WE WE MUST KNOW TO WIN
WHAT ARE THE CAMPAIGN GOALS?
The goals will determine so much with the direction of the ad:
-The platform we use
-The messaging of the ad (copy)
-The offer we are making
-The creative (graphic/video/etc)
Most people will simply say, "To make more money" but we have to be much more specific. If the goal is to generate leads, do we want to optimize for calls or form leads? How much info do we want to collect (the more info we ask the more qualified the lead, but less people that are willing to fill out the form).
If the goal is brand awareness, we are optimize for impressions/views/web views/etc. This would be part of a longer term strategy for for companies that have high value targets with longer sales cycles.
WHAT IS THE BUDGET?
Ads can be run on virtually any budget, however larger budgets can provide:
-More creative options (production quality)
-Distribute the funds over multiple platforms
-Longer runways for for data and ad efficiency optimizations
-Improved Tools like more advanced marketing automation
-Prioirty placements (platforms favor larger budget ad campaigns)
If the budget is small, we have to start with a lot of assumptions and have less margin for error and amendments. Again, any ad spend can be viable, however we recommend spending as much as you're comfortable with and no less.
WHO ARE YOUR CLIENTS?
Arguably the most impactful thing an ad can do to improve its spend efficiency (lower cost per lead) is TARGET THE RIGHT AUDIENCE. By "Right Audience" we are talking about
the individuals most likely to help us achieve our campaign goals. We can target people that love our solution, but cannot afford it (capacity issue). We can target people that love our solution, but don't perceive a value for it.
OR THOSE THAT CAN BOTH AFFORD THE SERVICE/PRODUCT AND CAN PAY (CAPACITY). The latter is the obvious target audience.
This process is called SEGMENTATION (or Consumer Profiling), and. we often believe as busienss-owners that we have our "perfect client" dialed-in. But it turns out that we aren't always great at this becuase we have cognative bias and this can distort perception. We also don't always have access to pertinent data to give us an unbiased world view of our truly best clients.
THE GOOD NEWS IS, THERE ARE TOOLS THAT CAN HELP US UNDERSTAND WHO OUR PERFECT CLIENTS ARE OVER TIME USING BIG DATA (AI).
There are a number of things we can do to properly segment our audience:
1) USE OUR OWN HISTORICAL DATA: We can analyze our biggest volume clients, largest majority of buyers, shortest sales cycle buyers, highest margin clients and compare that to audiences of the opposite (smallest margin clients, longest sales cycle clients, etc)
2) WE CAN USE AI. For example, Facebook allows marketers to upload an email list of your entire client database (more clients the better this works) and it will analyze those buyers' profiles agains millions of points of data to correlate them and find out what they have most in common. They then create a "Lookalike" audience of prospective buyers on their platform that most closely resemble the qualities of our existing buyers.
3) WE EXPERIMENT: Sometimes we don't have access to historical data so we have to make some initial assumptions about our target psychographic/demographic and run A/B split tests against that hypothesis. We can control for ad messaging while we evaluate which segment gives us the best conversion rates.
