Digital Lab

Billions of dollars are spent every year on advertising… the majority of which is spent by multi-hundred million dollar companies (and larger).

But why do they spend so much on advertising?

How do they run campaigns that stay profitable?

Here are a few secrets that the top 1% of advertisers use to stay on top.

Creative Is The Biggest Variable

In advertising, there are a lot of tools and data to play around with.

This often leads businesses to over-value these systems.

Relying on a new integration, or better analytics as the reason their campaigns aren’t doing well.

The reality is that the ad creative you are running is the biggest variable to your success.

9/10 times, an underperforming campaign can be dramatically improved with better ad creative.

Images, videos, copy, landing pages, email sequences, you name it.

These touchpoints are incredibly important for performance.

The only way to know if you have high-performing ad creative is to:

1. Make it in batches (test 5-10-20 creatives at a time)
2. Allocate your budget to all of them
3. Measure the results
4. Keep the top performers

It may not sound that complicated, but when you’re managing 20 new ad creative ideas on a monthly or weekly basis, pushing them to a campaign, measuring and iterating on the results…

It can quickly become overwhelming.

But, that’s what it takes to build hall-of-fame-level ad campaigns.

Not Every Campaign Is Measured In ROI

While it may be unpopular to say, that not every ad campaign can be measured by ROI.

That’s strictly because the purpose of an ad campaign isn’t always to “track transactions”.

Some ad campaigns certainly are, and you should be tracking your ROI as much as possible.

But here are a few examples of advertising that doesn’t have an easily measurable ROI:

• TV Ads
• Partnerships
• Sponsored Events
• Sponsored People/Orgs
• Out Of Home Displays
• Brand Awareness Campaigns
• Direct Mail
• PR

Just because you can’t easily measure them, doesn’t mean they don’t work.

Companies are still doing all of these every single day because they do work.

The question then becomes, “How do you know?”.

The easiest way to track it is in a 30-60-day revenue/lead acquisition bump. Look at the 30-60 days after having run a campaign and measure the overall lift in revenue/lead acquisition from all channels combined.

Organic Search + Advertising + Referrals + Repeat Business + Social + Everything Else

When you see the total, you should be able to measure some overall increase during the time after the campaign.

The thing about these unmeasurable campaigns is that they show up in the analytics, just in all the wrong places.

Someone does a Google search for your brand name because they saw a billboard on the freeway.

Someone goes to your Facebook profile because you sponsored an event they are at.

Someone clicks an ad because they recognize your name from a commercial they saw on TV over the weekend.

These actions mask the ROI of the unmeasurable campaigns, but these campaigns can often be incredibly valuable despite the difficulty in measuring.

Your Best Prospects Are Your Customers

The difference between most “young” advertising campaigns compared to “seasoned” campaigns is the represented in the overlap between prospects and customers.

When most people think about advertising, they think about attracting new customers.

This is obviously an important part of any business… however, it’s not the only opportunity in advertising.

What if I told you there was a group of people that I could say are 100% guaranteed to be open to buying from you?

And all you had to do was present the right offer at the right time…

Well it’s true, they’re already your customers.

Customers are the unsung heroes of advertising because they are the most qualified lead you could have and they’re significantly more likely to buy from you than someone who has never heard of you.

Yet most companies don’t spend a single ad dollar on their customer audience.

Here are a few types of campaigns you can run to make more $$$ from your customers:

1. Up-sells (Sell something 5X-10X the price of your most popular product/service, run ads to customers to upsell them into it)
2. Cross-sells (Sell supporting products/services to your most popular product/service, this works great for equal or lesser price points)
3. Repeat Purchases (You may have a product/service that is ideal to be bought multiple times, run specific ads related to 2nd, 3rd, and 4th purchases)
4. Subscriptions (You might have the opportunity to create a recurring revenue stream, like auto-refills or a maintenance plan)
5. Referrals (Encourage your customers to refer friends & family with the promise of big rewards)
6. Affiliate Programs (Encourage your customers to become affiliates for your business and access revenue-share opportunities)

Are you making the most of your advertising budget?

Do you have experts in your corner helping you to build profit-driving campaigns? Most of the companies I speak to don’t. Even if they think they do, there’s almost always something missing. The numbers just aren’t working the way they should.

If this sounds like you, hit the button below.