Want to make your digital ads work harder?
Here’s three top tips to improve digital ad performance
COVID has changed the way businesses operate in more ways than we could have imagined nine months ago. Businesses and brands of all sizes have had to adapt in line with the changing business landscape, whether that is switching to remote working or delivering services in a new way.
Inevitably these changes have resulted in budget re-evaluation. At the start of the pandemic, there were predictions that digital ad spend would see a reduction in 2020 for the first time within a decade – where growth across all digital spending has previously grown year-on-year.
However, at a time when more people are online than ever, businesses should look at their digital marketing and associated budgets as an aid to business recovery rather than an expense.
Digital ad campaigns help increase brand awareness, sell products and showcase services, and businesses and brands should make the most of their online spend whilst considering the shift in behaviour patterns of their audiences, evaluating and planning paid advertisement campaigns with the pandemic’s impact in mind.
As a brand communications agency we understand the importance of adapting your marketing campaign to address the current climate. Here’s three top tips that will make using paid advertisement work even harder at a time when it is needed most.
Consider your budget allocation
Financial losses are one of the most common impacts SMEs have felt since the coronavirus outbreak. Because of this it is important for businesses to re-evaluate their budgets for CPC and focus on their best performing campaigns. It is vital that businesses remember that during these times, competitors are in the same boat and are going through the same crisis of confidence in performance marketing.
Reductions in budget spend by competitors opens potential gaps in the digital advertising market and the opportunity to improve ad positioning and ranking. Paid advertisements, on Google for example, work via a bidding system of CPC on keywords. The higher the bid, the higher the ad will be positioned/rank on the search engine. Due to the impact of the pandemic, businesses are more likely to reduce their marketing spend. This however is beneficial for those in a position to maintain or even increase budget spend when competitors are potentially reducing spend. This will ultimately lead to higher ad rankings.
Businesses should discontinue ads that promote services that cannot be performed due to the current government guidelines. Instead, traffic should be pushed to services that can be delivered virtually.
Study current customer patterns
According to this Google trend report, during the first lockdown customer search patterns drastically changed, one example is the increase of night time searches as more people are at home in the evenings.
It is crucial that brands are aware of the current behaviour online patterns of target audiences and may find that their ads perform better outside of the typical business hours. Why not adapt your advertisement to address these changes.
Make the most of trends in social channels
With more people staying home and consuming more content, SMEs should also be aware of the changes to engagement levels on the social channels they use. During the first lockdown, Facebook saw a 70% increase of time spent on the platform, imagine how many more potential customers/clients could be reached through paid advertisement if spend was targeted in line with changing use of social channels.
Depending on your service or product here are some opportunities worth exploring: