How To Make Your Advertising Dollars Go Further

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The way a company interacts with its customers is constantly changing and evolving. Advertisers often wonder how to use their budgets more effectively. A marketing budget is more than just a financial plan. You should also know which effective advertising methods you should invest your money in.

According to Statista, paid social ad spend on social networks in the US surpassed 40 billion dollars (US) in 2020. Ad spending in the social media advertising segment shows an annual growth rate (CAGR 2021-2025) of 10.55%, resulting in a projected market volume of nearly 230 billion dollars by 2025.

Whether it’s social media advertising or print advertising, here are 7 ways you can make sure your advertising dollars go further.

Develop a Strategy That Works

The size of your budget doesn’t matter as much if you don’t have the strategy behind it. You can have six figures dedicated to a campaign, but without a strategy to back it up, you’re essentially wasting time and money. Know where you are placing your ads the plan around them. Why are you there? Who are you targeting? How can you get optimal exposure? Your strategy for how you execute your advertising will help you deliver your message while staying on target with your goals and objectives.

Narrow Your Focus

No matter what your advertising budget is, if you aren’t reaching your target audience, the campaign won’t work. No way around it. The narrower the audience focus for your campaign, the greater the response. It might seem counterintuitive to lessen the reach of your campaign, but this allows you to more effectively reach your target audience, closing the gap between buyers and non-buyers, while saving you money. Identifying and narrowing your target reach can help stretch your budget and create more loyal customers.

Allow Flexibility In Budget

You should never “Set it and Forget it” when it comes to placing your digital ads. Remember, you can modify your budget when necessary. Your budget should be prepared to go with any changes that may arise from consumer behavior to the seasonality of shopping habits to a shift in trends. Flexibility enables you to keep your budget in check and balanced. A good tip is to create a minimum ad spend amount but allow the opportunity to increase the spend if your cash flow allows it.

Stay Local

When you are bidding on advertising placements, you’ll be competing on a local level, even with the national brands. Focus on how to reach your local, hyper-targeted audience and expand from there. Markets vary region to region, state to state, and sometimes even town to town. Understanding your local market better than the national brands will help with the messaging, targeting options, media placements, and more resulting in higher consumer engagement.

Meet Your Customers Where They Are 

It doesn’t matter how big your budget is if you’re spending it in the wrong places. One of the biggest mistakes we’ve seen is when brands are advertising in places that their consumers are not. If you know who you targeting, you should know where they spend their time. Whether they are online a lot via desktop or their mobile devices or if they turn on their TV when they get home and don’t turn it off until they go to bed, knowing where your target audience is spending their time allows you to know where, when and how to reach them.

Plan Early

It takes time and effort to set goals and pave the route to achieve them. So, start planning your budget 4-6 months before you start your fiscal year. This step ensures that you have ample time to align your marketing budget with your strategy. Therefore, you’ll be able to start your campaigns with confidence.

Evaluate and Adjust

Keep track of your campaign’s return on investment by setting monthly and/or quarterly analyses. The analysis should include touchpoints that assess your budget. Track your budget. For example, if the money you allocated for a particular strategy may not be getting the desirable ROI you were looking for, don’t hesitate to give it to another advertising channel. Just like being flexible in your advertising budget, but flexible in your advertising placements. Continue what works and adjust what doesn’t.

Whether your a small business or a national brand, be cautious of where your dollars are being spent. It’s more important now more than ever for advertisers to think outside the box and stretch their advertising spend as far as it can go. If you have questions on how you can make advertising work for you, contact us today.

2021 Holiday Marketing Guide

2021 Holiday Marketing Guide

For many businesses, the holiday season is their busiest. The most successful holiday campaigns you see and love begin their planning stages as early as summer or fall. There’s no holiday magic when it comes to successful campaigns, it’s all about strategizing and planning. Whether it’s freshening up your landing pages, creating brand awareness, finding others ways to target new customers and everything in between, the list of tasks seems endless for small businesses.

As the holidays approach, here are things you need to consider for your brand and campaign:

Audit previous holiday marketing campaigns

No how things change from year to year, you can still learn and prepare from past success. Look back at statistics from previous years to understand where you were successful and where you could use some improvements. Analyzing your previous strategies and campaigns will help you avoid making similar mistakes.

Identify holiday strategies that make sense to your audience

No holiday marketing efforts are created equal. Definitely don’t copy competitors’ strategies. The key to a successful holiday marketing campaign lies in knowing your target audience. If you are targeting younger customers, like Gen Z or Millennials, consider utilizing platforms like TikTok and Snapchat. If you have a brick-and-mortar location, get creative with gift ideas to draw your customers in.

Keep things simple

It can be easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of holiday planning. However, it’s better in the long run to start small with your holiday campaigns. Even larger retailers who have been around for decades often refer back to the basics during the holidays. The holiday season is not a good time to try new things to attract customers. Think about the amount of bandwidth your team has and the amount of support your operations will have during the holidays.

