How To Maximize Your Advertising Efforts

In a time of economic uncertainty, marketing can be a tough game. You’ll have to eliminate a lot of wasteful spending even though it doesn’t change the fact that we have a lot of targets on our backs.

Regardless of your budget or resources, it’s crucial that you ensure that no marketing dollar is wasted. In this article, we’ll talk about four steps to maximize your advertising efforts.?

An Overview

To start with, let’s take a few examples of advertising efforts that are maximized for the best results:

• An informative, detailed blog post that educates your target audience and increases your brand awareness drastically. Even better if it has a good conversion rate.
• A podcast that increases the sales of your product.
• A marketing webinar that helped you acquire more leads than your usual amount.
• A Youtube strategy that accentuated your brand identity and increased traffic.

There are many more, but in this context, these are meant to demonstrate how you can reap great results by maximizing your efforts. So how do you do that? That’s what we’re going to talk about in the coming section.?

Maximizing Your Advertising Efforts

1. Targeting the Right Audience

If you’re a marketer, you’ve probably heard this a million times but how well have you implemented it? Let’s take an example - suppose you are organizing a webinar for people looking to learn more about the digital marketing industry and its benefits. In this case, you’ll want to target a broad audience, who at any point of time, looked up digital marketing. The higher number of people you get in, the more likely your webinar is going to be a success.

In a different scenario, if you’re trying to sell your CRM product, you’ll want to target a very focused audience who are the most likely to buy CRM software. In this case, a broad audience will be a waste of money & resources and you’re less likely to convert.?

To create campaigns that have a high impact, it’s essential to do your homework - audience research. Understand what excites and scares your customer persona. Figure out what are their pain points and why they’d buy your product. Start by asking the right questions, then put out your campaigns as the answer. Focus on addressing issues that your product solves over boasting too much about the features.?

2. Auditing your Ads

If you find that your ad campaigns aren’t performing as much as they used to, it’s time for a review. Especially in a time of economic uncertainty, you need to ensure that every advertising dollar spent is going to be worthwhile. As we mentioned before, ensure that you are targeting the right audience. If you feel that you should be narrowing down, then test for lead quality and conversion.?

Then, review your engagement status. What is your cost per click and cost per conversion? Review which ads are performing better than the others and take a moment to understand WHY. It is also essential to understand whether your most engaging ads are your most revenue-generating campaigns.??

Optimize your ads and landing pages for the same messaging. Landing pages should reflect the purpose of your ad creative and should offer answers to the questions a customer would have when seeing your ad. Review which channels are performing well and audit your ROI. If you find things have been on a decline, it’s time to optimize.?

3. Implement an Omnichannel Social Media Strategy?

No one needs to hear about the importance of how social media is vital to their business. But what they need to hear is whether if they are doing their social media strategy right. Which platforms are your target audience using the most or most likely to be in? Understand and you’re good to start.

Build a content strategy that is suited to each channel and focus on a particular objective for each campaign. For example, text posts and moment-marketing threads work best on Twitter but on Instagram, you’ll have to nail it with visuals. Even more recently, short videos are the fastest-growing channels for effective communication.? The goal is to ensure you’re communicating your message through a medium that the audience understands the best, in a particular channel.

Again, this requires a lot of research, but take our word for it, it’ll be worthwhile. Conduct surveys, reviews and build a consistent social media identity for your brand.?

4. Improving Customer Experience

If you’re looking at the purchase process as: ad creative > click > landing page > buy, you’re going wrong. There are a whole lot of details in this process and it all adds up to one thing - CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE. Take note of a customer’s entire shopping journey, from the moment they know about your brand or see your ad to finally buying your product and again, coming back.

Where do you find the most friction? That’s where you start acting first. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an ecommerce business or B2B; customer experience is an essential proponent of a purchase decision. Test everything and ensure they’re working well and fast - this means loading speed, broken links, page navigation, layout, product descriptions, copy, payment gateways, etc. If you’ve been losing customers for some time now, figure out where they’re bouncing from.?

Final Thoughts

As a marketer, the one thing you need to keep reminding yourself is that there’s always room for improvement. Review, test, optimize and scale. Beyond the advancing technical glamour and rapid pace of changes in the industry, the fundamentals of marketing have remained the same. The key is to find your ideal audience and communicate in a way that best resonates with them.

Digital marketing requires constant testing and improvements and so, take regular steps to keep your campaigns optimized for the best results.?