3 Mistakes Marketers Should Watch Out For With their Digital Buys
Here at FieldTest we love nothing more than seeing new advertisers sign up for our platform and building successful ad campaigns using their branded content and our powerful set of advertising tools. We love ensuring that brands who come to us have all of the tools, information, and guidance they need to be successful, but sometimes we still see people making mistakes with their digital marketing spend that are easily avoidable. Today we’ll go through three of the top mistakes marketers should watch out for when doing their digital buys and how they can avoid them.
Mistake 1: Not Spending Consistently
One of the first mistakes we see people making is assuming that their marketing efforts aren’t working immediately after starting them and shutting down their spend to try something new. This is extremely common and very understandable, nobody wants to send money on a marketing campaign that “isn’t working”, but we need to take a closer look at what “working” means here. We typically advise new brands that it can take up to 6 weeks before we start to see revenue neutrality, and even that might not be quite enough time.
Digital advertising sometimes requires time to build up momentum and for new customers to slowly work their way down your marketing funnel. As we’ve talked about before, your ads will not simply act as a one-time interaction with your customers, but a process of guiding them down the three distinct stages. This takes time, but with a properly set up campaign and the guts to stick it out you’ll soon begin to see your campaigns performing.
Mistake 2: Not spending on prospecting
The second mistake we see brands making is not spending nearly enough on prospecting. Prospecting is the process of reaching out to new intenders who may or may not be interested in engaging with your brand. It’s one thing to go after your known customers and pushing them to convert again and again, but they only have so much money and need for your product so you will eventually have to expand your reach. This is a good thing and a key component to achieving scale for your business. Expanding your prospecting buy can mean many different things. From creating blog content that increases SEO, to purchasing google search ads to promoting posts on social media, it all ends up with new people being introduced to your brand.
On the FieldTest platform, prospecting can be achieved by starting a new awareness campaign targeted to new audience segments that have been previously untapped. This is not only a crucial step in growing your brand’s reach but it is a major part of what makes the FieldTest platform so powerful. We give you the ability to start new campaigns targeted to anyone, anywhere, anytime, and we hope that you’ll feel encouraged to use it not only to reach your proven customers but to get creative and test new ads with new audiences as well.
Mistake 3: Not increasing budget
Once you have your marketing all set up and your prospecting campaigns finely tuned, don’t be surprised if you start to see some serious success! This, however, is where we see many brands making the third common mistake in their ad buying: not increasing spend when they see it working. This one might seem obvious, but we can’t tell you the number of times we’ve seen brands start to achieve success and get skittish with their budgets. To these brands, they have set up their house of cards just right and don’t want to shake the table. In truth, their campaigns are much stronger than that!
We recommend that once you’ve begun to see your campaigns becoming revenue-neutral or revenue-positive that you begin increasing your budget in high-performing areas. At this point you have done the work of tracking down your high-performing audiences and creating ads that resonate with them, there is no reason not to hit the gas and turn your campaign performance up to 10! From this point you are free to experiment with new audiences and new creatives in other areas, secure in knowing that you have a high performing campaign already doing the heavy lifting on your sales funnel.
Make the right decisions with your ad budget with FieldTest
We understand that the world of digital advertising is a new one for many marketers and we appreciate the opportunity to help prove tools and education for brands ready and willing to grow. We hope this guide has given you some valuable insight into how to set up your marketing buys effectively and truly maximize your digital advertising spend with FieldTest.