Be prepared for the competition

With so many promotions around the holiday shopping season starting as early as this month, marketing is as important as ever to draw customers to your business. Make sure your campaigns help you stand out from the crowd and clearly communicate the benefits of shopping with you over your any other business.

Create a real reason to buy

The holiday season is known for discounts that can only be found once a year. When creating your holiday marketing plans, make sure you’re clearly incentivizing shoppers to visit your store. The holiday season isn’t just about creating revenue, it’s also about establishing relationships with customers who will hopefully return to purchase your products in the off-season. Make sure that customer retention is top of mind during any marketing decision you make for the holidays.

Don’t forget about your existing customers

A lot of businesses are always focused on attracting new customers, that they forget about the ones they already have. Chances are that the visitors who come to your website during the holidays will be a healthy mix of new and returning customers. The pathway to purchase for a repeat customer looks very different than a new customer, so make considerations for both while building out your marketing and website materials.

Use video marketing

Because of COVID-19, people are consuming as much as four times more online video than they were prior to the pandemic. Think about ways to incorporate video into your holiday marketing materials. Create video advertisements for tv, streaming services and your social media networks. You can also utilize video for organic content that you can share on your website, emails and social media channels. It’s a great way to dive deeper into your product or service to make it an easier buying journey for your customer.

Keep your website up to date

Your website is the face of your company, even on any other day of the year. It’s where people go to learn more about you, familiarize themselves with your brand and to potentially purchase your products or services. Make sure your website is user friendly, updated with the holiday campaign, and ready for the traffic and activity. Ensuring your website has a smooth user experience for mobile and desktop will help prevent your business from losing sales.

Whether you’re a large company or a small business, one of the most common mistakes brands make during the holidays is late planning. Start planning now, optimize your content, keep your customers in mind, and don’t forget about establishing lifetime value with your brand long after the holidays. If you are stumped with planning your holiday campaign, reach out to us today!

YouTube Launches Channel Memberships, Merchandise and Premieres | Digital Scoop 026

YouTube Goes After Instagram

YouTube creators are gaining three major new tools to generate revenue from their videos outside of traditional advertising, as well as those that will help them better engage their fans. This comes after Instagram’s launch of IGTV, so clearly this is a rebuttal since IGTV offers similar features.

This new features include rollout of channel memberships, merchandising, and the launch of Premieres. 

Memberships

Creators with 100,000 subscribers or more, are over 18 and members of the YouTube Partner Program qualify for this feature. For $4.99 per month, this feature will allow subscribers to gain access to members-only posts in the Community tab where creators can share custom perks, like access to an exclusive videos, news, announcements, and more. YouTube says it will vet these perks manually, to ensure they meet YouTube’s guidelines and are something the creator can actually deliver. The perks can be almost anything the creator wants to offer, within YouTube’s guidelines.

Merchandise

In addition to memberships, creators will also be able to sell to fans directly. The feature will show pictures of creators’ merchandise in a display under their videos. This tool is available to all channels in the U.S. with over 10,000 subscribers. This greatly increases the visibility of YouTubers’ branded gear on the platform. Previously, creators could only paste a link with no options to upload images of their merchandise in their video descriptions. This has the opportunity to increase sales by getting more clicks to products. Previously, people had to click “show more” to see the full description, creating an extra step in the process.

Premieres

Finally, YouTubers can use a new feature called “Premieres” that creates a landing page they can promote ahead of a video’s release. This page will also have a chat feature, like Live videos do, which means creators can use Super Chat and take advantage of Channel Membership perks even if they aren’t doing live content.

The videos are uploaded in the same interface on YouTube, so there’s no new workflow to learn beyond toggling the “Premiere” switch on. Creators can also join in the chats as the video goes live to engage with their fans around this pre-recorded content, as well as comment on the videos before they start. When the Premiere wraps, it’s posted as a regular video on the site (without the two-minute countdown video YouTube adds).

What’s next?

YouTube said its version of Stories will arrive for all eligible creators with more than 10,000 subscribers later this year as well. The announcements come at a critical time for YouTube, as Facebook and Instagram are trying to woo creators away to their platforms and video hubs with unique features of its own.

 

Facebook Video Monetization And Promotion Tools | Digital Scoop 023

Facebook has released a new set of monetization options and best practices for video creators as it seeks to build interest in its Watch platform.

 

The new monetization options include:

  1. Pre-Roll Ads
  2. Preview Trailer
  3. Ad Auto Break Insertions
  4. Pre-Publish Brand Safety Check

Facebook Removing Powerful Ad Targeting Options | Digital Scoop 018

Facebook is removing powerful ad targeting options from third parties called Partner Categories. Here are three advertising tips you can use.