Introduction
Effective advertising frequently does more than just entertain; it also positions and convinces the target consumer of the brand's benefits.
For brand executives, this entails being explicit about the value the product provides as well as explaining why customers should believe the product will deliver the benefit.
Make sure your advertising is consistent with your brand identity and properly communicates your message.
High-quality images improve the legitimacy of your offer and increase consumer trust.
Table of Contents
1. Why do Companies Need a Digital Advertising Agency?
A growing number of business owners are creating their accounts to start promoting themselves thanks to free and simple access to digital marketing tools like Google AdWords and Google Analytics.
Although everyone has access to these technologies, it still takes time to learn how to evaluate the appropriate data and fully comprehend your advertising efforts.
As a result, many unskilled marketers create their commercials with incorrect expectations or mindsets, which leads to expensive mistakes.
That is the reason why it can be more helpful to hire a digital advertising company to do the heavy lifting for you rather than learn everything from scratch.
Here are the best practices that agencies use to grow your business.
2. Audience Layering
In Google Analytics you can create audience segments, which are categories of people based on demographics, lifestyle, interests/behavior, and more.
Layering audiences is the method for analyzing multiple groups at the same time by creating a filter in which only people who meet these criteria are eligible to see these ads.
This way you can target niche communities and create hyper-focused ads for them.
As an example, you want to promote a large-scale flea market where they sell second-hand sports equipment.
You can target your display ads according to the interests of your target audience; in this case, you select sport-enthuses people as your first audience.
Additionally, you want to narrow your focus down to users whose recent purchase intention includes second-hand items.
By putting this audience on top of the first one, you focus on an audience who is more likely to be interested in going to this flea market.
Audience Layering: Mistakes to avoid
Narrowing down too much
However, don’t drop the size of your potential clients to less than 1000 people.
If you limit your target audience too much you will struggle to find enough people who see your ad and click on it.
For example, if you are a luxurious furniture store you can add an audience whose recent purchase intent includes luxurious items.
On top of that, you can target people whose household income is in the top 30% to attract people who can afford your items.
Depending on where your store is located there might not be many people that fall under the second category.
In this case, you can either increase the percentage to the top 50% of household incomes or increase the distance around your location to reach potentially more people from your target audience.
Bidding too much on low-value audiences
Many businesses tend to overspend on Google Ads campaigns. They misjudge how much a new customer might spend on them vs how much they have to spend for the corresponding keywords that they have to target to attract these clients.
As an example, a four-star resort would not spend the same amount on a keyword that is targeted to attract families compared to couples who want to go on a honeymoon trip.
The family with two children just wants the standard package with all-inclusive service, compared to the couple who wants the best service and additional packages to experience an unforgettable honeymoon.
The latter group of customers brings you much more money than the family who are looking for the best deal for their summer holidays.
Therefore, you should allocate more budget to attract the more valuable customer segment with higher returns.
3. Getting Additional Insights from Conversions
Conversions in Google Analytics are customer behavior goals that you want to track.
This can range from measuring every time someone fills out a subscription form for a newsletter or starts a free trial to test out your product.
Most people who start working with Google Analytics often forget or shy away from setting up conversion goals.
The mistake here is that they might think that getting a lot of traffic to their website is the most important metric but this concept could not be further from reality.
Having more impressions or clicks doesn’t automatically mean that your website gets the right leads.
If people leave your website right away after they arrive on it, it means that they are not the right users you want to attract.
This means there is a disconnect between the advertisement and the website/landing page.
Digital advertising companies are experts when it comes to creating online ads that accurately reflect the content of your website.
Digital media advertising is all about bringing the right people to the right websites/landing pages.
What is the industry benchmark for competitive conversion rates? Looking over all industries, the average landing page conversion rate is 2.35%.
You should aim to have a 3-5% conversion rate to have a solid number of people who potentially bring you sales.
It is all about understanding the search intention of your customers and how they browse the internet to find specific solutions for their problems.
What many people don’t know is that digital advertising companies can replace or at least complement your sales team.
4. Combining Marketing and Sales Data
Digital media advertising cannot only target the top of the customer funnel but also prompt sales.
In the beginning, advertising was mainly used to raise awareness and it was highly complicated if not impossible to see the results it had on increasing purchases.
However, with the advent of modern technology, digital advertising companies could track every movement users made on the internet.
This gives us a better understanding of how effective online ads are at promoting action that leads to purchase intentions.
With a CRM platform (Customer relationship management) like Salesforce, ad agencies can connect campaign data with sales data to gain new insights about the whole customer journey.
This allows businesses to see if their campaigns bring in enough sales to justify their ad spend.
For example, when looking only at marketing metrics you can see how many users clicked from your ad to your website as well as which actions they performed.
When connecting your sales data with your marketing data, however, you can gain a better understanding on which campaigns brought the highest revenue.
For example, imagine you spend a lot on one of your campaigns but it doesn’t bring in many clicks to your website.
However, when you start looking at the high ROAS (Return on ad spend) of that campaign, it becomes clear that you should continue with it.
Opposite to the example above are the allegedly successful campaigns that don't bring in any sales in the end.
Analyzing the right KPIs beforehand will prevent you from overspending on an inefficient ad campaign.
5. Sales Funnel Experts
The marketing funnel is a tool that helps digital advertising companies create strategies around different customer stages.
These stages describe your consumers from the time they first hear about your brand to the moment when they first purchase from you.
At the top of the funnel (ToFu), the goal of your ads is to raise awareness about your business to let them know that you exist.
Agencies develop material that is directly targeted towards their needs as these consumers are not yet ready to buy something.
The middle of the funnel (MoFu) displays the customer segment that has already heard your name but needs more information about your product and brand to be convinced.
People in this stage already have an idea for what they want to find and they weigh the different options in the market.
The bottom of the funnel (BoFu) shows the customer segment that is ready to buy from you or who are already loyal customers of your brand.
Each funnel stage requires a different approach to address that specific customer segment.
Digital advertising companies know exactly how to create different advertising materials for each customer stage.
6. List the Most Valuable Keywords for Your Business
It can be very difficult to distinguish which keywords are relevant for your brand to advertise and which ones are just a waste of money.
This concept ties back to the customer funnel and the stage that your business prioritizes at the moment.
Experienced marketers don’t put all their money on one or two customer segments, they distribute it more evenly throughout every funnel phase.
This makes sense as you need all components from traffic, and subsequent conversions to completing sales for a complete cycle.
When it comes to keywords, it is often only a dozen that bring in the most valuable traffic to your website.
Tools like Google Ads and Google Analytics can be very overwhelming for beginners.
Other people who are not marketers can get confused with the high number of metrics that can be measured even though many of them are not relevant to your business.
Depending on what you want, you can try different options to learn the impact that certain settings have on your ad campaigns.
Conclusion
Working with a digital advertising company can be a cost and time-saving alternative.
Digital agencies can alleviate businesses from technical and time-intensive tasks while providing them with clear insights thus leaving the clients to do what they do best.
Digital media advertising is only getting more competitive with time so the safe approach for businesses would be to focus on the activities related to their core and leave the digital advertising companies to develop the promotion for them.