In today's fast-paced and highly competitive digital landscape, the field of digital marketing is constantly evolving. With a plethora of platforms, tools, and strategies at their disposal, marketers face the challenge of making a lasting impact while managing limited resources. It's no longer enough to simply throw money at advertising campaigns or drown in an overwhelming amount of data. Instead, digital marketers must adopt a mindset that focuses on doing more with less.
Best Strategies for Lower Budgets
It is not uncommon in the current paid media landscape to see budgets cut for paid media or non-essential items. One could hardly argue that paid media is NOT essential, but try explaining to your CFO that we need to invest money to gain market share for our brand with little data to support the revenue impact. Any CMO will know the value paid media brings, but the challenge will be to maximize impact to show value. Here are some steps you can take to maximize impact.
Get Back to Basics
No matter what users you drive to your site, if that site experience is sub-par, you won’t be able to retain people to take the needed action. You need to partner with your UX team to ensure you understand the pain-points a user may be experiencing on the site or how to make their journey feel special.One way to do this is by investing in conversion rate optimization (CRO) efforts. At Seer our CRO team reviews the customer journey on your site, testing different elements to see what resonates and also optimizes the content to achieve significant conversion improvements. This will only amplify any media efforts as conversion rates should improve.
Another tactic is to focus on your first-party data. We all know the importance (and ever-increasing importance) of first-party data, but ensuring you leverage this in your paid media efforts is vital. You may have to work cross functionally to extract your CRM lists and upload the ones that can be paired with your media assets. Customer messaging is key here to align the right message/offer with the correct audience list. It is also important to take a step back here and ask what you are trying to get your users to do?
The last item may be contrary to popular opinion and that involves a human element. So much of digital marketing is working smarter and not harder. Enter automation! But even with that, there are always things a computer cannot do. There needs to be a human element. That coupled with automation is where the power lies. The suggestion here is don’t set it and forget it. Use the tools, let the engines employ smart bidding and new campaign types but still police it. At Seer, we love automation and lean into creating tools that help us manage smarter, like our Data Platform tool.
Finding Efficiencies at Scale
Go into how you can trim the fat of wasted spend. At Seer, we have tools that allow us to find ways to merge our PPC and SEO data to see if a term is already ranking highly in organic and potentially save thousands on removing those terms from paid search. Even if you don’t invest in our data platform, you can still save money within your paid channels removing inefficient spend. Look at terms that have run the past 90 days and spent over $100. If those terms are not converting, it may be time to remove them.
Embrace Automation (with aforementioned human touch!)
We can’t be everywhere at once but AI can. Leaning into campaign types like Advantage + Shopping and Performance Max technologies allows for increased opportunities for optimizations and fine tuning. This is not a set it and forget it campaign style - marketers like ourselves still maintain a close eye on performance and changes mainly around data being feed into platform, creative trends, and data being outputted. Don’t be afraid to lean in here until you find your ceiling.
Check out some content about Performance Max, Advantage + Shopping, and how you can use other AI tools like ChatGPT.
Learn Where the Next Dollar Goes
Do you know the value of all your marketing efforts? You should. Don’t look at your marketing in silos. Review your total portfolio and see what channels are driving sales/leads AND at the returns/costs you want. Not all channels are created equal, they should have different KPIs. But the ones delivering on their results, these are the channels to put that next dollar. It may be your email program and you need to invest in more drip series development to retain your current customers that are most valuable to you. It may be your social ads actually drive the most cost effective new users? And if you are only running one channel? Are you maxed out - it may be time to diversify. Don’t know if you are maxed out, an agency can help. 😉
Find What Works for You
By implementing these strategies, marketers can make the most of their resources and achieve more effective and efficient digital advertising campaigns. It's important to adapt these ideas to your specific business and target audience while continuously monitoring results and adjusting your approach as needed.
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