International eCommerce success requires more than selling directly to consumers in other countries; it necessitates handling everything from selling in local currencies to understanding international shipping, tax compliance, and cultural localization. It’s complex, but the payoff can transform businesses. Allbirds, Shein, and Next serve as a few examples of companies that boosted their annual growth rate significantly by selling internationally.

This guide walks you through key pillars in your international eCommerce strategy: eCommerce platform decisions, logistics, demand generation, localization strategies, and examples of a few brands who are doing it right.

What Is International eCommerce?

International eCommerce differs from domestic eCommerce in that everything (from UX, to checkout, logistics, and customer support) must adapt for new geographies. You’re not just selling products; you’re entering cultures, navigating regulations, and competing with local champions.

As friction drops due to platforms like Shopify Markets and Global-e, more brands have made the leap. Should your company jump on the international eCommerce bandwagon, you’ll need to plan for a number of logistical issues, including:

Cross-Border Shipping

SteelSeries ships headsets and other gamer must-haves across continents, and therefore had to prioritize finding the right regional shipping partner for each market to speed delivery and lower costs to their customers. Storing products in warehouses around key markets helps increase efficiency instead of using only one location to store all of their inventory.

Localized Currencies & Pricing

Nike offers a localized experience for its numerous markets, displaying its prices in the local currency (EUR, JPY, CAD, etc.). Offering products in only one currency (think seeing prices in USD despite being located in France) can turn international customers off and make the purchase decision less appealing.

Multi-Language Support

Not offering content in a local language is perhaps more than culturally insensitive; it’s a huge drag on conversions. Zara does a great job of not only translating its website, but offering the user choices first-thing if their current location doesn’t match their desired language. While it might seem daunting, remember you can use AI tools to help with this project.

Regional Payment Methods

Similar to language and currency localization, consumers expect to be able to use their preferred local payment methods when shopping online. Companies like H&M remove barriers at checkout with targeted options that locals want to see.

Duties & Tax Calculation

Amazon encourages users to complete transactions by displaying the final price when importing products from other countries. Buying a drumset on Amazon includes all import duties and taxes, whereas buying the same kit from Sweetwater, a great music shop for consumers in the US, will involve manually estimating how much you’ll have to pay at customs upon delivery.

Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes: which option would you prefer?

Local Returns & Fulfillment Options

Having regional fulfillment centers help cut down return shipping times and decrease shipping costs, and also avoid customer frustration. Smart brands offer local return drop-off points and prepaid labels rather than losing money on international returns.

Why Should Your eCommerce Business Go International?

As we’ve already addressed, international eCommerce requires a host of logistical planning, and undoubtedly requires working through a series of headaches. So, why should your eCommerce business sell internationally?

Revenue Diversification

Relying too heavily on a single country or region leaves brands exposed to economic slowdowns, political shifts, or changes in consumer behavior. Going global spreads your revenue risk, beyond growing the total number.

New Customer Acquisition

Once domestic customer acquisition begins to plateau, international markets offer the next great source of growth. After all, there’s a finite total addressable market in any one country.

Even the world’s most populous country, India, accounts for less than 18% of the world’s population. If you don’t want to enter a new vertical (or perhaps already have), market expansion makes logical sense.

Seasonal Balance Across Hemispheres

Selling across hemispheres helps smooth out seasonality shifts in your revenue. Apparel brands that focus heavily on one time of year can sell year-round by targeting one hemisphere for one half of the year and the other for the second half.

For instance, a brand like Patagonia can launch products on a staggered seasonal schedule, with core items like jackets selling in the Northern Hemisphere during winter, while surfwear peaks naturally during the Southern Hemisphere’s concurrent summer.

Increasing the Bottom Line

Growth comes at a higher rate in emerging markets, so if you’ve tapped out your efforts in the most developed markets, global expansion offers a fresh chance to increase profits.

Ultimately, if run well, an international eCommerce business should outperform even the best version of its one-nation self, increasing top-line revenue and future growth opportunities.

What Are The 4 Types of eCommerce?

It probably doesn’t need to be stated, but there’s more than one type of international eCommerce. Most experts have settled on four being the magic number for types of eCommerce, which we’ll delve into below, but adding government to these four types gets us to a grand total of six.

1. B2C (Business-to-Consumer): Most DTC (direct-to-consumer) brands fall here. B2C eCommerce involves selling directly to international shoppers via your own site or a third-party marketplace.
2. B2B (Business-to-Business): B2B eCommerce mostly consists of selling services, bulk, or wholesale products to retailers, distributors, or partners in other countries.
3. C2C (Consumer-to-Consumer): Platforms like eBay or Etsy enable cross-border transactions between individuals.
4. C2B (Consumer-to-Business): A newer type of eCommerce, C2B reverses the norm, allowing content creators or freelancers to sell services or content globally through platforms like Upwork and Fiverr.

Bonus: Government eCommerce Types

1. B2G (Business-to-Government): In B2G, businesses sell directly to governments; this is especially common in regulated industries or for health products. Businesses in the aeronautical or weapons industries often sell to governments around the world.
2. C2G (Consumer-to-Government): eCommerce can also take place directly between citizens and their government (think of paying taxes), but sometimes comes through a third-party business like Razorpay, a payment gateway company.

Each type brings different compliance, fulfillment, and marketing requirements, with some brands even spanning multiple categories.

What Is the Best International eCommerce Website?

OK, so you’ve decided you want to take the plunge and launch your eCommerce brand internationally. How do you choose the right international eCommerce platform for your business?

Let’s go through some major players in the game to help you start your process:

Global-e

First up, we’ve got Global-e, a leader in international eCommerce solutions. They support over 200 markets with local currencies, more than 20 languages, tax and duty automation, and logistics partnerships.

Global-e offers end-to-end checkout and compliance, taking risk off your plate. They’ll assume legal and regulatory risk for your merchant of record setup, offer a variety of A/B testing capabilities for your checkout flow, and have a veritable roster of heavy-hitter clients like Hugo Boss, Adidas, and Netflix.

Amazon Global Selling

Next up, let’s take a look at Amazon Global Selling. This eCommerce behemoth sells in more than 20 countries, and offers the same incredibly simple user experience it offers in its home market (the US) across the globe. Depending on your needs, you can utilize Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) to provide prompt shipping internationally or choose to fulfill orders on your own.

If you have a smaller regional reach, Amazon may serve you best, but if you’re looking for coverage in a broader list of markets, particularly in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, you’ll likely need to look elsewhere.

Shopify

Shopify serves as one of those potential options. As one of the most widely-used eCommerce platforms globally, it powers over 4.5 million stores in more than 175 markets.

Shopify offers a robust set of built-in features and integrations specifically designed for international eCommerce, including a centralized dashboard to manage multiple countries, currencies, and languages, local currency display based on geolocation, native translation support and app integrations, localized payment options, real-time duties and tax estimates, and fulfillment help with the Shopify Fulfillment Network.

WooCommerce

For brands that have dev power available to them and complex product catalogs or custom backend needs, WooCommerce offers a great suite of tools and support. It’s built on WordPress and offers serious customization and control to serve businesses that need a tailored international eCommerce experience.

Strategic Pillars of International eCommerce

To give you more guidance on your international eCommerce journey, we’ve compiled some key pillars of cross-border eCommerce you’ll want to plan for in order to drive the strongest sales numbers for your business.

Data-Driven Market Intelligence & Optimization

Your global eCommerce strategy needs to follow the data; it’s impossible to create a one-size-fits-all strategy for the entire world. Leverage regional insights for key performance metrics like average order value by market, checkout abandonment by payment type, and promo responsiveness by country to drive incremental revenue.

Pro Tip: Build dashboards by region in your chosen measurement platform (likely Looker Studio or GA4) and track performance weekly.

Additionally, you may want to explore benchmarking tools or datasets that your international eCommerce platform offers either through their website or through your reps to see where you’ve found success and where you need to improve your numbers.

