Regardless of size, when any business needs to grow or has a product/service development, a major factor in success will be their ability to attract new customers and re-ignite interest from existing or lapsed customers, time and time again.
For the past 22 years I have been a part of some amazing business successes, from large corporations with multi-million-dollar marketing budgets, to helping start-ups flourish into fully-fledged brands that people talk about on a day-to-day basis. I still get a buzz out of every single one of them.
Being part of an industry that helps grow business and drives commerce is extremely rewarding and with it comes a true belief that advertising works, IF (and there is an IF) you know what you are doing.
If you don’t understand and appreciate the landscape, constant growth and high complexity of digital advertising, you are unlikely to truly understand how to get the greatest benefit from it.
Whilst Google, Facebook and similar have self-service business platforms that allow anyone to begin advertising ‘in just a few clicks’ it desperately under-sells the reality that there are hours of back-work that need to go into a campaign set-up that only those experienced in digital media & marketing would appreciate.
One of the biggest complexities with digital advertising is the importance of building out highly functional triggers, goals and actions before commencement. This is fundamental to digital media success. Most businesses will be able to tell you their goals, but not many can their work with the depths of digital platforms and deploy those codes on to a website and connect those back to actions that are occurring in a bricks & mortar store.
Growing your business through digital advertising requires research, understanding, hypothesising, predicting and learning. It requires people who know how data analysis will drive and improve performance and know how to create a connection between your brand, its audience and the media they consume. It requires proper resourcing, vast experience and focus.
More specifically, the benefits of a sound digital strategy include the ability to:
- Track customer journeys and measure which specific web pages are generating revenue and which are dropping people off-site.
- Identify high-intent audiences and keywords and use this to find like-minded people that will expand your awareness and drive entirely new revenue streams to your business.
- Retarget customers who ‘abort cart’ before purchasing, or up-sell with high intelligence and relevance to customers who have bought similar products.
- Break down the different stages of a customer life-cycle and proactively move them through the steps from awareness, to interest, desire, action and then, based on learnings, help get more customers to repeat it.
- Use your first-party data with great effectiveness and success. First party data is the only thing that really sets you apart from your competitors. Knowing how to segment that data based on such things as frequency, value or purchase preference will give you a great competitive advantage. Furthermore, combining that data with second and third-party data will minimise budget wastage and allow you to create tailored segmentation and targeting solutions and test similar audiences at a larger size.
A successful digital campaign relies on your ability to answer key questions such as: what do I want my ads to do? What is my business goal? What drives revenue? What can I measure? Is there a hard cost involved? If it relates to goods, what is my breakeven point? Through this analysis you should be able to set a workable advertising budget. There is a fine balance between a ‘healthy’ budget and overspending. You absolutely do not need a big advertising budget to get results or even kickstart your journey into advertising.
If this level of detail sounds like too much effort, then you need to consider outsourcing your advertising to an external communications agency. Naturally this will come with a cost, but that cost will be relative to your budget and in the right hands, the agencies service fee will be returned in spades. This return will be seen in their experience, hours of time they save you, your conversion rates and returns, your customer lifetime value, and most importantly their clear ability to improve your bottom line through a positive Return On Investment.
Digital advertising can and will grow your business if the time and effort is put in at the start and if there’s resource and dedicated teams in place to replenish your advertising plans through analysis of data & action-based learning.
Jenna Lambert is a Business Chicks Premium member and Managing Director of Media33. Media33 are in independent Australian communications agency that uses traditional and digital media expertise to create and nurture growth for their brand partners, large & small. As a Google ‘Premier’ and Facebook ‘Preferred’ Marketing Partner, they are recognised as an optimum results-focused agency that delivers top-of-market outcomes across multiple categories & disciplines.
