The BELT Method - An Overview

Facebook & Instagram Ads are best in business to drive qualified traffic to your offers but they are also very best at driving you crazy. 4 years into my journey as a media buyer and a roller coaster ride with Facebook & Instagram Ads, I recently took CXL institute Facebook & Instagram Ads course which is taught by Curt Maly Founder of Black Box Social Media and the very best in business.?

Throughout these 4 years, I have gone through a lot of Facebook & Instagram Ads training and CXL’s training is by far the best one. It not only teaches the media buying but also the overall customer journey and how to influence customers and not to go after vanity metrics like CTR, CPMs and others. The holy grill of this course is THE BELT method which is Belief, Engage, Lead and Transact and moving customers through these stages and ultimately get them to do business with you.

The Rule of seven.?

The marketing rule of seven says that ideally, someone has to have seven different contact points with you before they make a decision. So how do we know this rule of seven is true. We can lend Think With Google Insights for that. Take a look at Gina's travel micro-moments over the course of three months:

There are 850 different contact points that this person makes over a three-month period of time when they're researching travel. So, imagine that you're in the travel niche, and just imagine that you're renting cars. Well, out of renting cars here, we can see that only 2% of the overall searches were about renting cars, but they're making a decision with all these other contact points as an influence. So what does this mean? this means we need to adopt the full-funnel strategy and have an influence on the complete buyer journey?

What Facebook tells us to do?

What Facebook tells us to do is they tell us to adopt a full-funnel strategy by using different campaign objectives and formats to preferably reach different personality profiles within an audience. Now, what I mean by that is keep this in mind, some people read, some people like to watch TVs, some people like to get on the internet. Some people like to click-through on stuff. Well, Facebook has all these different objectives to target people on. So many times as marketers we feel, well, “I just want people to buy”. So we only target just buyers.No, we're really required to target everyone. Some people buy right away with an ad. Great, it's a small percentage. Some people require to watch things, i.e. video views, or click things, i.e. landing page clicks.

Eugene Schwartz Five Levels of Awareness

Eugene Schwartz is one of the best copywriters in history. Eugene Schwartz introduced Five Levels of Awareness in his classic book Breakthrough Advertising back in 1966. Schwartz broke down prospect awareness into five distinct phases:

The Most Aware: Your prospect knows your product, and only needs to know “the deal.”

Product-Aware: Your prospect knows what you sell, but isn’t sure it’s right for him.

Solution-Aware: Your prospect knows the result he wants, but not that your product provides it.

Problem-Aware: Your prospect senses he has a problem but doesn’t know there’s a solution.

Completely Unaware: No knowledge of anything except, perhaps, his own identity or opinion.?

We can further name the stages as more commonly known as Top of funnel, Middle of funnel and Bottom of funnel. So most of the marketers are battling in the most aware field where prospects are most aware and it all comes down to price. But when we move customers from unaware state to most aware state we establish trust and authority with the customers and the BELT method shows how we can meet the prospects where they are in their journey with the right content and move them to the next stage

The BELT Method

Belief: At this stage of the customer journey, they may or may not be aware that they have a problem. They may be or may not know that you have a solution for that problem or that your product or service could even solve that problem. So it's our job to help them to begin to believe that there is a problem and it can be solved. Yes, just that no conversion ads, not banners saying “Buy my shiny stuff buy my shiny stuff”. The problem is that a lot of marketers go on Facebook and start with conversions ads and start looking for purchases and transactions. This is like asking someone to marry on the first date. The job of the marketer is to educate and influence the customer first before trying to convert them.?

Now let’s discuss the specifics of these kinds of campaigns. So we are looking to help people and make their belief that they have a problem or if they are already problem aware make them product aware. We can use Video Views, Brand Awareness, Post Engagement objectives with this kind of campaign and use videos to get in front of prospects.

Engage: Your engaged audience is someone who has watched your video in the last 28 days. This is your warm audience, now you can start serving them ads that build your credibility and trust. The content at this stage should educate and entertain and should introduce or strengthen your brand to the prospects.

Lead: At this stage, we create the middle of the funnel campaign to guide our audience towards the solution that they've been warmed up to through the Belief and Engage stages. At this stage of the customer journey, our prospects should be product service focused, our messaging should offer our prospects support, solutions, the ability to actually buy something from us. It's our job to lead them to the sales presentation we offer.

Transact: At this stage of the Customer Journey the prospects should be ready to make that purchase decision. At this point they've visited our site, they've gone to the sales page, they've maybe initiated an initial transaction with us, maybe they become a lead. It's kind of like dating, we've gone through lots of different processes to get to know each other, now it's talking about moving to that next stage. So at this stage, we're going to make sure that retargeting is all set up, we're going to make sure that they're ready to make that purchasing decision and remember that our goal here is to get your prospects off the fence and to make a purchase.

That concludes the BELT method, this is obvious a 10,000ft view of the overall strategy. You can rethink what is your customer journey look like after implementing this strategy?