Deliver Successful Digital Advertising Campaigns
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain what makes a digital advertising campaign successful.
- List three steps for delivering effective digital advertising campaigns.
What Makes a Digital Advertising Campaign Successful?
Digital advertising gives marketers the perfect opportunity to reach customers. Through digital ads, marketers can deliver personalized messages to any individual, on any device, at any time. However, personalized, scalable digital advertising campaigns are easier said than done, especially now that the world of digital ads is noisier than ever.
To deliver exceptional digital advertising campaigns, marketers need to take the time to understand their audiences, produce relevant messages, and monitor their media spend. These may sound like big tasks, but every marketer has the capacity to accomplish them using one powerful tool: data.
How can you use your data to power digital ad campaigns? It all starts with these three steps.
Three Steps for Delivering Effective Digital Ad Campaigns
- Activate your first-party data.
- Optimize advertising spend.
- Grow your data.
Step 1: Activate Your First-Party Data
A compelling digital ad is one that feels organic and relevant. Such ads are highly personalized and often the result of marketers knowing exactly whom they’re targeting. But how can you learn important details about your audience in a world of data privacy?
The answer lies in first-party data. First-party data refers to information usually acquired from customers throughout the purchase journey, including names, purchase information, general engagement, and email addresses. This data is extremely valuable. It can help segment your audience, for one thing. It also gives insight into your audience’s preferred digital channels.
Do your customers spend a lot of time on Instagram? Are they regular readers of The New York Times? Do most of your customers seem to buy your products using mobile devices? Answers to such questions can help you reach the right customers using data you already have.
Step 2: Optimize Advertising Spend
Once you’ve harnessed what you already know about your customers, it’s time to optimize your campaigns. Rather than focusing on improving digital ad campaigns as a whole—which can feel overwhelming—you can prioritize one small thing: your budget. It’s time to reduce financial waste as much as possible.
Once again, data comes to the rescue. Minimize your media spend by thinking about who you shouldn’t be targeting. You heard that right. Let’s say you see a snazzy jacket in an Instagram ad and end up purchasing that jacket on the company’s website. The next day, you’re scrolling through your Instagram feed and you see the same ad for the same jacket. That company is not wisely allocating its media spend! Given that you’ve already purchased the jacket, the return on investment (ROI) of that ad is now minimal.
Use your data to investigate segments of your audience who are not a good fit for specific digital ads. This can dramatically optimize your advertising spend. It can also ensure that you’re investing in the most promising recipients of those messages you’ve worked so hard to craft.
Step 3: Grow Your Data
Businesses can increase ROI by increasing customer conversions. To increase conversions, you need to increase your customer base, and many marketers use acquisition campaigns to do just that.
So, who should you target with an acquisition campaign? Don’t forget about that powerful data you already have! Take a moment to consider your existing customers. Who are your best customers? Who keeps coming back for more? Answering these questions allows you to create what’s called a lookalike audience—a group of customers with similar demographics, attributes, and behaviors to your best customers.
Seek out prospects within this lookalike audience to reduce cost per acquisition and obtain more valuable first-party data. You can then use that new data to start the cycle over again.
Make the Most of Your Data
To create scalable, powerful digital advertising campaigns, it all comes down to data. Marketers can utilize first-party data to learn more about their audience, optimize their advertising spend, and acquire new customers. When you put your data to work, you boost your odds of delivering effective digital ads.