Online Advertising & Remarketing can really make a difference if you need to find new customers or bring back previous website visitors.
It is tempting to dive straight in and set a number of test campaigns running across different platforms, but the goal setting needs to come first. This provides valid insight which will help to determine what activity should be selected for campaign testing.
Goal Setting
We believe there is nothing wrong with applying some ‘old school’ SMART thinking to strategy & goal setting:
- Specific – We need to apply numbers or percentages to the goal; for example “I want to grow the monthly number of visitors to our product pages by 20%”.
- Measurable – This is easy; digital advertising tools usually allow all activity to be properly measured; individually and separately from other initiatives. Unlike placing an advert in the offline press we will know if digital media we buy has worked or not.
- Attainable – We make sure that any goals we set are achievable and have a firm grounding in the reality of the consumer or B2B environment and your appetite to media expenditure.
- Relevant – There are plenty of ways to simply get visits to occur on a website, but the goal is to land relevant people onto relevant pages!
- Timed – We set the goals with you and make sure that a time frame is set for us to work against, and this is one of the key ways we measure the overall success.
We appreciate that some of the above may be obvious, but it gets ignored so often. For online advertising & remarketing it is the most important step in helping to ensure that campaigns are successful.
The Audience
Once the goals have been set there are a few other areas of consideration that we turn our attention to. The following list is not exhaustive, but gives examples that provide some food for thought:
- Audience – Who is the ideal or typical potential customer that we are trying to reach? Can we learn anything from your existing customer base or previous website visitors? Is there a clear target age group to go for, and do we favour women over men?Some of the platforms we would use allow such demographics to be applied to the audience that your adverts will be served to so it makes sense to target the right people as much as possible.
- Location – Your target consumer as a brand might live anywhere in the UK, or world, but should we introduce some regional bias to campaigns? It might be that you just operate in a certain town or county so we need to target just those areas. Do we consider ethnicity and therefore either target or exclude culturally diverse areas and regions? Does your product range or service lend itself to more affluent areas rather than ‘poorer’ towns and cities or are you genuinely universal?The tools and platforms available to us for your advertising all allow targeting down to a town & city level if required so we don’t have to take a broad brush approach all the time if there is merit in being specific.
- Devices – Most platforms allow adverts to be targeted at all or specific devices (usually at a level of mobile, tablet, and desktop). Does your current website look great on all devices? Do we consider whether the optimum experience for your business is on a desktop, or do we test all devices?
With goals and audiences identified we would then look at the tools at our disposal and choose the ones that we best believe will help us achieve our aims.
Maybe it is Google Adwords online advertising and remarketing? Perhaps a campaign across some key social media services such as Facebook or Instagram? Maybe a mix of the two with a retargeting campaign that advertises your business to previous website visitors as a gentle reminder of your existence?
There is no ‘off the shelf ‘ solution so you will always get a bespoke response. We have no particular bias towards individual advertising platforms…our only bias is towards our clients!
If you already run a lot of online advertising & remarketing activity and need some digital assets to support this (such as a microsite about a particular product) then please do get in touch. We are often full of ideas about how we can help your existing media spend work a lot harder for you.