According to a recent report, the average online consumer picks up his or her mobile phone 56 times a day. In that time, he/she is exposed to hundreds of ads in all that time. That’s in the middle of all the social feeds- insta stories, tik toks, snapchats from friends, imessages and texts from families….the list is endless.
We sat down with Sudheer Dhayanand, Head of Position²’s paid campaigns practice to break down the most important ways you can turbocharge your digital advertising.
1. Define your goals
Define what you want from each of your paid marketing efforts: Brand awareness, traffic to the website, a specific action (Form Fill or Call), or of course Purchase.
This clarity will help you identify the suitable campaign types on the diverse different ad platforms, and allocate your budget according to your objectives.
2. Build your campaign on the intersection of your target audience and targeting.
When strategizing your targeting & messaging, flesh out your target persona and likely online behaviour.
Choose your targeting basis that—from among search keywords, topic, interest, placement, contextual or demographic. Leverage custom audiences and lookalike audiences for conversion and retargeting. And reserve at least a decent percentage of your budget on brand building.
There are a ton of case study resources for you to expand your learning, so do explore them when planning your campaigns: Google case studies, Think with Google, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Pinterest and Tiktok.
3. Make your ad creatives truly creative
Optimizing your messaging and refreshing your creatives is very important. Here are a few pointers…
- Make them visual and ensure they stand out.
- Avoid generic stock images.
- Invest in distinctive human imagery or creating powerful data based graphics about your product.
- Design your ad messaging focused on user intent and highlight key differentiators in the creatives.
- Test various permutations of your text ads to arrive at the best performing ones.
Make sure you are following good social brands outside of your domain. This will give you and your creative team fresh perspectives. Also, what works for one platform does not necessarily do well in another. So keep the context of the platform and user in mind when designing multi-platform creatives.
4. Avoid the data dazzle
Digital campaigns generate a lot of data, and that can lead to overanalysis and overload. The more you look at it, the more you see patterns, what if’s and rabbit holes. Make sure you stay focused on your goals and not get overwhelmed by campaign data.
Arena Calibrate’s marketing dashboard enables you to look at key metrics across platforms and campaigns on one screen, without being bogged down in the details.
5. Leverage AI/ML that’s built into platforms.
Many of the social ad platforms have intelligent features such as smart bidding, smart alerts, and recommendations that do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Algorithms are able to take the information you provide as a marketer- past campaign data, audience profiles, creatives---and optimize your campaigns for you.
6. Test landing pages to land you results.
Landing pages are vital to conversion be it a lead or a form fill. Test, test and test some more… from A/B tests to multivariate tests to get the best results. Make sure the communication is seamless from ad to landing page.
7. Focus on the quality of leads/conversions, not just the numbers.
Now you have everything in place, and your campaigns are generating conversions, it’s time to identify if the conversions are the right ones or not. You need to continuously analyze your…
- End conversion quality
- Communication (Ad/Campaign) that led to the conversion
- Prospect’s movement throughout the lead funnel.
These 3 focus areas will help us optimize your campaigns and your ROI.
Walking the talk: A Position² case study
Client: A US-based healthcare provider that offers special therapy for children with a certain disorder. The provider has clinics across the country and were looking to connect with parents looking for a solution.
Objective: Leads (Calls to their call center or Form Fills for a call-back)
Position² Solution included:
- Research on customer persona, competitors, communication differentiators and keywords.
- Design of different messaging for various segments, and use of platform’s smart features for campaign optimisation. Testing of search and FB campaigns for conversions.
- Creation of campaign groups and separate landing pages for each clinic location, optimised with A/B testing.
Result: Our campaigns delivered the desired results across all clinics for the client.
As a result of applying all the above-mentioned tactics, we doubled the conversions in comparison to the previous year with consistent quarter-on-quarter growth. We also managed to reduce the cost/lead by 32.5%.
