How To Setup And Optimize Your Digital Marketing Campaigns For Best Performance

The strategies I will be sharing here can be used not only on NG Adverts but also on any other ad network like Adwords, Facebook, Instagram and the likes.

You see, knowing how to target your ads on any ad network is very critical to help you maximize every dime you spend. NG Adverts has over the years developed an array of tools to help you target the right audience. Advertising is effective when the right message is presented before the right audience at the right time; so do well to execute the list below to increase your ROI.

1. Create A Buyer Persona

This is the most important aspect of your ad campaign which will greatly determine the success of your campaign.

So what is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional character created to represent a type of user that will use a product, website, service etc. Simply put, a buyer persona helps you define your target market or audience.

In creating your buyer persona, critical questions like:

• The demography (age, gender, race, marital status, occupation, level of education, annual income etc)
• How they spend their day on the average?
• What are their pain points?
• What are you going to help them solve?
• What do they value most?
• What are their goals?
• Where do they go for information?
• What experience are they looking for when seeking out your products or services?
• What are their most common objections to your product or service? In other words, why won’t they buy from you or subscribe to your service?

…need to be clearly answered so that you have a good understanding about who you are trying to market to.

The answers you get from these questions will guide you in creating your ad descriptive or copy, as it will help address the pain points of your prospect.

Here’s an example; in which of these locations will soft drink sell faster –  in traffic or in a shop in the street?

Your guess is as good as mine – in traffic.

…why?

People are confined to the vehicle they are in at that moment and want to easily quench their thirst. The vendor that provides this solution in traffic clearly understands the problem s/he is going to solve and knows that the people stuck in traffic are most likely to be quite interested in his or her product.

To summarize this point, you must know who your ideal customer is.

…let me leave this here.

2. Create A Sales Funnel

Every successful marketing campaign is a product of a carefully thought-out process; it is not one that is left to chance. I often see advertisers just run their ads and expect magic to happen.

…well, effective marketing requires more than that.

If you really want to increase the conversion rate of your marketing campaigns, you must have a Sales Funnel in place.

So what’s a sales funnel?

Here’s how Crazy Egg defines it:

…the path website visitors take on the way to buying your product or service.

When setting up your marketing campaign, you need to deliberately create a path your prospect will follow from his/her first contact with your ad to the point of purchasing your product.

This entails having a system in place where you will constantly engage your prospects; educating them about how your product or service can solve their problem.

Have you considered that not everyone who gets to your landing page will purchase your product or subscribe to your service immediately? How do you intend to deal with that? Do you have re-targeting ads in place that will follow up your prospects around the web till they purchase your product?

How do you intend to re-engage customers who successfully purchase your product?

Do you have a plan in place to initiate repeat business from customers who have bought from you or wouldn’t you want repeat business from your customers?

These are things you clearly need to factor and a good sales funnel system can help you put these in place.

As an extra resource, you can go through this simple guide from Mirasee on Sales Funnel Stages that gives an in-depth explanation on Sales Funnels and the different stages.

3. Create The Right Message or Descriptive

Let’s face it, there’s a lot of distraction on an average page on the web and so, the primary goal of your banner ad descriptive should be to get the attention of your prospects at a glance such that they will be willing to click on your ad to get more info on your offer.

In drafting your message, you have got to learn to think like your prospect. So ask yourself, what should I say to get the attention of my prospects? You will want to create a message that tells them you have a solution to their challenge. Your message should tell them that you have got what they have been searching for.

Remember, this is not something you will want to do in a rush. So you’ve got to take a while and put down as many ad descriptives as you can.

An example of a text ad descriptive for someone in the clearing and forwarding industry can be:

Example 1

Title: Save yourself of Customs wahala

Ad Description: Clear your goods easily and get it delivered within 24hrs. Start NOW!

Url: www.clearingagent.com.ng

This second example can be used by the web hosting industry.

Example 2

Title: Cheap Web Hosting

Ad Description: Get Free Domain. 100Gb Fast SSD Storage. Unlimited bandwidth and MySQL databases. Order NOW!

Url: www.globeresellers.net

Did you notice that the 2 ad examples above have a Call-To-Action (CTA). People are more likely to click on your ads if you add a CTA in the descriptive.

4. Design Your Ads

Once you are done crafting your message, you have got to make it appealing to the eye by getting a good design. So you will use all the text you have drafted above as the content of your banner design.