Lean heavily on your reps; remember, it’s literally their job to make sure you realize a pretty penny and don’t churn, or even better, upgrade. Use all of these data points wisely to avoid common mistakes in your analysis and run CRO tests to improve your performance in your key markets.

Demand Generation & International Paid Media

Acquiring users in new markets means reshaping your media plan. Consider a few key tactics:

• Launch local paid search and paid social campaigns. These will drive awareness and conversions, and complete your funnel with email and SMS marketing to nurture these leads. This may seem daunting, but AI can help.
• Localize your creative tests; not just in language, but culturally. Speak to your potential customers the way they speak to each other. For instance, the difference between the way European and Southeast Asian consumers communicate can prove to be stark. Don’t be too pushy in the wrong place or your conversion rate will tank.
• Build a regional eCommerce calendar to guide budget allocation. Black Friday in the US and Singles’ Day in China may serve as the best-known sales tentpole events, but others around the globe make a big impact. Don’t forget about summer and winter bonus periods in Japan, Ramadan in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and Click Frenzy in Australia when considering key moments to drive sales.

Risk & Fraud Management

Expanding globally also means dealing with currency fluctuations, increased chargeback and fraud risk, and country-specific security compliance. Global platforms often include fraud filters, but consider layering on tools like Riskified or Forter for added protection.

Brand Control & User Experience

You always want to have full brand control, but that can come at the expense of scale. Solutions like Global-e and Shopify offer incredible efficiency, but it sometimes feels like you’ve sent your potential customers into a portal entirely out of your control.

Mitigate this by customizing checkout visuals as much as possible, using branded error pages and transactional emails, and creating a clear post-purchase journey.

International eCommerce Increasingly Serves as a Must-Have for Continued Growth

The brands that win globally don’t just “go live” in new markets. They research, plan, deeply localize, iterate constantly, and choose their tech stack with intention.

This process takes time and energy, but with a projected increase in global eCommerce of over a trillion dollars between 2025 and 2027, you won’t want to miss out on your slice. With the highest projected GDP growth coming from outside the Western European, Canadian, and American markets, global eCommerce offers a gateway to a higher annual growth rate than possible if focused only on the G7.

Ready to go global? Get to work now planning out your strategy for your international eCommerce platform of choice, shipping and fulfillment logistics, local demand generation, and localization tactics, and watch your growth numbers accelerate.

The post International eCommerce Marketing Strategies: A Complete Guide appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

How Is AI Used in eCommerce?

A consistent flow of customer data aggregation combined with the continuous training of Large Language Models (LLMs) creates a virtuous feedback loop. This ultimately leads to an eCommerce business providing their potential customer with a more targeted and effective online shopping experience.

Using AI can sound daunting or offputting, but we’ve all experienced it for years, even before “AI” had entered our daily lexicon. As consumers, we’ve felt AI’s effects for years and years.

Have you ever seen Amazon suggest “Products you might also like”? This one small example shows how AI has already used large amalgamations of consumer data to drive value to the end-user since long before the launch of ChatGPT.

Top AI Use Cases in eCommerce

Behind the scenes, AI already powers much of the online shopping experience. Let’s take a quick look at some practical, high-impact use cases of AI in eCommerce:

1. Intelligent Logistics

AI improves supply chain accuracy by predicting delivery times, delays, and inventory needs using real-time signals and historical data. The result? Fewer out-of-stock items, better planning, and happier customers. You can thank AI for getting your order to you on time and with little to no problems.

2. Smarter Product Recommendations

Similar to the Amazon example above, AI analyzes browsing habits, purchase history, and user behavior to suggest items that match a shopper’s preferences. This process improves conversion rates and Average Order Value (AOV).

3. AI-Driven Customer Support

AI chatbots in eCommerce serve as virtual agents that handle FAQs, order updates, and simple transactions, giving human reps the bandwidth to tackle more complex issues. This improves response time without increasing support overhead.

4. Dynamic Pricing

AI-powered tools can adjust prices in real time based on factors like demand, inventory, and competition. This ensures that offers stay competitive while maximizing margin. You’ve undoubtedly experienced this: think trying to buy flights or purchasing event tickets off of a resale market.

5. Smarter Segmentation

AI enables deeper audience segmentation by continuously analyzing customer traits and behaviors. It helps marketers deliver more relevant messaging and identify new high-value segments faster than manual methods.

How to Build an eCommerce Website With AI

We live in an era where customer experiences serve as the cornerstone of eCommerce businesses, and data aggregation provides the backbone. This combination plays a pivotal role in personalizing marketing campaigns, creating seamless personalized experiences, and even driving online business decisions. As competition within the retail industry increases, understanding customer interactions at a granular level has changed from an advantage to a necessity.

An online retailer’s website serves as its digital storefront, a crucial touchpoint that can make or break the customer experience. Whether you’re unveiling a brand-new site or fine-tuning a landing page based on valuable insights, Artificial Intelligence offers a multitude of avenues for enhancing user engagement and satisfaction.

Shopify’s AI-Generated Product Descriptions feature serves as a prime example of this in action. This innovative tool simplifies a labor-intensive process (crafting compelling product narratives) by transforming it into a seamless, efficient task, contributing to a more cohesive online shopping experience.

While human editing remains essential for high-ticket items or for items in sensitive categories, the ability to scale personalized content across thousands of SKUs without compromising quality provides a clear competitive advantage.

Additionally, retail businesses can use AI to improve their customer experience while saving costs on human labor. One quick guess: you would probably prefer speaking to a human over a robot in a situation where you need customer service, right?

Well, that might not be true for much longer with artificial intelligence tools in the picture. Brands can utilize AI to enhance their customer service offerings with robust AI-powered chatbots. To make a chatbot “smarter” with AI, you:

• Teach it to comprehend how people naturally speak so it understands what they ask for.
• Next, you keep updating its “knowledge” based on what it learns from talking to customers, making it better over time.
• Lastly, you ensure that if the bot gets stumped or the conversation gets tricky, it knows when to pass the chat to a real person for help.

Chat-GPT-powered Duolingo Max serves as one example of how AI has already revolutionized the way users engage brands and their relevant products. In this case, Duolingo users use Duolingo Max as a conversational way to learn new languages.

Best-Practice Tip: Train your chatbots to handle a wide array of queries but also to recognize when to hand off to a human agent.

One AI use case that you might be familiar with is the Amazon subscription service that offers lower pricing for recurring product subscription purchases. As a part of this feature, Amazon uses Artificial Intelligence to make suggestions if you are running low on quantities of recurring product purchases and suggests that you restock before you run out.

Let’s turn this into an example: Amazon has a customer who orders a supplement as part of their Subscribe & Save program. On average, the customer places one order every 7-9 weeks. With AI, Amazon can predict when the customer will likely run out of product, prompting a CTA to repurchase the product with enough time for delivery so that the customer never goes without the needed product. When brands use AI to drive more purposeful and intentional interactions with the customer, the customer notices. A customer experiencing such a timely, helpful prompt will prove more likely to continue to purchase with the brand.

AI allows for personalization at scale, and customers respond to personalization with their wallets. This concept is nothing new; McKinsey published a study all the way back in 2021 highlighting how personalization, when done well, can produce a major boost to the bottom line. Not only that, but consumers expect personalization. The same study showed that more than 70% of consumers expect brands to personalize their experience, and more than 75% of consumers get frustrated when they don’t receive that unique treatment from a brand. 

Retailers using AI-powered tools like Amazon Personalize or Algolia Recommend tend to see quick gains in average order value and engagement by offering shoppers a more intuitive discovery journey. As LLMs integrate further into on-site search and product filtering, these experiences will become increasingly conversational, intelligent, and user-centered.

Predictive Analytics & Inventory Management

Inventory management operates in the shadows as the unsung hero of eCommerce businesses. While not as glamorous as marketing campaigns or user interfaces, inventory management remains absolutely crucial for smooth operations and customer satisfaction. In an industry where timing is everything, having the right product available at the right time can make or break a sale; and a customer relationship. By leveraging AI for predictive analytics, eCommerce retailers can forecast inventory needs with remarkable accuracy, ensuring they remain one step ahead of consumer demand.

