How to get the most out of your ad campaign (part 2)

In my previous post I talked about the importance of using daily budgets, creating an audience structure, and constructing a funnel approach for reaching your audience. This post focuses on the final element, which is usually the most critical one: properly structuring your creative assets.

Creative Structure

Once your audiences have been divided into separate campaigns/ad sets/tactics, you can (and should) customize your creative assets for each audience. Your audiences are going to have different interests and motivations, so customize the messaging to be specific to each audience. If your offering can be sold to CPAs and small business owners you need to create separate ads that appeal specifically to each audience, not generic ads that work for either.

Your creative assets should also be contextualized to the user’s relationship to your brand (their position in the funnel). If your funnel is set up as a three-tiered Prospecting —> Interested —> In-Market funnel, then your messaging and call-to-action should reflect the position in the funnel and the goal you have at each position.

By customizing your creative to each audience and being mindful of where it falls into your campaign, you will increase the effectiveness of your budget and work to systematically move prospects through your funnel.

Maximize Results

Taking a little extra time on the front-end of your ad campaign – to strategically determine a campaign structure, how each of the elements are going to interact, and how you can systematically qualify your audience – will go a long way in maximizing the efficiency of your budget. It will prevent you from wasting money sending ads to people who are not interested in your offering, and it can help make a large target audience much more manageable.

One final thing to note is that the means by which we execute this kind of strategy are rapidly evolving. Privacy changes are going to push the entire ad industry to adapt the ways we target and retarget our audiences and how we attribute campaign activities. We don’t know many of the answers at this point, but we can expect that our ability to measure and retarget off-platform activities and cross-platform engagement will change significantly. This means that leveraging in-platform engagement to move users down the funnel may become more important than it is today. It may even mean that we may need to maximize the use of lead forms to allow non-ad communication to drive lower funnel activities. Whatever happens, we will be prepared to leverage the new tools available to make the most of our ad campaigns.