Of course this is having a knock-on effect for businesses and brands throughout the country. With another extension request until the 31st January. Who knows where the economy will be in two months’ time? With this uncertainty comes a need to watch your budgets and advertising spend even more closely. But you still need results and to engage in the best possible way with those consumers that might need convincing to spend their money.
Here’s how you can optimise your current digital display activity to get the most out of your budget.
When you’re attempting to seek as much performance as possible from your existing budget, there simply can’t be any hit and hope. You need to break down your demographics as much as possible and use numerous data points to establish those users that are of the most value to your business.
The next step is to target them through your digital display advertising. You have a variety of tools you can use to do this including audience targeting, geotargeting and contextual targeting.
This should also be an ever evolving process. It’s crucial to have up to the second reporting providing insights to enable you to tweak your campaigns while they are running, as well as advanced insights post-campaign to analyse your audience and optimise your upcoming campaigns for enhanced performance.
Getting in front of the right users is just part of the battle. You need to grab their attention with your ads to ensure they see it and want to click on it.
The design of your ad is therefore crucial. It needs to catch the eye and instantly be recognisable as an extension of your brand. That’s the start. You also need to ensure that your messaging provides an incentive and a reason to click on the ad and that your call to action (CTA) is super clear and not confusing.
Too many campaigns falter with poorly designed ads.
Whilst you may want to allocate a portion of your budget for brand awareness and attracting new users into the top of your marketing funnel, you need your spend to work as hard as possible during these uncertain times.
That means how you engage with existing users will be crucial. With only 2% of new users converting on their first visit to your site, you have some work to do to guide them along their path to purchase. Retargeting should be a central tactic to your strategy to do so.
Remember, don’t simply use a blanket message in your Retargeting. Segment your users based on the action they’ve taken on your site and what this shows about their intent, whether they read one of your blog posts, viewed a category of products or abandoned their basket.
When done well Retargeting ads can perform 10x better than standard display ads. Now that’s how you optimise your spend.
Picture the scene. You Retarget a user with a beautifully designed ad for a product they’ve recently viewed. They click through to site and the product is either out of stock or the advertised price is wrong.
Cue a frustrated user with no chance of converting.
Out of date ads will always see you fall at the final hurdle and will mean far too much wasted budget from your campaigns. In-feed ads are an essential solution to guarantee your ads will always be up to date in line with any changes to your inventory, pricing, offers or deals. And the best part? It’s all completely automated. You only need to do the work once in uploading your feed to ensure your ads always automatically update.
The timing of your ads is always a crucial factor. When it comes to Retargeting, you need to be able to move quickly, serving your users with relevant ads as soon as they leave your site.
Timing will also impact the content and messaging of your ads. Users have different mindsets during the day as they undertake different activities online. It’s up to you to understand how your users are feeling and alter the content and messaging of your ads to tap into this. This could be in line with the time of day, what the weather is doing, and even in accordance with political events, such as Brexit. Dynamic creative is the way to go.
Despite the ongoing uncertainty about Brexit, your business simply has to keep engaging with new and existing users in the most cost-effective and high-performing way. That means that whilst your competitors are cutting back and trimming budgets, with marketing spend usually the first to go, it’s crucial to continue investing in digital advertising to gain that competitive advantage.
Contact us today to learn more about optimising your current spend for increased performance.