If you are feeling adventurous, you can use a free service like www.canva.com or www.bannersnack.com to design your ad banner. However, if you don’t have the time, get a graphics designer to do this for you. Let your graphics designer know:

a. that you intend to use these banners online and so he should give you the soft copy; you don’t have to print it on paper.

b. that your banners should be designed according to the following dimensions – 300 x 250pixels, 728 x 90pixels, 320 x 100pixels, 160 x 600pixels and 300 x 600pixels

c. that the banners should not weigh more than 100kb

If you will want our in-house graphic designers to design your banner(s) for you, contact us.

Please Note: Also depending on the nature of your campaign, you may not need to design your banners to look like you’re obviously advertising something; as your ads will elude online users who have been affected by banner blindness. The key to resolving this is to design your ads to look just like a thumbnail article on websites. Deploying Native Ads will help you get better results in this regard.

Customers who subscribe to any of our Premium Plans take advantage of our years of experience in Digital Marketing in knowing how to craft attention grabbing ads that work.

5. Run A/B Tests On Your Ads

One interesting thing about running your ads online is that you can easily make adjustments to your ad and have the changes effected in split seconds. One rule of thumb is to always test your ads along different parameters.

Running A/B Tests on your ads helps you to know what works and which ads to run more. You can run A/B tests based on little or major variations in your ad descriptive for instance, if you want to actually test if ads with CTAs have better Click-Through-Rates (CTR) just as we discussed above.

So an example of an A/B test are the ads below:

Example 1

Title: Save yourself of Customs wahala

Ad Description: Clear your goods easily and get it delivered within 24hrs. Start NOW!

Url: clearingagent.com.ng

Example 2

Title: Save yourself of Customs wahala

Ad Description: Clear your goods easily and get it delivered within 24hrs.

Url: clearingagent.com.ng

Notice from the 2 ads that one has a CTA and the other doesn’t. You can have these ads run for a while (e.g. a week or a month) and then check the CTR of each of the ads. The one with the higher CTR is obviously performing better than the other with a lower CTR.

You can also run A/B tests using different targeting options. In other words, you can use the same ad descriptive but different targeting parameters. For instance, you can target the same ad separately to run on Mobile and on Desktop devices to see which gets better CTR.

6. Setup Your Targeting

Proper targeting of ads is quite crucial to cutting down your costs. As you may well know, ads placed on NG Adverts will be seen by anyone around the world if it is not targeted to any specific country. So be sure to at least set your country targeting to the locations you want to get clicks/visits from.

If you are servicing clients only in Nigeria, set your ads to only display to visitors from Nigeria. If you want to further narrow down and have your ads to only display to people in Abuja only, use the City targeting option to do just that.

7. Use The Suggested Click Value

Our Real Time Bidding engine was designed to display ads more from Advertisers who have set higher ad spend daily budgets and Cost Per Click (CPC) rates. So if you want your ads displayed more frequently across our network of publisher sites, use the Suggested Click Value which is automatically set by our artificial intelligence system.

If you see a high Suggested Click Value rate, it means that the category and the ad block size(e.g. 300x250px) you are targeting is quite competitive; so you’ve got to be willing to spend a bit more than other advertisers to have your ads displayed more frequently than others.

8. Analyze Your Stats Periodically

Just as I shared in my post – How Online Advertising Can Benefit Your Business, one of the benefits of running your ads online is that it is fast and trackable. Analyzing your ad performance will help you know what is working and what is not; so it’s now easy for you to make quick adjustments and cut down costs in the long run.

If you run A/B test ads, it only makes perfect sense to go through the stats on your dashboard and analyze the data for better ad campaign performance subsequently.

In conclusion, a whole lot goes into creating a successful ad campaign. If you want to make the most of your online advertising and cut down costs in the long run, you must:

1. Craft the right message
2. Set the right targeting
3. Test your ads
4. Analyze the data you get from it.
5. Boost the winning ads

We know that business owners are faced with the challenge of managing other aspects of their business and that’s why we have created Premium Plans to provide a robust Digital Marketing and pocket friendly subscription that will help any business consistently reach their target audience without having to deal with the technicalities outlined in this post.

All the same, if you are feeling adventurous enough and have spare time to take on this critical aspect of growing your business, just Sign Up or log into your NG Adverts account to get your hands dirty.

How have you been optimizing your Digital Marketing campaigns? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below.