We’ve all been there … and thought about how we could increase the performance of a digital campaign. The reality is the digital landscape is so vast and overwhelming that we often fail to see the wood from the trees.
We’ve looked at freeing up some woody paths and found ways to guide you around the landscape of Facebook, search advertising, display and all other digital channels.
It’s crucial you define which path you want to follow before you start walking. Taking the wrong road can lead to underperforming communication, a low return on investment and unreached targets.
1. Start with a plan
First things first: where do we want go? Or in other words: what do we want to achieve? Not every path is suitable for everyone. Some people prefer a long walk and are better off developing a long-term content campaign to increase sales. Whereas others will settle for a short and powerful campaign to increase, for example, their brand awareness via Facebook.
It all depends on the main objective, the product and the market. The most common objectives revolve around gaining brand awareness, identifying leads or increasing sales. Just make sure your objective comes with a clearly measurable target.
Once you know the direction you want to go, you can start exploring all potential audiences:
- Who do you want to reach?
- Who is likely to convert?
- Other questions you’ll need to tackle are where do you find your target audiences in the digital woods?
- And how much will it cost you to reach them?
Centralising all this information in one place will produce a sort of media map that’ll guide you through the digital forest.
2. Test, test and test again
It would be awesome if you could say, “just run ad X to convert person Y”. It’s a shame, but it doesn’t work that way.
All we can recommend is that you test, test and test again. Make different ad variations, play with messaging, visuals, calls to action, … and make sure you always test one variable at a time.
This way you can analyse what works for your audience. It’ll be a little bit of a bumpy road, but you’ll see, it’ll be worth your while.
A good way to know what you should test is to break the problem down.
Imagine for example that you are targeting people who are considering renting somewhere soon. You might have two audiences within the main audience: people who are going to live together with a partner, and others who’ll be living alone. You might want to attract both audiences. People are very visual, so you can test both images: one image with a couple and another with just one person on it.
The same idea is possible when you’re creating a call to action button on Facebook. You might consider testing ‘buy now’ and ‘learn more’ at the same time. ‘Buy now’ is more direct and might deter some people, while ‘learn more’ is more vague, but less intrusive. By testing different calls to action, you will no doubt find one that works best for you audience.
3. Track it, check it, fix it, make it
In the same way that Hansel and Gretel laid a trail of breadcrumbs to find their way home, you should track your digital efforts carefully. Like that it’ll be easier to find out which channels, ads, target audiences … perform the best.
It’s important to ask yourself the question: what do I want to track? Make sure you make a tracking template and define your tracking codes in order to be consistent. Tracking is not something you can do retroactively, so you must have a clear vision on your tracking system before you start.
4. Deliver an appropriate site experience
Everyone is talking about ad optimisations. But don’t forget to look at the on-site user experience. Your ad may be the best ever, but if people land on a wrong or poorly designed landing page, all your efforts will be in vain.
Make sure that the landing page style correlates with the ad, and that calls to action are in the right place and that people can easily navigate through your website.
5. Don’t judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree
Finally, the biggest obstacle on the road: measurement. A wise man once said, "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." Now we don’t want to make our fish feel stupid, do we? So make sure you allocate media efforts to the right objective. Want to measure the cost per conversion? Don’t include media used for awareness videos. We recommended you create an ROI table to take decisions on all levels and to have a clear overview of your media performance.
You’re almost there. The reality is there’s no holy grail to great digital performance. But by keeping these 5 steps in mind, you’ll have a head start in the digital world. Now that you’ve learned how to walk in the digital landscape, there’s one thing left to do: sit down, order a fine coffee and think about your next kickass campaign.
Need some help?
If you don’t enjoy walking through the maze of options alone, contact us. We’ll be thrilled to be part of your journey.
Written by Lynn Goossens, Performance Marketing Expert
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Filed under INSPIRATION