When we first discussed this blog, our campaign manager was wary of sharing her secrets. Facebook Ad campaigns are a competitive business after all. You wouldn’t get far asking the Red Bull Formula One team for their engine specification if you worked for Mercedes, would you?
However, because we think there’s gold in the way we run our campaigns especially on low budgets, we persuaded her otherwise. Digital advertising has a reputation for demanding high minimum spends to get returns, but we know not everyone can commit big bucks. That’s why we have put the work into continually improving, reacting to platform changes more smoothly and creating better returns for our smaller business clients.
So, if you promise not to tell anyone, we will share Almond Marketing’s top five tips for achieving campaign success on a budget.
Draw your funnel
All businesses have a marketing funnel. It’s a blueprint for the series of steps customers take from being a cold to hot lead; from not knowing you through engaging with you to making a purchase for example. A good campaign will reel customers in at each stage while making it feel natural and organic to them.
Our campaign manager spends a huge amount of blood, sweat and occasionally tears drilling down into the detail of the top, middle and bottom of our clients’ funnels.
As a result, she times our campaigns to perfection and our client ads land just at the point where customers have questions that need answering or expectations they need fulfilling. This has a massive positive impact on the results.
Use your customer data
Who is engaging? Who is clicking? Who is buying? Who is not? A key task when it comes to PPC marketing is identifying customer attributes and patterns to re-use them. Digital ad campaigns, on Facebook particularly, make targeting ‘look-alikes’ easy saving time and money.
To build growth for our clients, our campaign manager downloads their customer and purchaser lists and uses them to create look-a-like audiences. Running parallel campaigns to them alongside existing customers is a great time-saving tip.
Don’t assume too much about demographics
PPC lets you test responses and collect data so it is possible to work with evidence rather than hunches about your customer base.
How often do you hear statements like the below?
“Only people over 25 will be able to afford our product”
“Our service appeals to women under 40”
“We appeal to urban city dwellers”
Or even the vague
“We’re chasing Generation Z”
The above are all examples of client assumptions and judgements we have challenged with real-world data. The result is often a double win – saving money by ending campaigns that miss the mark and making more money through finding revenue streams the client hadn’t previously considered.
Test, test and test again
Digital marketing’s ability to test campaigns quickly and easily is its great strength. You can run split campaigns to test your creative, messaging, products, landing pages and a range of other variables.
Our campaign manager revels in this rigorous testing of options and will launch parallel campaigns juggling target audience, ads and landing pages together. After seven days of testing, seven because that way we capture weekday and weekend behaviours, we can identify winning combinations and scale up their budgets while quietly pausing ones that miss the mark. This cycle of design, launch, test, pause or scale means growth is supported with minimum risk and wastage.
Take off is only as good as the landing
However good your sales campaign, return on investment will only be realised if any landing pages make engagement and, ultimately, purchasing easy. Landing pages that do not have a clear action for customers wanting to buy, present too many choices or are clumsy and frustrating will have a negative impact on conversion. There are many ways to optimise landing pages and having your digital campaign and web teams working in sync will help you avoid fumbling the ball at the last moment. Our campaign manager spends a lot of time optimising this final step for our clients.
Based on these top tips you should be better placed to implement digital ad campaigns on a budget. There is an art to getting it right, as well as a science. It’s about attitude too. How relentless are you in the pursuit of every last bit of revenue a campaign might deliver? How much testing is too much? We haven’t talked about retargeting audiences with a second, third or fourth campaign either.
Having a campaign manager like ours, who is fiercely committed and competitive, is a good first step. If you think we could help you deliver more return on ad spend (ROAS), drop us a line. We provide strategic and tactical help to all kinds of businesses, why not yours too?
