to Social Media ads.

We ensure that the following is in line daily to not waste budget on unnecessary attention.

Campaign optimization

Daily budget/bidding strategy optimization

Adjusting ad budget according to peak hours

Device optimization

Keyword optimization

Conduct keyword research

Keyword mapping by the audience and ad text

Monitoring and optimization

Ad copy optimization

Set ad headlines and body copy for each keyword

Dynamic ad copy optimization

Adding call-out extensions

Link destination optimization

Change the link destination for each ad group/campaign

Result

The target was to bring in 5 leads every month from prospecting buyers.

In the first month we brought in 8 leads and second month we showed 3X Growth by bringing in 15 leads for the company from 10 different countries that we targeted ads to start working on converting them to a sale.

As a result of the ads the website had an increase in visitors,

We have overachieved the target in terms of a number of leads and as the first high-paying potential customer, we have brought in an order for a container shipment of Ceylon tea from a lead from Poland.

In conclusion, Google advertising is not cheap compared to Facebook and Instagram ads but it’s very effective as per this campaign run by HypeX Digital Marketing agency.