The questions to ask when you’ve been spending heavily on digital advertising
How often are you having an honest talk, really rumbling, about your paid digital marketing and whether it’s time to change things up? Digital is a driver of success - ‘the great enabler’- but it will reach a point when it’s time to prime wider potential audiences for future success or indeed, it could be a good moment for an overhaul to the the approach to digital.
An honest rumble with your team and stakeholders is the way to start the process of changing things, even in a downturn. Here are the 5 conversation starters we would suggest.
“Let’s take stock of our budget allocations”
What percent of your media budget is allocated to each channel? It might highlight an imbalance towards a channel like paid search or Facebook advertising that is important for reaching those in market right now but won’t be nurturing long-term growth.
A recent publicised case from Oddbox showed that 90% of their media budget was in FB & IG before they took stock.
2.Have we seen our performance plateau?
Signs of plateauing performance include: audience saturation such as slowing reach & excess frequency (high freq is common for traffic campaigns), reduced engagement and creeping CPMs, ROAS, CPA. It might be that the available audience in a channel is exhausted and it’s time to rethink.
3.What is the abundance of ‘amber’ in our reports really saying?
A proliferation of amber on your weekly reports is a ‘tell’. Team members won’t want to raise alarm by adding red; much better to say ‘we’re monitoring it’ and label a row amber. Let’s be honest: a lot of amber indicates a trend to stasis or nudging down - which is red.
4.What is the effort vs reward for our tests and optimisations?
Tests that yield small gains in real terms (not a percentage increase) and changing around the fringes such as copy variants, new CTAs, changing frames or small tweaks to the promo. Perhaps it’s time to ask if the effort was worth the outcome. Testing and learning is one of the joys of digital marketing but the gains may well be marginal. It could be time for a bigger test.
5.How varied is our social and digital creative?
Two-to-three seconds to land ad recall, a positive brand association and prompt action is hard. Ideas that start conceptual end up tipping rational with everything that’s needed to communicate. Multiply that by the number of brands advertising in your category and outside your category using the channel to sell and you’ve got wallpaper. An open conversation about whether your creative is varied and is distinct versus the entire feed is helpful.
Having the right honest talk will help to get senior stakeholders and team members in the mood to take steps to change up or to double down with confidence on what's working best.