Imagine running an online fashion store. With the holiday season approaching, you don’t know how many units of a new trendy sweater to stock. AI can come to the rescue by analyzing historical sales data and current fashion trends. It can even predict how many sweaters you should expect to sell, allowing you to stock just the right amount. Plus, AI continuously evolves. The more it experiences, the better it gets. For brands, this means no more overstocking leading to steep discount sales and no more frustrated customers finding their size out of stock at the moment of purchase.

AI-Driven Customer Segmentation & Personalization

The use cases for AI in eCommerce have almost no end, and segmentation and personalization offer another fascinating angle worth exploring. Advanced AI algorithms can sift through massive datasets to identify patterns and segments that might not draw the human eye. These insights can prove incredibly valuable in tailoring personalized marketing campaigns on social media platforms.

Segmentation, creative and messaging experimentation, and garnering continuous learnings serve as keys to success for any business. With advances in AI and Generative AI, businesses can now employ AI-driven customer segmentation in their paid social campaigns.

Let’s delve into how AI tools like ChatGPT or MidJourney can significantly enhance your paid social campaigns, particularly in the eCommerce sector.

Robust A/B Testing Frameworks

Traditional A/B testing often involves manual effort and is limited by human biases and capabilities. AI tools can automate this process, designing hundreds of tests simultaneously to identify the most effective messaging and creative components. This is crucial for eCommerce businesses where even a slight increase in CTRs (click-through rate) alongside conversion rate optimization can translate to substantial revenue gains.

Tailored Advertising Strategies

One of the most compelling features of AI in advertising is its ability to create highly customized strategies. By analyzing vast sets of data, AI can identify nuanced audience segments and tailor ad copy and creative elements to resonate with these specific groups.

For instance, an AI tool can craft LinkedIn ad copy targeting C-suite executives in the Fintech industry, or develop Meta ad copy aimed at homeowners interested in remodeling. These tailored solutions maximize engagement and performance metrics, ensuring a higher ROI on your advertising spend once users hit your landing page.

Data-Driven Creative Ideation & Copywriting

AI tools can also assist in the creative process by analyzing historical data and current market trends. This enables them to offer creative ideation that is not just innovative, but also grounded in data. Whether generating compelling headlines, crafting persuasive body copy, or even suggesting visual elements, AI can significantly speed up and enhance the creative process.

Comprehensive Analytics & Insights

One of the most transformative aspects of AI in paid social campaigns is its ability to provide in-depth analytics and insights. AI tools can track a multitude of metrics in real time, from customer engagement rates to conversion metrics, and offer actionable insights. This data-driven approach allows for agile adjustments to campaigns, ensuring optimal performance at all times.

Automation Via AI Agents

The next phase of AI will take us from using excellent AI tools to the era of employing AI agents. While they may stem from chatbots, agents offer more than a helpful assistant. They actually do the work for you. Agents don’t require constant supervision, and can check off task after task for hours on end without human intervention. Whether you train your own agent to generate blogs, create marketing collateral, provide campaign performance insights and recommendations, or pay for a pre-trained agent’s services through a third party that can track AI visibility, for instance, your productivity can skyrocket.

AEO for eCommerce

Similarly to how tools like Ahrefs can help with eCommerce SEO, AI tools can also track AI visibility and more, so you can bring more potential customers into your funnel; or figure out why they’re missing. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Mode, and other LLMs prepare potential customers for purchase better than traditional SERPs, making your eCommerce Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) efforts critical to sales.

Goodie, for instance, offers visibility tracking across leading LLMs, as well as traffic and attribution, copywriting, sentiment analysis, and AI optimization services, so make sure to employ an AEO tool like Goodie to avoid falling behind on the future of search.

AI Tools: Challenges & Solutions

As much as AI thrives on data to make intelligent predictions and improve customer experiences, there’s a growing challenge that can’t be ignored: the tightening regulations around personal data privacy. Social platforms like Meta have become more restrictive about data collection. In this environment, the value of first-party data (information willingly and directly provided by customers) becomes paramount.

Businesses, especially in eCommerce, must strengthen their first-party or even zero-party data touchpoints. This data comes when customers voluntarily offer information, perhaps through surveys or personalized account settings, which can be invaluable for targeted marketing and personalization. Balancing technological advancement with ethical data collection practices serves as the new tightrope that eCommerce businesses must walk.

Brands must now actively earn trust and incentivize users to share meaningful preferences. Interactive quizzes, loyalty programs, post-purchase surveys, and gated content are now central to gathering usable insights for AI engines. The brands best positioned to thrive in this landscape will be those that treat data collection as a value exchange; offering more tailored experiences in return for transparency and control. AI doesn’t replace the need for ethical data use, it magnifies it.

Mastering eCommerce AI

The realm of eCommerce is no longer just about transactions, it’s about experiences. At the heart of these experiences sits data, smartly leveraged through the power of Artificial Intelligence. From enhancing customer service with AI-backed chatbots, as seen with innovative platforms like Duolingo Max, to smart inventory management and hyper-personalized marketing campaigns, AI is not just a technological advancement; it’s a paradigm shift.

In this context, it’s worth noting that platforms like Shopify offer a range of AI-powered tools designed specifically for online retailers. These tools can help businesses optimize their websites, from generating product recommendations based on user behavior to automating customer service interactions.

AI can be a game-changer for eCommerce businesses in paid social advertising through automating A/B testing, providing tailored advertising strategies, aiding in creative ideation and copywriting, and offering robust analytics. The integration of AI into your paid social campaigns for your eCommerce brand can result in more effective advertising strategies that are both creative- and data-driven, ultimately leading to a higher ROI.

However, like all powerful tools, AI comes with its challenges. In an era where data privacy is becoming increasingly paramount, businesses must adapt, prioritizing first-party data and ethical practices.

This isn’t merely about compliance; it’s about building trust and long-term relationships with customers. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, the eCommerce businesses that will truly stand out will be those that seamlessly blend technology, ethics, and an unerring focus on customer experience aided by AI, but including and centered on humans.

The post eCommerce AI in 2025: Transform Your Online Business appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

Expecting another AI marketing blog now? Sorry, not here. Let’s look at another type of evolution: from sales-led growth to product-led growth (PLG).

What Is Product-Led Growth?

Traditionally, SaaS and digital products required a robust sales team, generally supplemented by a healthy marketing budget, to produce growth at scale. Those expensive suites at the ballpark and rounds on the golf course moved the process along at a slow pace as salespeople tried to “reel in the big fish.”

As technology advanced, product-led growth entered the scene, offering scalability at a fraction of the cost. PLG allowed companies such as Facebook (which became Meta), Slack, Shopify, Zoom, and others to turn into unicorns, achieving billion-dollar valuations in a shorter period of time than their founders ever could have imagined.

PLG is an approach where the product itself serves as the primary driver of customer acquisition, retention, and expansion.

Now that we’ve defined PLG, let’s look at the basics of a PLG-based growth strategy, how it works, why it matters, and how to build a product-led growth engine for your business.

What Is a Product-Led Growth Strategy?

PLG strategy puts the product in your customers’ hands with minimal friction, allowing them to grow into higher revenue generators as their usage expands. This builds both brand and product trust quickly by allowing users to experience real value early, rather than sitting through sales demos or needing to sign a contract before testing out the product. PLG functions as a test drive of sorts, only there’s no risk of the customer crashing the car while driving around the block.

In fact, this test drive enables users to spearhead lead gen for you by sharing the product and bringing other potential paying customers into the fold via word of mouth and your product’s built-in sharing options. This drives down customer acquisition costs, as you let users of all phases (free trial, freemium, premium, etc.) enjoy your product to the point that they can’t help but want more, at which point your more efficient, leaner sales team can jump in if necessary to drive incremental revenue.

Companies like Slack, Notion, and Dropbox serve as great examples. Users can start using these products with minimal friction, experience immediate value, and naturally progress to paid plans as their needs grow. The product serves as more than a tool—it’s the salesperson, the marketer, and the customer success rep all rolled into one.

