It’s not that simple. But it’s also not rocket science.
It doesn’t matter about the tactic or channel – building brands and marketshare requires experience, testing, adaptability, and time.
Contrary to what you may believe, nothing is that simple or transactional. There is no this for that — without it affecting other things around you and influencing decisions and choices you’ll have to make in your business.
Say for instance, you decide that the best way to build your brand (product or service) awareness amongst your target market is with a digital advertising campaign. Sounds good. It’s relatively cheap, easily scalable and best of all responsive and measurable — so you’ll know which platforms and venues work and which don’t.
So you’ve opted to run a digital advertising campaign – let’s review…
Great! So you put aside $5,000 for the media-buy which should get you a reach of around 500,000 impressions. Cool. That should give you a good ROI. But that’s not all there is to it and that’s not all you’ll need to budget for.
Firstly, from a strategy perspective…
- What is your singular goal or business objective? What will this effort help achieve?
- Who will this ad campaign be most relevant for? Who will you target and which geography? Are you looking at a single State or several Metro’s? Country-wide, regional, or global?
- Depending on your product or service, what is the average value of a sale? Before moving forward you’ll want to have some idea of your potential ROI.
- Then there’s the messaging, creative development (you’ll want ad creative to place on these websites and social platforms), and the offer. In order to generate some kind of engagement and give your target market a reason to click on your ad, you’ll need to offer something – a resource of some kind; more information, join us for a webinar, a free trial… whatever it is… What is your target market interested in?
Now, let’s talk logistics…
When you think about the actions a prospect will take upon seeing one of your digital ads (and this applies to any tactic or channel) — all sorts of questions start coming up.
- Now that you have the targeting, geography, and where the ads will be displayed nailed down, what happens when they click on an ad?
- Where will they be taken? What is their next step? What do you need for them to see and do?
- How will you stay in touch with them? Will you capture their contact info?
- What about a retargeting ad campaign? Or an email campaign follow up?
- Do you have the systems in place to automate the engagement process and their journey?
- How will you handle customer data compliance?
- Who will manage and oversee the automation platform?
- Who will create the landing pages and funnels? (After the creative has been developed it will still need implementing.)
- How will you assign each contact to different communication streams? What would these be?
- What else should you do with these new leads?
- When should leads be handed off to Sales?
- Once with Sales, what happens then? Depending on your sales cycle they should probably still receive some type of marketing communications.
As you can see, what sounded like a simple decision of adding a digital ad campaign to your marketing plan — isn’t so simple or transactional.
Digital advertising can be very effective.
Digital ad campaigns are relatively quick to implement and with near real-time reporting — they’re a dynamic marketing channel. It’s also what we would call a passive tactic, in that it requires action by your target market. They have to take the next step. It’s for these reasons (and others) that it’s a low cost channel. Results can vary widely but depending on what you’re doing and where, expect to see conversion rates of between 0.8% for household IP, up to 1.34% for PPC and 1.44% for Facebook/Instagram.
Just be clear on what your goals are and that you give your campaign time to gain traction and dialed-in. Oh, and be careful what you’re measuring. For Digital Advertising, focus on the CONVERSION metrics – they’re much more relevant than clicks or CTRs.
If you’d like to discuss your marketing goals and how we may be able to help you grow your marketshare and brand value, give us a call or drop us an email — we’d love to show you what we can do.
Build your brand with those that matter.