Connect With Consumers Archives

By Jia Wertz

As an e-commerce operation in 2022, chances are the bulk of your advertising budget is earmarked for digital advertising. With a forecast of $524.3 billion this year, the sector spans video, social media, mobile, search, display ads, native ads and email. Given the number of channels, the quickly evolving landscape, and the difficulty of tracking channel-specific ROI, the digital ad landscape can be complex for marketers to navigate and with so much of our ad budgets focused on digital ads, the stakes have never been higher.

When you add in ad fatigue of users, privacy concerns, an adoption of ad blockers, and rampant digital advertising fraud, building your digital ad strategy can be downright daunting.

Fortunately, there are best practices that can help you maximize your return on investment while protecting your brand’s reputation with consumers. Here’s how to get the most out of your digital ads in 2022.

Make Sure Your Ads Are Going To A Quality Audience

Most advertisers don’t realize how rampant digital advertising fraud actually is. Ensuring that you’re buying traffic from a reputable source is essential in getting the most from your ad dollars. Moreover, nefarious practices by some traffic providers, such as ad injection fraud or domain spoofing, can be bad for your brand’s reputation and potentially even result in legal fees.

Ensuring your traffic partner has first party data and is fully compliant with the regulatory landscape is essential – not only for the integrity of your advertising budget, but also for the integrity of your brand.

Connect With Consumers At The Right Moment

The timing and placement of digital ads, and the context in which they’re received by the consumer, should factor into your overarching strategy.

Gone are the days of bombarding consumers with ads that are disjointed from their purchase path or even their mood. To be effective in today’s advertising ecosystem, you need to reach consumers when it adds genuine value to their purchase journey, or to strengthen your brand by enhancing and sharing in the moment or mindset they’re in.

When ads are perceived as disruptive it can have a net negative impact on the brand. Moreover, marketers should consider ways to provide value through ads rather than simply monetizing consumer attention. Remember that putting your ad out into the world is only the first step. It’s crucial to consider how and when ads will be received by consumers, and their potential impact.

Measure Your Results

It’s likely that your digital advertising budget will be spread across multiple channels – from social media, to display ads, search, email marketing and more. Take the time to create infrastructures for tracking channel-specific results.

The first step is understanding exactly what you want to accomplish with your ads. Many brands are good at tracking ROI from sales, but neglect to measure other key performance indicators (KPI) like increased brand awareness, brand sentiment or the discovery of the brand by new audiences.

Once you understand what’s important to you, identify how you’re going to measure success in those areas. This is also a good time to communicate what success looks like with your team, and get their buy-in on big picture brand goals.

Optimize Based On Data

When you have channel-specific data, take action on it. Often, advertisers will go to great lengths to track results, but stop short of taking the critical step of making the data actionable.

In addition to understanding which channels are performing the best for your key performance indicators, you’ll also want to optimize based on what you’re learning from your audience and their experience.

Is your message resonating better with a key demographic? Is a particular ad driving more purchases, while others are driving more engagement? Are you having more success in particular geographical areas? There’s so much to learn from your data, it’s important make room for continual optimization.

With so much competition in the digital advertising ecosystem, it’s important to be intentional about your strategy. Aligning with reputable traffic sources and taking a data-driven approach to optimization are good best practices to follow. Even more important is remembering how you like to be treated as a consumer. To stand out in a crowded landscape, go beyond your KPIs and practice the golden rule.

Feature Image Credit: getty

By Jia Wertz

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website or some of my other work here.

I am a documentary filmmaker and the Founder of Studio 15, a socially responsible fashion brand. After leaving behind a 15-year career in the corporate fashion world, I started a company that focuses on doing good and supporting women. It’s Studio 15’s mission to promote and collaborate with other female-owned businesses and to support female entrepreneurs in developing countries through a partnership with Kleos MFG, a non-profit organization.

Sourced from Forbes

By Madeleine Streets

Marketers came roaring into 2020 with plans to spend heavily on in-store experiences and brand activations such as pop-ups and parties. But with a large number of Americans still facing stay-at-home orders, industry experts are observing a shift to a different marketing approach: influencers on video platforms.

“Many small- to mid-size apparel brands are focusing in on three platforms: TikTok, YouTube and Instagram,” said Clayton Durant, founder and managing partner at consulting firm CAD Management. “Quarantine has bumped up the amount of time spent on these platforms.”

Influencer marketing is not new, but the financial strain felt by many consumers is changing the way brands approach it. Durant said traditional advertising campaigns are no longer deemed tasteful nor are they driving the meaningful engagement required to convert sales. Instead of glamorous, aspirational images, consumers want meaningful, authentic content from sources they trust. Increasingly, that means social media micro-influencers.

For many brands, partnering with a series of micro-influencers is becoming a more reliable source of marketing than traditional campaigns. These influencers usually have 50,000 to 2 million followers on social media, but speak to an engaged audience with more followers than many top celebrities. They are also less expensive to partner with.

“Many of these influencer deals give the brand the most amount of leverage in the transaction, allowing the brand to get a better ROI,” said Durant. “If you handle micro-influencer campaigns right there is more of a ‘partnership’ feel to these transactions; many micro-influencers are going above and beyond their deal points.”

Finding the most cost-effective marketing approach is more critical than ever, with many brands suffering from sales drops. But the disappearance of live marketing has also allowed for the redistribution of resources to social media, SEO and influencer campaigns. Durant believes that investing in these partnerships now could also pay off in the long term, as brands and consumers adjust to the new retail landscape.

“I expect brick-and-mortar foot traffic to take at least a year to get back to ‘normal,’” said Durant. “To make up for the loss of foot traffic, brands are going to turn to platforms like YouTube, TikTok or Twitch to create one-of-a-kind virtual shopping experiences that mimic walking in the store. That is where partnering with influencers to host digital store experiences could be quite powerful.”

TikTok, one of the pandemic’s success stories with 315 million app downloads this quarter, has also observed this shift. The platform has recently launched an ad format for influencers, enabling its more prominent users to include “shop now” links in their videos. For brands to capitalize on this feature, though, they will need to partner with that select group.

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock