The Top 3 Dos and Don’ts of DTC Digital Advertising
Advertising is a new venture to many DTC brands, and it’s no wonder. Long the domain of Fortune 500 companies with dedicated digital ad buying departments trained in navigating the complicated world of ad exchanges, it has been seen by many to be simply too complicated to endeavor. Because of this, many brands have opted to stick to the walled gardens of Facebook and Instagram and neglect the rest of the internet; This is no longer the case as FieldTest has opened the field to anybody with a brand and a credit card.
This is great news for new brands just starting out, but with new territory comes a lot of uncertainty. Many people have questions about how to determine their spend levels, others wonder exactly where their ads should link to in order to drive sales. We’ve dedicated ourselves to offering information to guide our customers towards their absolute best campaign performance, and educating them on the factors that come into play in deciding things such as building brand awareness, influencing consumer confidence, and converting new customers.
In service of that goal we’ve decided to outline three major “Do’s” and three major “Don’ts” of digital advertising with FieldTest. We hope this will help you understand how we think about building our platform to support your campaigns and how you can best take advantage of its features to drive new traffic to your site and new customers to purchase your product. So, without further ado,
When building out your digital ad campaigns with FieldTest:
Do: Make your ads “true to your brand”
Your brand comes first when designing your website or your posts for social media, why would your digital advertising be any different? Your digital ad presence is a great place to let your brand really shine, where else do you get the opportunity to deliver custom messaging to highly targeted audiences all across the open web? This might be a challenge, but it’s one that will pay off in the end.
What does staying “true to your brand” mean exactly? That will change from brand to brand, but some things will stay true across all verticals. Number one is to make sure you use branded language and imagery. Consistency is key with digital ads - nobody wants to click on an ad promising one thing and be taken somewhere that delivers something else - so using language and images in your ads that represent your brand is a great way to not only increase consumer confidence and create a better ad experience for your customers, but it can even boost campaign performance down-funnel (more on that later).
Do: Follow the funnel strategy
If you’ve read any of FieldTest’s blog content you’ve likely seen us discussing the importance of following the three stage funnel strategy, this is not an accident!
The sales funnel strategy is a core part of what makes our ads, and most digital ads, work.
Put quickly, the funnel strategy breaks out into three distinct phases: Awareness, Consideration, and Action. In Awareness you are making new customers aware of your brand, presenting them with images and messaging that will provide the best possible introduction and first impression of your brand. In consideration you will use the data collected in the awareness stage to showcase features of your product that set you apart from the competition to your most interested Intenders. In Action, you will present your qualified intenders, those who have made the trip down your top two funnel stages, with ads specifically designed to push them to purchase.
Following this proven method will ensure that your ad campaigns are performing their absolute best, no matter your vertical. If you want to read in-depth on this subject, check out our blog post here. If you would like to see some examples of how to adjust your creative at each stage, we put together this handy guide here.
Do: Have a plan
Taking the last two items into consideration, our last recommendation is that you go into your digital ad campaigns with a plan prepared and ready to execute. Part of what makes our platform so special is the ability to add and update ads on the fly, but your best strategy will almost always be going in with a strong understanding of how your ads correlate to their audiences and how they correlate with each other. This may sound complicated at first, but it doesn’t have to be.
FieldTest gives you all of the tools needed to run multiple campaigns, each with multiple ads. These will act as single pieces of the whole puzzle that is your total digital advertising spend. By deciding on what intender segments you plan on approaching with digital ads before you start your campaign, you will be able to hone your messaging and creative to build the most effective campaigns possible. For example if you are an athletic shoe brand and want to reach new hiking intenders, build out a plan to use hiking themed headlines and shoot some original hiking photography. If you run a DTC clothing store and want to try to build an audience in a new city go ahead and gather up some location-based images and write some headlines to match. These minor considerations will ensure that your ads connect deeply with your desired audiences and build lasting relationships with your customers.
Keep in mind that, while acceptable at every stage of the funnel, these creative customizations need really only be present in your upper-to-mid funnel. In your action stage pre-planning looks just a little different. See, the ultimate goal here is to send your potential customers pushes to purchase. This is accomplished less with customized ad copy and creative and more with premium offers and discounts. For this stage, pre-planning means having your offers decided upon, your coupon codes generated, and your free shipping offer set up for qualifying customers. This way you will avoid undue delays in getting your ads live and create the conditions for a high-performing, well-polished ad campaign.
Now to switch gears
Now that we’ve covered some major Do’s, it’s time for a change of pace to discuss the things that we see come clients doing that impact their performance negatively. In order to help you avoid making the same mistakes, we’ve assembled this list of the biggest Don’ts when designing your ads with FieldTest. So, if you want your ad campaigns to perform their absolute best:
Don’t: Make your ads too busy
Did you know that the average time spent reading a digital ad is around 1 second? That may not seem like much time, but a lot can be conveyed in just 1 second. However, if your ad is too busy and packed with information this can make things more difficult. We find the best ads are the ones that have simple, informative imagery and headlines under 88 characters. This created an ad that not only has a headline that fits well within the frame, but is easy to read and internalize in the limited time available to you. Once things begin to get overly complicated and headlines begin to get too long people instinctively begin to tune out. Don't take it personally, it’s just human nature! Keep an eye on the FieldTest blog in the coming weeks for more information on how we plan out our digital ad campaigns with the guidelines in mind.
Don’t: Put text in your imagery - Unless it really works
Keeping in line with our last point we come to one of our biggest no-no’s: putting text in your images for FieldTest ads. This can lead to a number of problems, from ads cropping your text to distracting from your headline space to simply creating a visual that is too complicated to take in at a glance, impacting performance. We always recommend that your images be simple, high quality, preferably original and always tied to their ads’ funnel stage.
We would be remiss, however, if we didn’t mention that this rule has one major caveat: if you design your creatives specifically with the FieldTest format in mind you can have much better results with copy in your images. We have only seen a handful of brands try this out successfully, but when an offer code or very light copy is introduced in an image created only for use within the FieldTest ad unit format it can help create a cohesive, effective ad experience. Our creative frame is 300x160 pixels, in case you want to laugh at danger and break all the rules.
Don’t: Forget to experiment
We hope that these last two don’t haven’t tamped down your creative energy too much because the last and absolute most important item on this list of Don’ts is forgetting to experiment. Experimentation is extremely important in digital advertising. The internet is a vast place with billions of people on it, it would be a tremendous mistake not to try to reach new customers by building out new ad campaigns targeted to new intender groups. Luckily this doesn't have to be an expensive proposition!
We often see brands build out several “test” campaigns, filled with one or two ads meant to dip their toes into a new audience targeting segment or Geolocation without dedicating a full campaign spend to it. This way they can see how their new audiences perform and make informed decisions down the line. Several of our longest-running clients have run dozens of test campaigns, turning up new and exciting opportunities for brand growth they may have never discovered before.
We hope these Do’s and Don’ts will help you fully understand how we designed the FieldTest platform to be used and how the top performing campaigns use it successfully. By following these guidelines we think you’ll find that your campaigns perform better, are easier to manage, and that you will ultimately find yourself reaching and converting new customers in places you might have never imagined before.