Marketing professional understandably struggle to make the best decisions on how to most effectively spend their marketing dollars. The options for building creative assets and reaching customers through media buys are extensive. We have all seen how quickly budgets can be squandered with little or no results.
That’s why we believe that constantly measuring each campaign is essential, in order to make the directional shifts necessary to achieve the desired results. Our approach is to work with our clients to establish the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the campaign, and working backwards from these to develop an effective strategy scaled to optimize budget, desired timeline and client resources.
So as we begin to get deeper into 2015, here are 5 of the most effective tactics we employ to maximize budget:
Re-Targeting
Retargeting is a recent tool that allows you to place a cookie on any potential customer who visits your website, your campaign microsite or even a landing page. Leveraging that cookie, targeted ads can be placed on sites that they visit at a much lower cost than serving up ads on a site that every visitor would see. Re-Targeting allows you to continue reaching potential customers who came to your site to motivate them to return to the site and take further action. Regardless of the number of potential customers that visit your website, retargeting will almost certainly deliver an increase in conversions.
Retargeting doesn’t rely on collecting any personally identifying data; the cookie merely confirms the area of your site that your visitor browsed, allowing your ad to be targeted accordingly. Retargeting has the potential to deliver up to a ten-fold increase in the ROI of your marketing spend – making each dollar invested perform like five to ten.
As powerful a tactic as this is however, it is important that the immediacy and frequency that your retargeted ads are served up are proportionate to the degree of purchase intent exhibited by a visitor, otherwise it could very well turn them off. So make sure and dial it up and back accordingly
Conversion Rate Optimization
While retargeting can be effective for visitors who leave without making a purchase, you should also be working on optimizing first-time conversion rates for your site. While it is smart to use retargeting to pursuing the potential customers who come to your site for the first time, it is always preferable to convert more of them on their initial visit.
Too often, businesses don’t develop a user experience that effectively mirrors their customers’ journey through the sale process. The first step in reversing that is by identifying the reasons they decide to leave in the first place.
A thorough, professional audit and analysis of your site’s overall information architecture, design, content structure, and functionality will provide you with a roadmap to address these problems. Some critical components we recommend include:
- Headlines and Visuals
- Navigation and User Paths
- Calls to Action
- Content & Structure
- Site Analytics
Finding the right digital agency will help you convert a higher rate of first time visitors move them faster through the sales cycle.
Geofencing
Geo-Fencing is location-based digital technology that allows an advertiser to select a geographic point using latitude and longitude and then to create a virtual “fence” around that point of a given radius in which your ads will be served up. For example, an advertiser can pinpoint a specific store, office or branch location, then deliver a targeted ad to anyone who comes within a 5-mile or 5-block radius of that location depending upon its density.
Ads delivered through geo-fencing typically yield higher conversions and better ROI for marketers since they’re highly contextual. It’s very much like being able to display a “special offer” sign across a dozen city blocks instantly, and only show it to the consumers you actually want to reach.
Well-Timed Ad Delivery
Rates for digital and mobile ad placement can vary widely depending on factors like the popularity and demand for the online property, available inventory, the quality of premium placement you want the ad displayed in – and of course – the time of day you want your ads served. Online traffic of all kinds tends to peak at different times during the day and week, so it’s critical to understand the persona you are trying to reach. The time an ad runs can be based, for example, on weekday versus weekend usage patterns.
It is equally important to split test the times that ads are run, to see when it is most effective. Coming from an advertising background myself, I have seen many broadcast media companies charge advertisers a premium to run their ads at a fixed time everyday, when in fact that strategy will only result in them reaching the same people at the same time without reaching additional prospects. Using an attitudinal approach, we might recommend that a B2B client try marketing to its audience after 5pm when they are done with their day and have more time engage with your ad. It’s important to evaluate interactions at all times of day to identify the best windows to most efficiently optimize performance.
Paid Twitter Promotion
Often overlooked in favor of better-known pay-per-click options, Twitter’s advertising offerings make good sense for business owners in almost every industry. Easy to use and suitable for even limited marketing budgets, promoted tweets are a great way to boost an existing campaign or to raise the profile of something new.
One of Twitter’s strengths is the relatively unobtrusive nature of its advertising products. These are native ads and are thus identical to an everyday tweet except for a discreet “Promoted by” tag. Users report that engagement with paid-for tweets is often at the same level as that engendered by natural activity, making them ideal for businesses that already have an active Twitter presence.
In addition to promoting their tweets in search results and on other users’ home timelines, Twitter advertisers have the option to send highly targeted and relevant promoted Tweets to a specific audience only. A further benefit is the syndication of promoted Tweets through Twitter’s mobile apps and to selected third-party Twitter-management tools.
With Twitter, drilling down to your audience is straightforward; in addition to keyword targeting, Twitter offers segmentation by user geolocation, device type, language and other preferences. Setting up specific campaign parameters makes it easy to target in a pre-determined period, and specifying a maximum cost per engagement and daily budget allows you to lock in spend and prevent cost overruns. You’re paying only for each retweet, reply, favorite or click for your tweet, so you’ll be able to assess whether it’s working before a small portion of your budget is even exhausted.