6 Steps to Get to Day 90: How to Continue Your Success
The first 90 days of a FieldTest ad campaign is the most pivotal time period for success. Everybody wants their ad campaigns to perform their absolute best, but without a well thought out strategy there is a serious chance you may find yourself struggling to turn in positive ROAS and scale. Luckily for you, FieldTest is here to help.
Last week we walked you through the first three steps we recommend to have a high performing first 90 days with your ad campaign. We covered how to set a sound strategic foundation, how to properly fund it to ensure its success and how to expand that success with creative iteration. This week we’ll finish the second half of our guide and show you how to take the success you’ve built to the next level. Let’s pick it back up at #4!
4: Accelerate
First things first, pat yourself on the back! With a full cache of ads that are delivering strong results and a well founded and optimized targeting strategy, you have put together an ad campaign that is highly optimized and delivering strong results even at this early stage. However, you must still make sure that you have set the right budget in order to expand your success and take full advantage of the opportunity you have created for yourself.
Once again, this will be different from brand to brand and no advice on budgeting can ever be one-size-fits-all, but the fact of the matter is that once you’ve gotten your creative and targeting strategies locked in there is only one way to move if you want to continue your success and that is up, up up!
This isn’t to say that you should immediately triple your budget and wait for the cash to come rolling in. Many brands make this mistake and then kick themselves when the results seem stunted and underwhelming. The fact of the matter is digital advertising is a process. A metaphor we’ve used to describe it is that of a plane taking off on the runway. Once you get the speed going to gain lift you don’t simply pull up 90 degrees straight up. Instead you make strong, steady upward shifts to your trajectory until you reach the altitude you want to achieve. Let’s discuss just what exactly that means in terms of your ad campaigns.
That marketing funnel we talk so much about? Your new intenders need to work their way down it. Every intender must follow the journey from awareness to consideration and finally to conversion and that takes a little bit of time. Not to worry, with the strength of your marketing we worked through together they will surely make the trip down funnel with ease - it's just not an instantaneous process.
With this in mind, take a look at your budget and consider what a strong, steady increase might look like. By increasing your budget by 10%, 20% or even 30% monthly you ensure that your campaign success continues to grow steadily, but without the stunting effects of a budget that has been cranked straight from first gear into top gear. This will give you a continual stream of new customers, and new conversions, at a pace that will look natural, and will maintain stability long into your marketing future!
Speaking of your marketing future, let’s talk about the last two steps in your first 90 days:
5: Expand your marketing
With your digital marketing campaigns you have created a well oiled machine, but that’s not the end of the story. With your mid-funnel and down-funnel converters firing on all cylinders you’ll find yourself with a challenge that comes for all successful marketers, how do you reach new audiences and get them to begin their journey down your marketing funnel? FieldTest digital ads are a great way to start doing this, but we are far from the only option, and in fact work best as a compliment to a full stack of marketing tools or what we call a “marketing stack”.
What do most brands keep in their marketing stack? You probably already know some of the big ones. Facebook and Google Ads are both some of the most used ad tools on the internet and for good reason. They both integrate nicely into some of the most popular online services in the world. Popular as they are, they are still limited to their respective platforms and are far from the only options brands have.
One option for high impact upper funnel marketing are youtube ads, video pre-roll and CTV. These ads require a little more investment in the creative end but pay off in spades in brand confidence and awareness marketing. The impact of seeing a well produced video ad cannot be undersold and can hardly be replicated. Best of all, like most of the options we will cover here, these ads have full audience targeting and data tracking capabilities so not a single insight need go to waste. You can even use audience profiles from your digital marketing campaigns to target intenders on both youtube and CTV, creating an ad campaign that crosses all the devices your intenders use and builds a powerful and cohesive marketing experience for your customers.
Another option that FieldTest offers is simulated direct buying and newsletter ad placements. These highly curated placements allow you to create a unique brand experience for your intended audiences, showing yourself to them in a way that compliments your marketing and puts you in “good company” so to speak. Not only will you be delivering them highly optimized performance ads online, but you will be delivering them curated ad experiences on high end publishers and newsletters they already read and respect. This not builds brand confidence but also provides a way for customers to feel like you are “everywhere”, which will in and of itself push them towards conversion.
With a stack of alternative and expanded marketing channels put in place, FieldTest comes in to pick up the ball and run it to the end zone. You see, by using these alternative marketing tools to send traffic to your website, you get new customers to trigger the FieldTest pixel and begin targeting them with your highly optimized ads, pushing them even further down the funnel towards conversion. This process means that any marketing push, anything that drives traffic to your website, will ultimately work to your advantage and make your already optimized FieldTest campaigns work even better. This holistic approach is something we believe in deeply, and leads us nicely into your final step for an extremely successful first 90 days in digital marketing:
6: Reinvest knowledge from your first 90 days
If you’ve made it this far and followed our advice on how to optimize your marketing to maximum effect you’ll probably feel like you’re on top of the world, and what’s the best part of being on top of the world? The view. From this vantage point you should have a before unmatched perspective on what has worked, what hasn’t and where your marketing should go from here to continue your runaway success. The final step to having the best possible first 90 days is to use this well-earned perspective to draw yourself a road map to the future and set a course for continued brand growth and advertising success.
Did you have one awareness headline that delivered stellar results? Something that resonated that well might be a good model for future ad campaigns to expand on. Did specific images steal the show in terms of traffic driven? This could be a good model for new branding initiatives and landing pages. Certain topics of content drive a lot of interest in your consideration marketing? Consider expanding your blog content to hit those notes that your audience most loves to hear. When we say that we believe marketing is a holistic process, we mean that every single learning from every layer of your marketing stack should be something that drives your future decisions to be smarter, more informed by data, and better optimized towards what resonates with your customers and drives performance for your marketing.
Be sure you’ve made the most of those pivotal first 90 days
If you follow these six steps, not only will you have a foundation for a strong FieldTest marketing campaign, you’ll have a strong blueprint for your entire marketing future. Brand growth is a continuous process, one that takes time and continuous care, but it does not have to be an uphill battle. With the right foundation and the right tools for the job, you can ensure that you get your campaigns up and running right within the first 90 days so you can coast on to brand scale on the steady winds of good planning, solid strategy, and the power of digital advertising platforms like FieldTest.