Setting the Foundation for Digital Advertising Strategy
This domain tests whether you can tie paid media to business goals instead of buying impressions in isolation. Expect questions on buyer personas, the buyer's journey, goal and KPI selection, budget logic, and the inbound framing of attract, engage and delight.
Build from the persona and the journey
A usable strategy names one persona with documented goals, challenges, watering holes and objections. Each journey stage has a different advertising job:
- Awareness: reach new qualified people; judge on impressions, reach, video views.
- Consideration: earn a click or a lead; judge on CTR, cost per lead, engagement.
- Decision: win against alternatives; judge on conversion rate, CPA, ROAS. Showing a demo request to someone who has never heard of you is a stage mismatch, not a creative failure.
Pick one primary goal and its metric
Vague goals ("more traffic") produce vanity reporting. Write SMART goals, name one primary KPI and record its baseline before launch. Awareness goals justify CPM and reach; lead goals justify cost per lead; revenue goals justify ROAS.
Worked example
A B2B team selling scheduling software needs 15 more customers this quarter. Demo-to-close is 25%, so 15 wins require 60 demos. Its landing page converts 2% of targeted sessions, so 60 demos require 3,000 sessions. At a $2.50 CPC that is $7,500. Reasoning: the budget is derived backwards from the revenue requirement, not from whatever is left in the account.
Traps that cost marks
Treating every campaign as lead generation; confusing tactics with goals ("run LinkedIn ads" is a tactic); quoting industry benchmarks as guarantees; choosing the offer before the stage.