Go ahead and do a Google search right now for “digital ad campaigns” and see what happens. You’ll be inundated with pages and pages of articles, all claiming to be the best tools, the greatest strategies, and the latest ad trends. There are almost as many pieces of advice out there as you have potential customers in your whole audience pool.
So, how is a small or medium-sized business like yours supposed to make sense of what’s “best” when there are so many variations to consider?
You’re in luck for two reasons.
- We have decades of advertising, marketing, and content experience.
- We’ve put together an ultimate guide you can actually apply to your business for real-life results.
Keep this ultimate guide on hand as you explore digital ad campaigns for your business! Of all the nuggets of advice out there, these insights, tips, and tools continue to be the most efficient, productive, and results-driven.
Stop Searching and Start Goal-Setting
Take a break from your research of digital marketing tools and strategies and look inward first. Start by taking stock of your company’s unique position right now, your core offering, your target audience, and your results so far. Use past and present successes and failures to guide you. Then carve out a series of S.M.A.R.T. goals – like actual results you’d like to achieve with every ad dollar you spend.
S.M.A.R.T. Goals Aren’t Cliche
There’s an acronym for everything when it comes to marketing. And while you don’t have to chase all of them, it is still a good idea to create SMART goals. As you conduct an internal audit of your current strategies, methods, budget, and results, start creating a wishlist of what you hope to achieve with your new plan. Let the wishlist be crude and creative in the moment, too. No need to polish or perfect goals yet. Just get the authentic objectives out and define the wins for any new marketing strategy you execute. And when you feel you’ve completed your list, go through all the ideas and hopeful aspirations, and keep only those that are S.M.A.R.T.:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-Bound
Develop Realistic Buyer Personas and Pick One
Once you’ve gotten REAL about your current positioning and your SMART goals, you can focus on getting in-depth about your target audience. Review your past and current clients to identify buyer persona trends. Look at demographics, employment, region, seasonal buying trends, habits, and preferences. Create as many personas as you need to for the best results. And once you have a roster of Teds, Kathys, and Marvins, you can pick one (at a time) to create a super-targeted outreach plan. Here are some tips to consider as you’re creating buyer personas:
- Consider interviewing or surveying current clients for direct feedback you can use in crafting your personas.
- Segment your personas into spontaneous, methodical, humanistic, or competitive buyer categories.
- Focus on roles, goals, and pain points for each persona.
- Remember to keep it targeted since no one ad campaign is going to be effective for every persona in your audience.
Assemble the Tools and Channels You Already Have
Take stock of all your existing digital marketing tools, channels, and strategies. Really audit the analytics and decide which paid resources have worked well, along with those that did not. Now’s the time to streamline the essentials and discard those that are not proving to be valuable. Ditch the apps or methods that aren’t productive, are hard to use, or don’t provide value. You can then begin exploring better-fit solutions and more innovative tools that get the job done.
Lead-Gen, Marketing, and Conversion Tools & Channels to Consider
There are hundreds of innovative tools and software solutions out there. It can be ridiculously overwhelming for marketers and leaders to try and decide which is going to work best for their marketing goals and strategies. Explore as many free trial periods and samples as you can. Look to embrace those that are easy to use, compatible with other software you have in place, and achieve results. Here are some of the most popular tools to consider adding to your arsenal if you haven’t already.
Canva – Canva is an intuitive graphics and design platform, great for even novice marketers in creating social media graphics, web graphics, and more.
Yoast – Yoast is an SEO tool and WordPress plug-in that is helpful in keeping your online content optimized.
ConvertKit – ConvertKit is an all-inclusive marketing platform, similar to Mailchimp, that makes it easy to facilitate creator marketing, email campaigns, and monetization of your content.
Visme – Use Visme for curating powerful content, data visualizations, graphics, videos, and more with an arsenal of templates and graphics at your fingertips.
Slack – Slack and other platforms like it are game-changing for connecting marketing teams, marketing data, and apps in one secure community channel.
SendGrid – SendGrid is a brilliant email marketing tool based entirely in the cloud, with tons of marketing features for A/B testing campaigns, measuring audience engagement, and managing email lists.
Loom – Loom is a must-have video messaging tool that allows users to create videos with editing, transcription, and recording and is great for training initiatives and online content creation.
Moosend – Great for lead generation and lead nurturing, Moosend is another great email marketing solution that is easy to use and wildly efficient to leverage.
Survey Monkey – Make brilliant use of cloud-based survey platforms like Survey Monkey and always have relevant feedback from your customers and target audience.
Data, Metrics, and Analytics Tools to Consider
In addition to the tools and software solutions to facilitate your digital ad campaigns, you’re going to need robust tools for analytics and measuring results. You’ll want those tools that are easy to use, can capture metrics in real-time, and offer insights you can actually use. Be keen to adopt those that offer all-inclusive solutions, too, capable of collecting data, automating metrics, and generating reports.
There are generally five types of data to analyze:
- Email marketing analytics
- Lead-gen and attribution analytics
- SEO analytics
- Web analytics
- Social media analytics
Here are just a few examples of great data or metrics solutions to explore.