By focusing on a seamless user experience and providing inherent value from the outset, these companies have not only attracted a broad user base, but also fostered strong communities that contribute to continual product improvement and further growth.

What Are the Three Pillars of Product-Led Growth?

So, how do you build a product-led growth strategy? PLG thrives on three fundamental pillars that make the model work. If one pillar fails, the whole structure will crumble, so make sure your entire business supports the mission.

1. Your Product’s User Experience

The most important currency in PLG is the user’s product experience. This goes beyond clean UI and page speed. The entire journey—from onboarding to habit-forming usage—must focus on making the user’s life better. Every moment should guide users toward value. Think of your user experience as a series of micro-wins that reinforce product value over time.

When users realize all the ways that a Slack conversation one-ups an email chain, they never want to go back. Then, as they learn more about integrations and fun features the app offers, they refuse to go back, serving as product advocates.

2. Understanding Product Usage to Measure Value

Qualifying leads can prove a taxing, though worthwhile, endeavor. Employing your product to lead the process over a salesperson can provide otherwise impossibly massive scale.

Enter the concept of product-qualified leads (PQLs). When users hit specific milestones in your product (e.g., completing onboarding or using a key product feature multiple times) they’ve signaled high intent. At this point, you can hit them with the right upsell to push them to the next tier in your account hierarchy.

Most businesses will show reticence to spend to the max tier before truly testing out a product, so qualifying the accounts that have a high likelihood of converting without initial sales involvement increases efficiency tremendously, dropping your costs.

Creating a killer piece of software that attracts users often requires large upfront investment. However, after that initial investment, the cost per additional user drops precipitously, approaching zero at scale. On the other hand, every sales lead requires time and nourishment, so adding users to your funnel without a salesperson serves as a major win.

What indicators suggest you’ve found a PQL? A PQL will have:

• Experienced product value, such as having:
  • Created a project or workspace
  • Uploaded a file
  • Connected a team member or integration
  • Reached the “aha!” moment (like sending a message in Slack or editing a doc in Notion)
• Actively, repeatedly, and meaningfully used the product through:
  • Multiple logins within a day or week
  • Returning after Day 1, 3, and 7
  • Engaging with core product features consistently
• Shown signs of scaling, like team use or feature depth:
  • Inviting multiple users from the same domain
  • Collaborating within shared workspaces
  • Assigning admin or decision-maker roles
• Interacted with upgrade flows or pricing content:
  • Ran out of credits, projects, or seats
  • Viewed pricing or settings pages
  • Tried to access premium features

3. Cross-Functional Alignment

PLG necessitates organizational alignment. If sales believes you plan to replace them with the product, you’ll have to literally replace them as they flee to other jobs. If the product team doesn’t think growth should be its North Star, PLG won’t work.

All departments must focus on growth through the product and share KPIs. The product is the centerpiece, and every team plays a role in improving it.

Without proper alignment, your organization will fail to:

• Understand which features drive engagement
• Prioritize the best roadmap decisions
• Identify bottlenecks in adoption and expansion

This unified analysis is the only way to find success with PLG.

PQLs often show intent outside of the product, as well as within, by clicking upgrade-related emails, interacting with help docs or pricing FAQs on the website, or exploring integration or API web pages.

Incorporating the data that comes from outside the product increases your likelihood of properly identifying PQLs. Without full-scale organizational alignment, this level of data input into your model won’t take place, resulting in a decrease in efficiency and a longer time to value.

What Are the Four Growth Strategies?

Every company, whether product-led or sales-led, grows in four primary ways:

1. Market Penetration

We can sum up market penetration as acquiring more users or customers in your existing market. In PLG, this often means driving more adoption within freemium tiers or expanding user accounts.

2. Market Development

If you’ve reached your original total addressable market and want to expand, you can try to reach new markets with your current product—presuming the fit makes sense. This could mean launching in new geographies or verticals, or targeting new personas.

3. Product Development

Perhaps your product has done outrageously well within its constraints, but lacks a key feature that competitors use to close deals or expand usage. At this point, introducing new features or add-ons that drive upsells and retention can push your user base up.

4. Diversification

If you’ve reached the product diversification phase, give yourself a pat on the back. While this step may require the most effort, it should mean you’ve already maxed out your market penetration, market development, or product development efforts.

This level of success can necessitate creating entirely new products for new audiences, but you’ll have the playbook for growth after navigating steps 1 through 3.

What Are the Stages of Product-Led Growth?

PLG strategy puts the product in your customers’ hands with minimal friction and allows them to grow into higher revenue generators as their usage expands.

Let’s take a look at the five stages of this PLG strategy:

1. Acquisition

Users discover your product through organic search, content, referrals, or social proof. You help by making sign-up easy and inviting.

2. Activation

The onboarding process helps users experience the product’s core value quickly. Your “aha!” moment—when users discover they need your product to solve a pain point—should sit front and center.

3. Retention

How sticky of a product do you have? Do users regularly come back to your product? Do they receive value that builds usage habits?

4. Monetization

Here, you push users experiencing great value from your product up a tier from a free trial or freemium plan to a paid plan. Make pricing clear, flexible, and tied to the value you provide your users.

5. Expansion

We’ve reached the best stage of PLG. As users invite teammates or expand usage, they generate more revenue with no additional acquisition cost.

Now, let’s move on to PLG best practices.

Best Practices for a Successful Product-Led Growth Strategy

Focus on these six areas of PLG and you may find yourself breezing through each phase of the four growth strategies that we examined above:

1. Make Sign-Up Frictionless

Ask only for what you need, when you need it. Offer SSO or Google login to avoid any drop-off at step one.

2. Personalize Onboarding

Introduce and showcase product features when they are most relevant, not in a big functionality dump right when the user tries your product for the first time.

3. Prioritize Core Feature Adoption

Focus on helping your users succeed with a few essential tools that you know deliver the “aha” moment ASAP. Think of when you learned to ride a bike—did you have to worry about switching gears or navigating rough terrain on day one?

For your sake, let’s hope not, and let’s make sure your users don’t need to wade through TMI before feeling the value your product provides.

4. Turn Data Into Action

Create behavioral cohorts and customize in-product messaging accordingly, so you give users only what they need when they need it—and nothing more.

5. Celebrate Wins

Use gamification, streaks, badges, or summaries to show users how they’ve progressed and provide encouragement to keep up their efforts.

6. Align Sales to PLG

Use product usage data to identify high-intent users and accounts with high-revenue possibilities to offer helpful human-led nudges at just the right time.

Product-Led Growth Strategy Examples

Now, let’s dive into some examples of product-led companies who’ve employed a successful PLG strategy, and the tactics behind their success.

SteelSeries: Merging Hardware & Software

SteelSeries has mastered PLG by connecting industry-leading physical products (headsets, mice, keyboards, etc.) with powerful gaming software. 

SteelSeries’ software suite offers users real, immediate value. Moments lets users capture, clip, and share their favorite gaming instances. Sonar allows gamers to improve their performance by tuning their devices to the point where they can hear sounds other gamers miss and one-up the competition. SteelSeries even offers a 3D Aim Trainer program that matches the user’s intended game settings and weapons.

These tools work to bring in new users and push them toward becoming “Steelheads,” SteelSeries’ most loyal customers, because:

• They’re free to use
• They create excellent reasons to return to the app
• They build community through shared content.

SteelSeries’ software increases brand stickiness and drives hardware loyalty.

Slack: The Viral Loop

Slack nailed the “invite loop.” Users join one workspace, love it, and spin up new ones elsewhere. This network effect, combined with their freemium model, fueled massive growth.

As anyone who has used the platform knows, the immediate positive experience in your initial workspace acts as a powerful endorsement and referral mechanism. Transitioning to Slack from email chains, where finding information proves nearly impossible, immediately triggers the desire to move all your work conversations to the more agile option.

Add integrations and tiered plans to push organizations along the funnel toward enterprise deals, and Slack’s sale for nearly $28B comes as no surprise.

