Paid Advertising

As with other forms of marketing, a paid ad campaign can have two objectives: branding or lead generation. A lead generation campaign will usually get bonus brand attention, but the reverse is not always true.  Why would you pay for brand attention that may not specifically generate leads?  You may want to generate awareness for a new business so you can tell your story and encourage customers to visit.  You may also need to build trust and credibility with prospects to support your sales team in a B2B or complex sale.

•  Identify your target audience and where to find them. This requires you to dive deep into the detailed geographic, demographic, and psychographic profiles of the people who are most likely to buy from you. If you’re a small or newer brand and have not yet built credibility, these may differ from your aspirational future buyers.  If you have undertaken a buyer persona and branding exercise, this will be essential to your campaign.  If not, we can help!
• Determine what a new client is worth to you.  This will be based on not only what they buy today, but their lifetime value.  You’ll need to know, or estimate, your retention rate and how well you upsell or cross-sell to increase their value.  You’ll also need to know how profitable specific types of clients are to you.  The goal is typically to have a positive Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) of your campaign based on client profitability.  In other words, don’t spend more to acquire a client than the profit that client will derive, unless you’re consciously investing in building volume.
• Establish your Unique Selling Proposition (USP).  This simple statement clearly and accurately states what makes you better than your competitors.  It will provide key input to your campaign messaging.  As you may have guessed, we can help with that, too!

• Identify the media that will best reach your target audience.  You may evaluate physical ads such as digital outdoor signage (e.g., video screens, bus shelters, and billboards), targeted industry magazines, and even more grassroots assets like well-placed posters, tri-folds, postcards, and event booths.  When running a non-clickable campaign, you should incorporate elements such as QR codes and trackable phone numbers to improve conversion tracking.Digital options include more familiar SEM tactics like Google Adwords website banner ads and META (Facebook and Instagram) ads, as well as YouTube, TikTok, and LinkedIn.  We can also serve ads to video streaming platforms like Hulu and Netflix.With so many options, how do you decide?  That answer is tailored to each client we work with based on our experience with the type of traffic each platform typically generates.  For example,  Google tends to be intent-based marketing.  Someone searches for something, and your ad shows up.  Social media is more interruption marketing.  You find the right audience who didn’t go there specifically seeking your product or service, but because we know so much about what they like and have tailored your message accordingly, your ad sparks an interest.  For many campaigns, we have found Programmatic Ads to be highly effective.  We are able to identify your audience based on locations they have visited within the past 3 years to within 300 feet, and serve ads across several of the platforms mentioned above, using the power of AI to determine how to optimize your ad spend.  Learn more about Programmatic Advertising here.
• Set a budget.  For lead generation campaigns, this is a combination of identifying available inventory (i.e. available impressions) on the target platforms, and then determining how many impressions you’ll need to get the clicks or calls that turn into leads, and how many of those will you actually close.

• Set a budget.  For lead generation campaigns, this is a combination of identifying available inventory (i.e. available impressions) on the target platforms, and then determining how many impressions you’ll need to get the clicks or calls that turn into leads, and how many of those will you actually close.
• Prepare creative assets.  Each media platform has specific requirements in format (video, gifs, or static images – note that videos typically perform best when available, followed by gifs since movement catches attention).  Each platform also requires specific sizes depending on where the ad will be displayed.  It is not unusual to have to prepare ten or more variations for a campaign.  Where will we direct the clicks or calls? If the clicks are sent to your website, it needs to be fast, mobile-responsive, and, most importantly, deliver a compelling message that will encourage visitors to take the next step without being distracted.  If your website isn’t built to convert, we may need to build a landing page.If we are optimizing for calls, we’ll set up call tracking to record whether calls are being answered and how well your team is handling them.  We’ll also be able to get critical feedback on the quality of leads we’re sending so we can adjust as needed.  Through this process, we have found issues with client telephony systems and call quality that were not previously known but were costing them money!
• Set up the campaign in each media platform.  This is the more technical part of marketing.  Our ad techs need to properly set up the campaign to serve the right ads to the audience we selected at the right time.
• QA and take your campaign live!  Once all of the strategy, technical, and creative pieces are in place, it’s time to launch!  We’ll typically start with less than your full budget to allow the platform algorithms to learn to optimize conversions.  The first phase of your campaign will optimize for clicks so we can drive sufficient data to teach the algorithms, then the second phase will optimize for conversions.  This all typically happens within the first 90 days.
• Monitor and adjust.  As the algorithms are learning, we’re also monitoring for lead quality, preparing our next round of creative assets to test, tweaking landing pages if needed, monitoring calls, and providing feedback.  This is a collaborative effort and we’ll be highly communicative and transparent with you as we work together to optimize your campaign.
• Close new business!  At this stage, you’ll also give us feedback on the types of clients you’re closing, and we can discuss expanding your budget, and potentially targeting your next priority audience.