Google Analytics – Get familiar with Google Analytics so you can stay up to date with all your online data, including audience engagement, behavior, and conversions.
Improvado – This all-inclusive platform is fully automated and pulls data from 500 data sources, providing marketing, sales, and revenue analytics.
Domo – Domo is a great data platform that focuses on delivering business intelligence along with data visualization.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud – Formerly Datorama, this analytics platform specializes in connecting all kinds of data sources in a single dashboard of usable analytics.
Funnel.io – This metrics platform is great for automating data collection efforts, analytics, and reporting.
Supermetrics – Supermetrics is a game-changing data platform that helps marketers simplify how they extract data from various campaigns, including SEO, social media, and P.P.C.
Ninjacat – This analytics platform is another all-in-one solution for collecting data about SEO reporting, P.P.C. results, and monitoring budgets.
Setting Your Digital Ad Campaign Budget
The only thing that separates your business ad campaign from those of the global or national brands is the budget. Let’s be honest – if you could afford to do ALL the things, you would, right? But most businesses have budgets and spending limits to consider. And as you create your digital ad budgets, these are the considerations to work through.
- Document your sales cycle for each type of buyer.
- Identify and estimate costs for each platform, campaign, and stage.
- Calculate your cost per lead (C.P.L.) by dividing the ad spend total by the number of leads you hope, or need, to get.
- Calculate how many conversions you need to secure to validate the ad spend and campaign.
Consider working in some variation of the 70-20-10 rule. This budgeting technique suggests allocating 70% (or the bulk) of your budget to proven campaigns that drive conversions, attract web traffic, or directly support a specific sale. Another 20% of your budget can be your more expensive, riskier spend on premier ad spaces or content. And the remaining 10% of your ad budget can be reserved for experimenting and trying new things with your marketing and advertising.
Follow the Five Stages of Development
Digital ad campaigns and marketing efforts aren’t as complicated to manage if you’re able to break down your process into easy-to-follow steps. There are some experts who swear by the “Five Stages” of a digital marketing life cycle. While it’s not the be-all-end-all solution out there, it’s a great way to segment your internal process to properly create, oversee, delegate, and manage your various campaigns.
1. Setup and Creative
Stage one is all about focusing on your strategy. This first step involves the processes associated with figuring out your audience, goals, problem-solving solutions, intended channels, and anticipated challenges.
2. Implementation, Traction, and Timelines
Stage two is your implementation phase. Here you’ll launch campaigns, evaluate performance data, and establish the timelines of each initiative.
3. Conversions and Funnels
Stage three involves your processes for handling sales conversions. But you’ll also want to capture engagements and create sales funnels to manage and nurture leads not ready to convert yet.
4. Meeting Customer Needs
Stage four occurs toward the end of your particular ad campaign cycle. You’ll want to determine if your products and services are meeting the needs of your audience. And now’s the best time to send surveys and request prospect feedback.
5. Analyzing Results and Adjusting
Stage five comes into play after your campaign is done. Here’s where you gather your metrics, analyze the results of each campaign against your initial goals, and make adjustments for improvement.
The Creative Process
It’s important to delegate enough time and effort to develop the creative concepts behind your digital ad campaigns. Running with the same tired messaging and graphics as everyone else isn’t going to help you land clients. The more creative and unique your offer, the more response you’ll get.
Be a Storyteller with Your Ads
Don’t just get creative about your sales pitch in your digital ad campaigns. Instead, get creative about storytelling in a way that highlights your core offering as the best (or only) solution.
Follow a P.A.S. Framework
Creative genius is great, but make sure there’s a mission embedded in your genius ideas. The P.A.S. or P.A.S.O. framework is always helpful to follow. Problem, Agitate, Solution, and Outcome is the definition. Lead your creative process by identifying a problem your audience has, reminding them why it’s annoying, providing a solution, and showcasing how happy they’ll be once their problem is solved.
Primary Elements in Ad Creation
When you’re developing your creative content for the various ad campaigns you intend to pursue, make sure they all have three common components.
- Audience: Ads should always speak TO a specific audience.
- Design: Ads should always resonate graphically with your brand image.
- Action: Ads should always ask the audience to do something specific with a targeted call to action.
Creative Ideas Can Come from Anywhere
Study your competitors for inspiration and see what other brands are “saying” in their campaigns. Assemble everyone on your team when it’s time for creative brainstorming sessions, too. Great ideas and ad campaign inspiration can come from anyone and anywhere.
Make Ghost Blog Writers Part of Your Ad Campaign Strategy!
As you explore new and innovative ways to improve your digital ad campaigns and marketing efforts, keep this ultimate guide handy. There’s a lot of “best practices” advice out there, and it can be challenging to know what to do for actual results. But these particular insights and tips continue to be bottom-line boosting.
Remember, the Ghost Blog Writers team is here to help, too! We are experts in helping businesses like yours with all kinds of advertising and marketing content. If you need resonating campaign language, thought-leadership blogs, web content, lead magnets, newsletters, or email marketing campaigns, we know how to drive results. When it comes to creating content and brilliant messaging, let our talented and diverse team of business-savvy wordsmiths help you achieve all your digital ad campaign goals!