Notion: Community & Simplicity

Notion’s growth engine stems from simplicity and a thriving community. Its clean interface, flexible and customizable blocks, and all-in-one workspace turned everyday users into evangelists.

The real magic? Templates. Early adopters didn’t just use Notion, they shared their workflows, building a thriving ecosystem of free resources that spread product adoption like wildfire. 

Whether for managing a startup roadmap or a reading list, Notion’s low-friction onboarding and powerful customization options hooked users fast. With a freemium model and organic word-of-mouth as its core strategy, Notion let its community enjoy simplicity and functionality as it scaled from niche tool to over 100M users.

Is Product-Led Growth Strategy Right for Your Business?

For PLG to work, your enterprise can’t deploy it as a tactic—you need to make it a company-wide mantra. You’ll require cross-functional commitment to using and aiding your product as a growth engine. But, before you take the leap to becoming a PLG organization, prepare your product for the role. Develop your product to the point that people can’t stop using it.

Reduce friction, provide immediate value with an “aha” moment, turn users into advocates, and watch your customer base soar.

Need help creating a PLG roadmap? Let’s talk.

The post A Complete Guide to Product-Led Growth Strategy appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

Smart businesses avoid this cycle by “warming up traffic” ahead of time. This approach filters out users with no purchase intent, attracting only those who have a potential interest in your product to your website. While some businesses do great by increasing their total traffic, most need to segment to produce the best results. 

What’s an eCommerce Funnel?

eCommerce funnels help facilitate segmenting and priming your website visitors. They act as bridges from the referral source to the website, filtering out traffic with no purchase intent. These eCommerce funnels, while common and widely used, have one purpose: warm up traffic for conversion.

Below, we’ll explore some eCommerce funnel models that you may not have in place today, but that could make a significant impact on your conversion rate. Let’s get started!

Advertorial Funnel

Businesses have utilized the advertorial funnel for a long, long time. However, modern marketers may have overlooked this option thanks to the “easy” advertising approach that companies like Meta and Google have been providing over the past decade or so. That luxury, as everyone has come to realize, no longer exists.

With the changes and irregularities in performance caused by iOS14 and later, marketers need to find solutions outside of just driving traffic to home pages or product pages. This massive-scale traffic approach no longer converts the way it used to, but a business can’t stop marketing—especially while in growth mode.

Enter the advertorial funnel. You’ve probably seen it before.

Have you ever clicked on an ad or a link about an interesting topic? Then, after clicking, you’re redirected to a page that basically looks like an article, or maybe just a page full of content, maybe even in the style of a news article?

If you pay close attention, you may notice that the page is linking to a product or products. The purpose of the page is to serve as a bridge between the ad and the product page. The ad grabs the attention of the user by promising interesting content. The advertorial delivers on such promise by providing interesting content and, within it, promotes some type of clickable product or offer.

This works great with Meta Ads traffic, which has suffered a sizable performance hit due to its impacted targeting features. This is a good point to make, as the majority of growing eCommerce businesses are currently using Facebook for, likely, the majority of their paid traffic.

If any of the above applies to your business, give the advertorial funnel a try—you may be surprised by the results.

Keep in mind that in order to have a successful advertorial funnel, you’ll need a few things:

• First and foremost, you need a quality copywriter. We cannot emphasize this enough. The content ultimately makes or breaks the advertorial. It’s the most important element, so you should not cut any corners here. Advertorials can prove to be expensive pieces of content to put out, but have the potential to open up an entirely new stream of traffic.
  • You have the option to take advantage of advanced LLMs like Claude or ChatGPT to help with initial content production, but always require human editing and direction to assure you don’t produce AI slop that hurts rather than converts.
• Second, you need to design the actual page. The design doesn’t need months of planning. As a matter of fact, we’ve seen extremely simple article pages perform well. As long as you have a landing page builder and someone who feels comfortable with the software, you can move on to production.
• Finally, and this is the obvious part, you need a traffic source. The good news is, because the goal of the advertorial is to entertain first and promote second, it can work well with any type of traffic source: organic, social, etc.

Lead Gen Funnel

If you’re anything like us, you’ve probably heard the term “first-party data” a lot lately. While first-party data has always had a key role, it has turned into table stakes in the marketing world. The lead gen funnel, like the advertorial funnel, has a long history of success. However, it shines now more than ever with the very real need to capture first-party data.

You want to get the most value out of every visit to your eCommerce website. This funnel helps you get closer to achieving that goal. Let’s break it down so you see its simplicity and power.

The lead gen funnel consists of a landing page with a form and some type of offer, which, upon completion, redirects the user to the final destination: (usually) the eCommerce website. The landing page acts as a door, where the only way to gain admission is to complete the form, which usually asks for an email address or a phone number. That’s it. It’s that simple.

But…why does this deserve its own highlight? Mainly because of what it means to now hold that user’s email address, or phone number…or data…or first-party data!

Let’s use an example. The landing page says “Get Early Access & Unlock 40% Off NOW”. Below that line sits a two-step form asking for an email and phone number. The user fills it out, gets the 40% off discount and heads to the website. Great! But now what?

Well, you have two data points on this user. You can put them on an automated email flow, you can send them SMS messages, or you can add them to your retargeting audiences. You’ve now created at least three more opportunities to communicate with this user that you wouldn’t have had if you didn’t generate any first-party data.

There are many efforts you can undertake beyond those three steps, but the main takeaway is that you’re maximizing how much juice you get out of every visitor—a necessary step, as traffic comes at a cost.

Let’s say you’re spending $2 for every visit you generate via ads. Without collecting any data, all you get for your $2 is a visit. But with the lead gen funnel, you now acquire an email address and a phone number for some of those visits, which allows you to remarket to them in the future, thus stretching your dollar longer.

Quiz Funnel

Quiz funnels became extremely popular on Meta Ads in the past few years. Want to know why? Because they work.

Quiz funnels provide a take on the lead gen funnel with a fun twist. They gamify the concept by asking the user to take a quiz, answer a few questions, and to enter their email (or some other data point) in order to get access to the quiz result.

You may have seen those “Which Italian brainrot character are you?” type of links on Meta. These are quiz funnels, with the ultimate goal of warming up a lead, collecting data, and generating a conversion.

The answers each user selects generate data points that get collected and can help you in multiple ways. First, the data helps you pick the most appropriate quiz result, which can increase your overall conversion rate. Second, this data allows you to create segments of users based on their direct responses. You can then analyze which quiz result (which is based on answer combinations) produces the highest value user or lead.If you want to see examples of types of quiz funnels, you can see 7 proposed ones here by Sleeknote.

Zero-Party Data Funnel

Another buzzword in the marketing world you have probably heard a million times: zero-party data!

So, what is it? Zero-party data is data that your customers intentionally share with you. This can include purchase intentions, personal context, communication preferences, and how the individual wants the brand to recognize them. It goes beyond just a phone number or an email address.

You may be wondering: how is this a funnel you can use for eCommerce? In the following example, we’ll look at how a pop-up serves as a great way to experiment with a zero-party data funnel.

Consider the following scenario: a user sees a pop-up on your site. It offers a free $5 gift card. It has a form asking for an email address. However, once they enter their email and click submit, instead of just giving away the gift card, a multi-step display proceeds, each screen with a unique question that gives you an insight into the type of customer the user can be.

For example, an online clothing store could ask: “What are you interested in most? Shirts, Pants, Hats.” Or maybe “When are you looking to buy? Today, tomorrow, in a week, in a month.” Once the user completes all the questions, they are then redirected to the checkout page with the free gift card in their cart. They must complete the checkout as if they were buying any regular product (keep in mind, they’re not actually spending any money).

Let’s analyze what we’ve done here. For a $5 offer, we’ve collected:

• An email address (at the beginning)
• Multiple answers to key questions
• A phone number (at checkout)
• A first and last name (at checkout)
• A physical address (at checkout)

That’s a lot of data that you wouldn’t get with a regular lead capture. You can now set up various retargeting campaigns on paid channels, you can put them in email campaigns or SMS, you can even set up direct mail campaigns.

