Most businesses will have considered spending money on a digital advertising strategy at some point. Without digital advertising, you could be missing out on making key sales and increasing brand awareness with potential customers. Not all businesses want to pay for digital marketing, but for those who do, they must be getting your money’s worth. If you don't know what you're doing, your digital ad spend could end up being wasted... or even backfire. So, what should you look for to make sure your digital advertising is working for your business?
Combat Bad Ads
One of the biggest pitfalls when it comes to digital advertising is for the ads to become hijacked. This could be where your ad is placed on a publisher’s site – one relevant to your business to attract your key target audience – but misleading malicious ads end up taking over.
There are ways to prevent this from happening to your digital ads. Having someone place an ad should be a transparent process and one that you can ensure works to stretch each penny as far as it will go. One method of mitigating against this is by ensuring that the ads alongside yours are verified. Ad verification acts as a remedy by identifying bad ads and nixing them before they can cause issues alongside genuine ads. Publishers should therefore verify ads to prevent bad ones from being run alongside the ones you may be trying to place to make your digital money go further. If you are using a publisher to host your ad, you should enquire as to what they do to prevent these malicious ads.
Monitor Social Media Ad Response
You also need to monitor social media ads for comments, replies, and complaints. Nothing damages a social media advertisement like a barrage of negative comments, dislikes, angry faces, and negative reviews. While deleting or disabling these interactions is an option, most companies would rather opt to at least try to respond professionally and politely first. But just the fact that those negative sentiments are visible can really decrease momentum and effectiveness of ads. If it gets really bad and starts damaging your brand, you might just want to pull the ad.
This happens to all brands and businesses at some point, no matter how stellar their reputation or how well executed their ad is. While there are certainly trolls out there that just want to criticize everything and everyone, if this becomes a patter then you really need to take a look at your digital marketing strategy and overall company with honest eyes. Does something need changing?
Implement A Feedback Loop
One of the main reasons that people feel their ad money doesn’t go far enough is because they don’t check to see why it might not work. Sending an ad out there and waiting for results might make sense for the first few times, but after each ad campaign, the numbers need to be run. You should see how each ad performed, which will hopefully give you some pointers on how to make sure they perform better in future.
A/B testing could be a way around this to increase conversions. This is a way of sending similar ads out – with only one major difference – to see which ones did better. This helps isolate aspects of the ad that work and those which don’t. Feeding back after each ad to see whether it gained enough conversions and understanding how the ad could have been run better are critical steps.
Tread Carefully On Socials With Your Budget
Social media advertising may seem the best use of time and money. After all, it’s fairly easy to grasp and you can track metrics effectively. However, boosting and sponsoring posts across Facebook, for instance, can often just give you vanity metrics. You could have thousands seeing your brand’s message on the platform, but the click-throughs could only be in single digits.
Social is useful but only if it actually backs up the objective of the ad. If the ad objective is to increase sales, then more views across Facebook doesn’t necessarily always achieve this. Instead, the platforms and targeted SMM campaigns should be chosen with these objectives in mind. Social advertising is important and can be beneficial, but it doesn’t achieve every goal. Long-term brand awareness building and immediate ROI with sales are both beneficial, but the latter is more quantifiable and relevant to your digital ad spend budget.
Spend Smarter
Digital spend is often imperative – but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a variety of combinations for you to try to ensure that your money goes as far as possible. While you may have to spend money, you want to make sure that this money fulfils your digital marketing objectives.