5 Steps Of A Successful Ad Campaign

5 Steps Of A Successful Ad Campaign

As we have previously blogged about how today’s connected society relies on their mobile smartphones, agencies should be consulting with your clients on developing a mobile marketing strategy that not only builds awareness but drives customers into their establishments such as restaurants, salons, stores, etc. or eCommerce websites.

Step 1: Establishing Key Performance Indicators

When you begin to lay the foundation for any advertising campaign, understanding the objective(s), commonly known as KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), is critical to establishing goals.

I am a fond of reminding clients that as marketers we are in the expectation business.  If we can’t ground our client’s expectations in reality—then why would we set ourselves up for failure?  Determining your objectives can be multi-faceted and include:

• To raise brand awareness
• To increase sales
• To drive web traffic
• To drive foot traffic to a physical store or eCommerce site
• To promote a special offer or sale

Step 2: Defining Your Target Audience

Having a clear understanding of who your customers are, what their likes and dislikes are, the type of lifestyles they embrace and key demographics such age, gender, location, income, education, etc. are all important elements to defining a target audience.  Here are some key points you may want to consider when targeting your audiences:

• Contextual relevance is a very cost-effective way of appealing to their targeted audience because it is topic-focused, where ads are matched to keywords extracted from content.
• 36% of users say they might actually purchase something when they receive tailored messages versus being bombarded by irrelevant ads.
• 4 in 5 consumers want search ads to be customized to their city, zip code or immediate surroundings. Advertising your service-based business in a geography that you don’t serve is pointless.
• Ask yourself who needs your particular product or service that you are trying to market.  A mobile dog grooming business would only be wasting money targeting non-dog owners and wasting unwanted ad spend.

Step 3: Developing Your Ad Campaign

Now that you have successfully built a consensus with your clients as to what the ad campaign’s goals are and helped them determine who their target audience is, the next step is to now you have to determine what type of ads are needed.

Do you recommend a short video or interesting animation?

Consider these key points worthy of discussion:

• Is your communication strategy aligned with campaign’s goals and KPIs?
• Rich media ads are not only cheaper to create but are highly effective.
• What is the best medium to reach your target audience?  For example, electing a gamification ad campaign for interstitial mobile ads promoting financial planning services may not be ideal medium.
• A campaign’s message is very important.  From the Call-To-Action copy to imagery and animation can impact the success of your campaign.
• Running A/B test campaigns allows marketers to see which ads resonate stronger with your audience.
• What is your client’s campaign budget? If the campaign’s goals are to drive foot traffic to a physical establishment, remember premium attribution comes with a higher CPM (Cost Per Thousand) price tag.
• Factors that impact budgets include the cost to create the ads, the type of ad inventory purchased, the management fee to run the campaign if you elect to offer managed services as well as the length of the campaign or ad flight as it is known.

Step 4: Determining How Long Your Campaign Runs

A “flight” is marketing parlance that defines how long your campaign runs.

Giving yourself a long-enough runway to be successful is important and goes back establishing expectations with your client.  As we have previously wrote about, grounding your clients’ expectations in reality is key to setting up your agency up for success.

The odds of exceeding your client’s ad campaign expectations are going to be a lot harder if their budget only allows for a 30-day flight.  Usually we recommend a minimum of 90-day campaigns are a good starting point to set both parties up for success.  Longer flight times allow your ad traffickers the ability to analyze and optimize the campaign, and determine which A/B test campaign is performing and which is not, to make the appropriate adjustments.

Step 5: Designing Your Mobile Ads

Depending upon the length of your campaign, as marketers, we need to provide creative that has multiple sizes as is the case of banner ads, as well as ads that explore animations as well as different content that progresses throughout the campaign, telling a narrative to your story. By having multiple ads not only allows for A/B testing—which is essential, but also eliminates ad fatigue.

It is not uncommon for targeted audiences to receive dozens of impressions before they take action and begin to enter your sales funnel. Having a supply of different ads for your campaign reduces fatigue and improves telling your brand story.

Designing and developing complimentary imagery and copy that aligns with your brand story, supports your campaign’s objectives is critical to your campaign’s success. Listed below are some best practices to consider:

• Hi-res images are a must to capture the attention of mobile users to drive impressions for more clicks. The selection of imagery should reflect the lifestyle and demographics of your target audience.
• Concise and compelling content should compliment your client’s brand message—but creative enough to capture mobile users’ attention.
• Clear call-to-action (CTA) such as tap to view and oversized buttons designed for mobile phones allows your target audience to have a better experiential interaction.
• Mobile ads typically drive the recipients to a landing page.  Having well-designed landing pages are important to driving conversions. Like the mobile ads that drove the user to the landing page, it too should have concise call-to-action is key to advancing the prospect down the buyer’s journey.  Consider running different A/B tests of different landing pages to test and optimize the results of your campaign.
• Offer discounts and promotions to drive consumer secondary actions such as coupons to redeem incentivizing them to purchase your product or serve.

Bottom Line

Mobile ad campaigns can be a very powerful method to reach new customers, build brand awareness and drive sales.  Executed properly it can create a very personal interaction, aligning your brand with new audiences.  Be sure to check out our previous blog entitled Mobile Advertising 101 to explore the right ad format to use.

Interested in learning more?

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