But the best part is the question-answer data you’ve collected. You can aggregate this data, and from it, pull the most optimal user “profile.” You can learn which combinations of answers produce the best results (in terms of likelihood of conversion), and then tailor your marketing campaigns and overall messaging around those learnings.

Using zero-party data properly to create better relationships in your marketing efforts has immense potential. We encourage you to play with this idea or even give it your own twist. But whatever you do—definitely go out there and collect that data!

What Are the 5 Stages of the eCommerce Funnel?

Now that we’ve gone over some of the best funnels for eCommerce, let’s dive into the 5 stages of an eCommerce funnel.

1. Awareness: Reach your potential customers on whichever medium makes the most sense for your business. You may want to utilize paid ads (Meta, TikTok, Google Ads, Bing, etc.), content (blogs, SEO/AEO), organic social media, or influencer partnerships.
2. Consideration: As your potential customers compare your offerings against competitors, give them the educational materials they need to make a decision in your favor during their consideration stage (Us vs. Them content, product videos, social proof, etc.)
3. Conversion: Here, your users want to make a purchase. Make it as easy as possible for them with a wonderful user experience on your site or app (a streamlined checkout process, intuitive navigation, more social proof, perhaps free shipping, cart emails, and clear return details).
4. Retention: Bringing new customers into the fold costs more than encouraging existing customers to purchase again. Encourage your existing customers to buy from you again with loyalty programs, post-purchase emails that give them a chance to rate their experience or earn rewards, excellent customer support, and future product recommendations.
5. Advocacy: If you keep your customers happy through retention, they’ll likely want to share their positive experience with friends and family. Ask this happy cohort to review your products, offer referral rewards with them, or consider a VIP program that allows them to earn increasing benefits for repeat purchases.

Use eCommerce Funnels to Lower Costs and Grow Your Business

eCommerce funnels offer opportunities that every eCommerce business should experiment with. And when you start to think in terms of CRO, growth can really take off.

Keep in mind that many more eCommerce sales funnels exist outside of the ones mentioned in this article. Not only that, but you can create unique combinations that fit the needs of your business. The sky is truly the limit!

For even more insights on eCommerce funnels, conversion funnel optimization, and email marketing, please contact us!

To recap, using eCommerce funnels allows you to significantly increase the number of opportunities for experimentation and testing. Even if you don’t see a big impact in terms of conversion rates, you can always take the learnings you collect and apply them across all of your marketing efforts.

For example, you may learn that a funnel with a different type of messaging than what you’ve been focusing on results in more clicks through to the site, and that messaging can help improve your email flows and offer future test options on paid social

Creating a machine that constantly pumps out business-related learnings will only help lower your costs and increase your revenue in the long term. So go out there, create some funnels, and test them out!

The post Effective eCommerce Funnels: Use Them for Your Brand in 2025 appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

Once they achieve sufficient growth, increasing margins or market share or efficiency often comes next. But, no matter where your business resides in its lifecycle, to reach the next step, you’ll likely need to increase brand awareness. Unfortunately, “brand awareness” often turns into a buzzword to throw out in meetings with the C-Suite that leads to wasted spend on PR fluff with no increase in the bottom line, and ultimately costs many marketing heads their jobs.

We don’t want that. So let’s answer one key question: Where is the line between building a foundation of brand awareness and throwing money away?

What Is Brand Awareness?

First, a definition of brand awareness from our friends at the Oxford Dictionary, who have established quite the brand themselves: The extent to which consumers are familiar with the distinctive qualities or image of a particular brand of goods or services.

Brand awareness extends beyond a first impression to include every interaction with the consumer. Every touchpoint pours another drop into the brand’s custom cocktail. One bitter experience can turn that well-crafted drink into one a customer will pour down the drain – so any brand hoping to maintain and grow its customer base must aim to provide a positive experience in all customer touchpoints.

Brands develop their “personalities” through each interaction with a customer. Is it scholarly like the aforementioned Oxford Dictionary, tough like Harley-Davidson, energetic and quirky like Red Bull, or somewhat amusing like TaxAct with Adam Scott doing its voiceovers?

The Four Stages of Brand Awareness

Brand awareness starts with recognition, then moves to recall, takes another step toward reaching top of mind, and a last leap to preference.

1. Brand recognition requires a customer to have been exposed to the brand and understand what the brand offers.
2. Brand recall means that a potential customer can remember the brand, either when aided (“Whose logo is this?”) or unaided (“What are some good brands for sunglasses?”). Unaided brand recall for newer brands may hover in the low single digits, whereas aided brand recall for larger brands can easily top 60% or 70%.
3. Registering as a top-of-mind brand means consumers think of the brand first when considering a good or service.
4. Brand preference, the final step, comes when the brand has nurtured its relationship with consumers to the point that they would prefer it over any competitor – think of your favorite toilet paper or toothpaste, for example.

Only those that provide an exceptional experience to their customers reach that final stage, brand preference. This level of brand salience (the likelihood of a consumer thinking of a brand at purchase time) means customers will pay more for your product, even if a competitor technically offers more value for the price. Only top brands that nurture their customers along the brand awareness funnel reach this level of brand equity, where consumers equate value with the brand name more so than with the product or service (IKEA vs. Ethan Allen, rather than the comparable couch each business sells).

Apple has some of the world’s highest brand equity – it’s incredibly well recognized and trusted. So high, in fact, that people continue to shell out massive amounts of money for new versions of the iPhone that don’t always innovate. In fact, Android phones often serve as a testing ground for the iPhone, which simply reaches feature parity within a short enough sprint so as to leave no doubt in their customers’ eyes as to which product remains more valuable. For Apple, investing heavily in maintaining that brand equity continues to prove a no-brainer.

Is Your Business Right for a Brand Awareness Campaign?

Brand awareness is not a short-term investment like a conversion campaign on Google Ads. It’s a long-term investment that broadens the top of your funnel. You certainly want to target your Ideal Customer Profile, but you don’t necessarily want to exclude the junior associate who becomes the product buyer in two years, either.

So, how should you decide if – or how much – you should invest in brand awareness marketing?

1. Focus on Your Business Goals

If you need sales immediately or the power company will turn off the lights, investing a large amount of budget into broad brand awareness campaigns makes no sense.

On the other hand, a successful business in a saturated market with more runway may find that strong brand awareness provides a differentiator that increases sales in the long run.

The insurance industry serves as a good frame of reference. Other than the actual terms of your car or home insurance, do you care about the “product” you purchase? No. You care about the brand’s reputation. That’s why you can’t look at a screen without seeing Flo from Progressive, Jake from State Farm, the AFLAC Duck, or Martin, the GEICO Gecko.

2. Consider Your Industry and Competition

A large enterprise looking to launch a new product in a competitive market with budget to spare should use some of it on brand awareness, but a business in a niche market with no competition or selling brandless, inexpensive products needn’t do so.

When the Boston Beer Company (maker of Samuel Adams) launches a new beverage, it knows the brand identity it creates and promotes will do more selling than the taste of the drink. The limited-edition Derrick White Ale release showcases how brand awareness plays a key role in the business’s marketing efforts. Boston Beer Company aimed to further establish the brand in the hearts and minds of the New England region, where the business sprouted, by pairing with a beloved local athlete.

On the other hand, a business hawking cheap floss and toothbrushes exclusively on Amazon should rightly focus on keeping its prices low by avoiding unnecessary brand marketing campaigns.

3. Assess Your Target Audience

Does your target audience need your product or service but not know your business exists? If so, brand awareness can help connect you with your potential customers.

Or, do people know your brand but have a less-than-stellar perception of it? Investing in brand awareness campaigns can help by showing the brand’s personality and the good it does in the world – think of the commercials you see that tout a brand’s foundation.

4. Study Your Current Brand Recognition

Where does your business reside on the brand awareness funnel explained in The Four Stages of Brand Awareness above? How far are you from reaching the next step, and what type of expected increase in revenue would that next step produce?

