By The following is a guest blog by Scott Ragin at AussieWriter.
Paid media campaigns are an effective way to stand out among thousands of other businesses on the Internet. However, every possibility of big reward comes with big risk. A number of careful considerations should be taken into account in order for the campaign to go smoothly, since there are many ways it can go horribly wrong, and the money may be spent without the possibility of return. For example, the strategy may be flawed or marketing agencies oversell their talents to get clients but cannot deliver. In most cases, however, paid marketing campaigns fail because the business and the agency do not collaborate effectively.
In this article, we’ll showcase the top ten ways a paid media campaign can go wrong, so you can prevent them from happening in your business.
10 Ways Your Paid Advertising Campaigns Can Go South
1. Directing visitors to home page instead of landing page
Most paid marketing campaigns are concerned with sending the visitors to the landing page, which is a specific page on the website built solely for conversion purpose. Surely, the business needs the people to “land” there because that’s where they can start to generate leads and make a profit. However, some marketing campaigns send people to the home page, which is the starting page of the website that shows what the business is about.
It’s obvious that a landing page is the best option if you want your ads to convert, so make sure you direct the visitors to the right place.
2. Insufficient investment
Marketing agencies sometimes propose to conduct a trial campaign to assess the effectiveness of the strategy and use a small budget. While this is completely okay, it’s best not to commit to a small budget for the main campaign, even if the trial was successful. Insufficient initial investment that transforms into the budget can hold the campaign back and prevent it from getting more attention from potential customers.
Marketing should always be viewed as an investment rather than an expense because it stimulates growth, which is a goal to be achieved at all costs.
3. Starting campaigns without a clear goal
Does “get more visitors” sound like a good goal for an online marketing campaign? Not really. It’s murky, which means that the results will be murky as well. This means that neither agency nor the business will be able to measure the real effectiveness of the marketing campaign, because even if the strategy brings just one new visitor to the website, it can be considered successful.
On the other hand, if you set the goal to bring 1,000 new visitors within a month before starting the marketing campaign, it will be much easier to analyze the progress and adjust the actions. Here are some great goal-setting tips from Buffer.
4. Misunderstood messaging
In some cases, the paid marketing campaigns can go horribly wrong if the marketers do not understand the essence of the client’s message. As a result, the message could use inappropriate phrases or sayings that may offend certain populations, which can be very bad for the company’s image.
One of the most prominent misunderstood marketing messages was in the campaign of the Singapore e-commerce site SuperGurl. Instead of “Shop now” button, they used aggressive language that played into rape culture on the page showing the advert for the Black Friday sale. This fail has led to an avalanche of negative comments and the company had to issue an apology.
5. Failure to engage multiple channels
No agency can know for sure what niche will generate the best results for the business, so it is strongly recommended to try different channels and platforms before focusing on the best one.
For example, if the agency focuses only on Facebook to bring more people to the landing page, but the results are not satisfying, changing the platform or engaging a couple of new ones is the best idea. On the other hand, if only one channel is used all the time, the campaign is limited in its ability to attract new visitors.
6. Poor Quality of Images
If the marketing campaign uses images that look like they were designed and treated in Photoshop by a student from junior high, they will not encourage the campaign’s success. High quality images are an essential condition for online marketing because they give the customer their first impression of the brand, which is very important. Therefore, it is a good idea to hire a professional designer that can deliver clean and appealing imagery.
Although visual content is essential for your successful marketing companion, you should also focus on your written content strategy. Hiring a professional writer should be a priority for managing your content issues.
7. Failing to test the imagery
Before using the images in the campaign, many advertising agencies recommend showing them to potential customers to see their reaction and define the best ones to use. Given that images are the first things that people see when they visit the website, it is very important to ensure that the images you use are the most effective and appealing to your audience. By testing your image options, you would be able to determine what image style appeals the best to your target audience. Failing to do that in a paid marketing campaign may result in a poor conversion.
8. Failing to track Return on Investment
As strange as it sounds, thousands of professional marketers fail to measure important campaign factors that show the performance of the campaign, including Return on Investment (ROI). It can be very surprising since this task can be carried out by using simple tools like Google Analytics and dedicating a couple of hours of time.
9. Confusing tactics with strategy
The strategy is defined as the plan for achieving the objective determined by the business. The tactics, on the other hand, consists of a number of specific methods for achieving the objective, such as Twitter Advertising, SEO, and PPC. Failing to define these two concepts appropriately is bad as it influences the results in a negative way.
10. Poor ad optimization
The ads on the website should target a specific group of customers, so they should contain content that specifically appeals to them. Also, the budget for such advertising should be appropriate because agencies may request a lot of money for them. Creating ads that are too generalized or expensive will ensure poor results and useless spending.
Paid advertising campaigns are a great way to differentiate your business from others, stand out and get more customers, but there are a lot of ways they could go wrong. Use this article to keep the mistakes away and learn from the experiences of others.
