Getting Customers to Click on Your Ads
The measure of success for an advert is if it influences someone to spend their money. This philosophy is at the heart of the digital performance marketing stance which judges campaigns by the clicks and sales they deliver.
This makes it easy to quantify the return on investment you’re seeing from your advertising and gives a clear indicator of when your ads aren’t delivering like you want them to. If your digital performance stats are plunging, you need to take a fresh look and find ways you can get customers to click on them and take action!
Two Important Principles
There are two important things that govern the effectiveness of all ads. The creative side and how they’re targeted. The creative elements of an advert are the offer to customers: telling about your product in the most effective way possible. Most adverts try to appeal to as many people as they can, but lots of work and research goes into making sure they will tap into the interests and concerns of your core market.
Targeting means making sure you put those ads in front of people who are going to be receptive to them. The best creative adverts possible won’t get sales from people who simply aren’t interested in your industry: if your brand retails white goods and spends lots of money on creating adverts but not on targeting to put those ads in front of people who own their own home and have the disposable income to spend on new fridges and dishwashers, then you’ve wasted your advertising investment!
Finding Your Audience
Market research can help you identify your audience in forensic detail, creating demographic rundowns of different segments of customers, allowing you to prioritise your spend based on how likely each segment is to generate sales, and intelligently target them based on their behaviour online, and even their location! If you have a high concentration of likely customers in a single London borough, you can target your ads on that borough, as well as by audience.
Choosing the Right Platform
Before you start targeting based on audience, you need to think about where your customers are, digitally, rather than geographically. Your market research helps you to understand how your customers behave online and a big part of that is identifying which social media platforms they are using to connect and share content.
Each of the major platforms attracts different audiences and has different strengths and weaknesses as a host for adverts. If you identify that your customers tend to use Instagram more than other networks, you need to tailor your ads to the inherent advantages that of the format. Insta functions as a ‘shop window’ far more than Twitter, which privileges text and wordplay.
When you create ads that play to the advantages of the network your customers use, they become more effective: you’re demonstrating that you talk their language, and this strengthens your brand and makes your ads more attractive, leading to more clicks and more sales.