You won’t be able to produce an algorithm that will generate the ROAS on that next step down to the cent, but you can create a framework with which to plan. For instance, create a hypothesis such as: an increase in sales of 5% would prove worthy of an investment of $X in brand awareness.

Then, set up a plan to run paid brand awareness campaigns on at least two marketing channels, and track brand searches, direct traffic, social media mentions, and other key brand awareness metrics (that we’ll discuss later on).

If your hypothesis proves correct, consider upping your brand marketing budget to see if success scales; conversely, if your test results in very little uptick in those key areas, go back to the drawing board and try different channels or return your focus to ROI until future revenue growth provides another opportunity to work on brand awareness.

How Paid Media Brand Awareness Campaigns Work

For our purposes, let’s discuss your brand awareness campaign strategy from a paid media perspective. While organic methods like SEO and content marketing remain essential for long-term growth, paid campaigns offer the advantage of immediate visibility and scalability. Most businesses will want to put their largest direct investment into paid advertising, rather than into sponsorship naming rights or PR, to avoid throwing away money on investments that sit more on the theoretical side of the scale than the practical, actionable side.

For a fraction of the cost, you can reach more potential customers on Meta or YouTube than you can in a Super Bowl ad on a primetime broadcast. Not only that, your target audience may even pay more attention to your ad than one running during the big game. Also, you can iterate on paid ads extremely quickly, as opposed to releasing one video in the middle of a massive cultural moment and hoping it goes well.

Businesses can test out their brand awareness campaign ideas and strategies on various paid platforms, including:

• Social media advertising (Meta, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc.)
• Programmatic advertising (Google, Adobe, Pubmatic, etc.)
• Paid search (PPC) campaigns (Google, Bing, Amazon, etc.)
• Sponsored content and influencer partnerships (Taboola, Meta, TikTok, etc.)
• In-game advertising (StackAdapt, AdMaven, InMobi, etc.)

How to Create a Brand Awareness Campaign

To build a successful brand awareness campaign, follow these steps:

1. Define Clear Objectives – Establish what you want to achieve, such as increased website traffic, higher brand recall, or boosted social media engagement.
2. Identify Target Audiences – Research the demographics, behaviors, and preferences of your ideal customers, based on the data you already have from existing customers.
3. Choose the Right Platforms – Select the most effective channels to reach your audience, such as social media, programmatic, or influencer marketing.
4. Develop Engaging Content – Create compelling visuals, videos, and storytelling elements to capture attention. Remember, you want to bring your brand to life with your creatives.
5. Implement Paid Advertising – Run brand awareness campaigns on Meta and YouTube, programmatic platforms, PPC, and possibly in-game placements to expand your reach. Start off with one or two platforms at a time, depending on your experience, and then iterate on new platforms over time with the learnings you’ve gathered.
6. Measure Brand Awareness – Track key brand awareness campaign metrics, such as social engagement, website visits (direct traffic), and brand mentions. We’ll dive in further on this subject in the “How to Measure the Success and Efficacy of Brand Awareness Campaigns” section.
7. Optimize and Scale – Continuously analyze performance and refine your strategy based on insights and data. Don’t think you’ll set a brand awareness campaign and forget about it; it’ll require continual updates to improve results.

For many, Meta can serve as a good testing ground for your first awareness campaign.

Creating a Meta campaign for brand awareness doesn’t require a lot of time or effort. Just create a campaign, select “Awareness” as your objective, and go from there. You can choose from several options for your performance goal, including maximizing reach, impressions, or showing your ads to people likely to remember seeing them.

From there, choose your target audience, set your budget, make sure the Meta pixel works properly in your account, set up a variety of creatives to cycle through (Meta highly recommends video ads play a part), and let it rip.

You’ll also want to build similar brand awareness campaigns on other platforms to increase your reach. If you’re newer to paid campaigns, try out one or two platforms first, then take the learnings you gather and repurpose them on additional platforms. You can also try out incrementality testing by turning off one platform at a time to measure the effect on the brand awareness KPIs you designate as essential in advance.

What Are Some Examples of Brand Awareness Campaigns?

Let’s take a look at two examples of successful brand awareness campaigns from a pair of gigantic brands.

Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign, where the company replaced its logo with people’s names, produced incredible results by encouraging consumers to find and share bottles with friends and family. The campaign helped spur over a million more teens in the US to try a Coke than had the year before. Coke used technological trends to its advantage, making the #ShareaCoke hashtag a key part of its effort to reach a younger audience on social media in the 2011-2014 range, as social media continued its ascent to cultural prevalence.

Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign provides us with another extremely well-known and successful brand awareness campaign. The initiative combined inspirational storytelling with endorsements from top athletes, reinforcing Nike’s brand identity while creating a powerful emotional connection with its audience. The concept has proved so integral to the brand’s identity that though it first popped up in 1987, the line still occupies key real estate in Nike’s current awareness efforts. 

The Importance of Brand Value Alignment

Not all brand awareness campaigns produce incredible results like the two referenced above. A number of factors influence whether a campaign works out or not, but some of the biggest failures stem from a lack of brand value alignment.

Brand value alignment constitutes the integration of a brand’s identity and principles with the messaging and values demonstrated in its marketing strategies, especially in terms of partnerships and endorsements. In a hyper-polarized political climate, leaning toward one side of the aisle or choosing the wrong brand or celebrity partner can prove disastrous.

Bud Light’s pairing with Dylan Mulvaney serves as an infamous example of brand alignment gone wrong.

In April 2023, Mulvaney posted to Instagram about a March Madness contest that offered a chance to win $15K. Mulvaney, a transgender social media star, delivered a light-hearted monologue about the contest and pretended not to know what March Madness meant. The backlash that ensued cost Bud Light dearly in sales, as anti-trans actors called for a boycott and negative responses flooded social media. 

The issue with the Mulvaney campaign had nothing to do with right and wrong or trans rights. Instead, it stemmed from Bud Light not recognizing its target audience’s cultural leanings. Bud Light surely aimed to reach a demographic outside of its traditional purview to increase long-term sales, but the effort actually diminished its standing within its core cohort.

Focus on Fit

Say you own an assisted living chain and want to attract seniors looking for a vibrant community with lots of activities and none of the headaches of home ownership. Your target audience will make the choice for themselves, rather than caregivers, so you need to reach people in their 50s and 60s directly.

Does it make sense to try in-game advertising?

No. There are likely over 3 BILLION video game users in the world, but this group consists generally of people under the age of 40.

This gamer cohort definitely wants to find gaming gear, though. If you sell premium video game headsets, like the top brands identified by ChatGPT below, running an in-game video or display ad campaign fits like a glove.

How to Measure the Success and Efficacy of Brand Awareness Campaigns

Brand awareness campaigns don’t focus on immediate conversions, and this can prove disorienting for marketers used to pointing to ROAS or CAC to determine whether their efforts bore fruit. But, just because you can’t attribute an immediate conversion to a campaign doesn’t mean it generates no value.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) can serve as an easy way to frame this concept. As internet users have begun seeing more and more AI Overviews from Google and Bing and have shifted their searches to answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity, about 58% of all searches lead to no click.

We need different metrics to measure success for brand awareness campaigns. Check out our suggestions:

1. Brand Search Volume

An increase in branded searches on Google, Bing, and elsewhere indicates heightened brand recognition. Track your baseline number of searches before the start of a brand awareness campaign and measure the growth that comes after the campaign’s launch.

2. Social Media Engagement

Make sure to monitor:

• Followers gained
• Shares, video views, comments, and reactions
• Mentions and branded hashtag usage

Should all these metrics take leaps without other specific campaigns designed to boost them, you can attribute at least a portion of that success to your brand awareness campaigns.

3. Website Traffic and Referral Sources

Direct traffic, in particular, can serve as a proxy for the success or lack thereof of branded awareness campaigns. If your direct traffic soars after the implementation of your campaign, that’s a great sign. If you don’t see meaningful pick-up in that regard, the campaign may have missed the mark.

4. Customer Surveys and Brand Recall Tests

Compare your aided and unaided brand recall from surveys before and after the launch of your brand awareness campaign.

Brands Awareness Never Ends

Ever heard of Blue Ribbon Sports? Probably not, but you likely own some of its apparel, just under the company’s later name: Nike. Despite already boasting one of the most recognizable brands in the world, the company continues to invest heavily in brand awareness campaigns year after year.

Nike sponsors top athletes and franchises across the spectrum to stay top of mind when it comes time to make a purchase. From Michael Jordan to Kobe Bryant, Tiger Woods, Serena Williams, Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, and younger stars like Jayson Tatum and Caitlin Clark, Nike constantly invests in its brand. Nike has no plans to fade from memory any time soon, and remains willing to use its massive marketing budget to keep showing you its logo.

And it must, because just like in your industry, the competition remains fierce. While Nike partnered with baseball superstars Ken Griffey Jr. and Derek Jeter in the past, New Balance swooped in and signed Shohei Ohtani, perhaps the greatest player of all time, currently playing in the massive market of Los Angeles in his prime years. Ohtani’s unparalleled impact (he serves as an unmatched icon in baseball-crazy Japan and a global icon) shows how efforts to improve or maintain brand awareness can never stop.

Investing in brand awareness marketing campaigns remains critical to long-term success, but only if done strategically. Align your brand awareness strategy with your company’s growth stage, industry landscape, and business objectives, and success will follow.

The post When to Invest in Brand Awareness Campaigns appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

The pace of change in sales and marketing, like the rest of life, continues to accelerate. The B2B sales cycle used to involve a lot of, well, salespeople. That’s no longer the case in many situations, and younger generations – Millennials and Gen Z make up roughly two-thirds of B2B buyers – prefer to learn from your website, not your people.

“Lack of understanding about Millennial and Gen Z buying behaviors can adversely affect providers’ ability to reach, engage, and ultimately win these buyers over,” explains Amy Hayes, Forrester’s vice president and research director.

New trends in SEO continue to unfold. As zero-click searches surge, the days of Googling a product or service and heading to a website may fall by the wayside. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) has emerged as a new frontier, so now more than ever, answering your potential customers’ questions clearly and efficiently will provide the key to your B2B success.

With all this change, one thing has stayed the same: If you’re not mapping your customer’s journey, you’re lost.

The B2B sales cycle can take years. While digital marketing remains essential, relationships, events, and other factors may weigh heavily. For continued success in the B2B space, you may need to add a new skill: customer cartologist.

Why Map the Customer Journey?

Mapping a B2B customer journey does more than refresh your understanding of customer touchpoints. It helps by showing you where friction exists. Once you know where the friction is, you can work to remove it wherever possible to drive increased conversion rates. Without quality B2B customer journey mapping, you’ll miss out on accurate data-driven optimization opportunities.

A Bad Map Leaves You Lost

Everyone has experienced it – you’re somewhere new, you need to get to your destination ASAP, and the map won’t load or your phone dies. You feel disoriented, which leads to desperate decisions, and often causes you to waste time turning one way, then backtracking after realizing you took the wrong turn.

The same truth applies to B2B marketing. With so many possible touchpoints, pretending your customer journey goes smoothly from A to B will have you focusing on the wrong problems and false solutions. Since B2B marketing often requires expensive initial outlays, a bad map wastes a significant amount of money.

The Buyer’s Journey vs. the Customer Journey

Bought a product recently? Was that the end of your interaction with the product or company? Probably (hopefully!) not, and that’s the difference between the buyer’s and customer journeys. The buyer’s journey ends with the purchase, whereas the customer journey continues on well after that point – think about the customer. Customer feedback, customer satisfaction, and customer service all play a pivotal role in the post-sale portion of the customer journey.

We recommend remapping your customer journey – not just the buyer’s journey – at least once a year. This doesn’t require an all-consuming process, but if you don’t rework the map after major changes, you’ll run your sales and marketing operations on bad data, so even data-driven decisions will miss the mark.

If your efforts conclude with the buyer’s journey, you miss out on learning how your customers turn into growth agents for your business, and how you might incentivize the acceleration of that process and scale results. Your relationship with your customer never ends with the sale.

What Are the 5 Stages of the B2B Customer Journey?

The B2B customer journey includes many touchpoints along the way, but we can break up the voyage into a handful of specific phases:

1. Awareness

Your potential customer runs into a problem that needs a solution. For example, an analytics provider stops offering integration with a major platform, and your potential customer needs either a patch or an entirely new provider. Your customer starts casually asking around, and hears your company’s name mentioned by a friend in the same industry or sees your video on LinkedIn. They may follow that up with an online search and read a blog post about the topic, but they’re not ready to sign a deal yet, and will dive in deeper in the next phase.

2. Consideration

The potential customer now begins investigating in detail, perusing your website and those of your competitors to find the best value. This phase will include zero-click searches, conversations with industry allies, focused pricing and product comparisons, and more, so it’s time for your marketing team to shine. Make sure your marketing efforts, including SEO, AEO, U/X, and social media, match the moment.

3. Purchase

You did it! The potential customer has become a buyer, and you’ve reeled in the big fish. Don’t throw the fish back into the ocean – continue the relationship to the next stage.

4. Retention

The contract nears its completion and you negotiate another term, right? No! Oftentimes, the B2B customer journey includes multiple decision makers and different end users; this means you need to foster at least one advocate on the client side at various levels of the organization.

Earn loyal customers through excellent service and a great product. Then, track sales data on the retention phase so you can optimize when and how you approach re-upping, as well as what upsell opportunities make sense for different types of clients. Transform customer retention from a hope into a plan.

5. Advocacy

Thanks to a great experience, your customer becomes a brand advocate, helping you drive even more revenue. Include a referral program to convert this word-of-mouth boost into a, well, conversion machine. Consider double-sided incentives, where the referrer and referred both benefit.

How to Map the Customer Journey

Since the B2B customer journey generally involves multiple stakeholders, you’ll need to create buyer personas: characters who represent your B2B customers, based on your customer data. Perfect personas don’t exist, but they’ll help you tell your customer’s story. Depending on your offering, you’ll need to work on several personas, including users, managers, directors, and C-Suite executives.

Before you start mapping, gather your customer data. This includes customer touchpoints across a variety of channels: marketing, sales, customer service, and beyond. With more and more touchpoints popping up over time (think of how many social media and marketing channels you operate, let alone physical touchpoints), customer journeys swerve and follow anything but a linear path. Did your CEO speak at a conference where one of your buyer personas attended? That’s a touchpoint. Did you run an ad in a trade publication? Touchpoint.

Take that data and lay it on top of the five stages you just read about above. This will be a visual exercise, so you may want to draw on a whiteboard, or use a digital space like Miro.

It won’t be possible to track some touchpoints, which means they reside in the dark funnel – the realm of contact with potential buyers or existing customers not attached to a pixel or tag for easy attribution. From a conversation with a cousin in the same field to a Facebook group discussion or a group text, these steps don’t fit neatly into a typical sales funnel.

Don’t let this distract you. Plot customer touchpoints on your board and insert data wherever possible. From surveys and digital tracking, do you know that 50% of your conversions include organic social media posts? Can you say that half of potential buyers who download your white paper convert? Use whatever data you have, and aim to include more as you gather it over time, filling in the gaps.

Take these points on the map and connect them, with details about pain points and emotions your buyer personas encounter from step to step. Use as much detail as you can along the way. For example, you might note that when users hit your landing page, they run into a redirect, degrading their experience and causing a drop-off in users who would likely move toward the next touchpoint, and ultimately convert.

Uncovering friction your team had no idea existed creates optimization opportunities to push potential customers toward the bottom of your funnel and beyond.

Invest in Mapping Your Customer Journey

If you haven’t taken a hard look at your customer journey in the past year, start the process now. The investment of time and energy will prove well worth it. Mapping your customer journey may seem daunting, but it helps identify friction, soothe customer pain points, improve conversion rates, and lead to fulfilling your ultimate goal: increasing revenue.

B2B Customer Journey FAQs

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