7 Digital Advertising Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
In an age where mass adoption of the internet is escalating, digital advertising easily becomes one of the most efficient and cost-effective marketing strategies businesses can utilize to drive sales. According to recent data, digital advertising accounts for 46% of total worldwide ad spending in 2021. With 93% of all online interactions beginning with a search engine, you might very well attract the attention of the people you target with digital advertising.
More businesses are investing in digital advertising because it works. There is, however, the right and wrong way to implement a digital strategy. If you’re not careful, digital advertising can instead become a minefield that blows up your brand. Marketers cannot afford to make blunders; it is just as important to know what to avoid as it is to know what to do.
Long story short, here are 7 digital advertising mistakes you need to avoid at all costs:
Widespread Geotargeting
Geotargeting in Google Ads is a tool that allows marketers to define a place, or a series of locations, as the only area(s) in which they want their ads to appear. This consists of parameters such as country, region/state, city, metro code/zip code, organization, IP address, ISP, and others. If you aim to raise your brand awareness nationwide or even worldwide, you may think that maximizing geotargeting features to reach the widest coverage possible is the best way to achieve that. However, this strategy may actually generate opposite outcomes. Displaying ads to customers outside of a specific area(s) results in wasteful impressions and clicks, depleting a company’s marketing spending without providing any significant return.
For startups and small businesses, the rule of thumb to avoid this is simple: target the areas of your business and exclude the locations you do not serve. Use Google Trends to determine which regions have the most conversion probability. The volume of searches for a specific term can be broken down by nation, region, subregion, and city using this tool. Be careful and check your Google ads that you only want your ads to appear to searchers in your location, not to searchers who Google your location. The latter is the default, and it will definitely result in wasted clicks and money.
Vague Target Age Group
One group you should keep in mind in digital advertising is age. You can spend a lot of money trying out the latest marketing trends, but your money will be lost if you are not reaching the right target audience on the correct channels. This is why one of the most common mistakes in determining the age group for your business is making it too vague, meaning that the gap is too big. Simply put, it will be rather inefficient if you have a target age group of 18-45 years old under one group.
The key to marketing to any age group is to understand your customers and their unique behavior. You need to create a specific age group for specific products or services you sell. You can have one business with many products to advertise, but different age groups have different preferences when it comes to styles or preferences.
For instance, if you run a skincare and cosmetics brand, you may want to divide your targeted customers into three age groups: 18-24, 25-34, and 35-45. For the first age group of 18-24, there are skincare regimens and treatments available to guarantee that their skin remains healthy and fit. The main goal is to avoid premature aging and to heal any scars caused by prior acne/pimples, so cleanser, clay mask, and sunscreen are examples of items that can be advertised for them. For the second age group of 25-34, skin cell renewal would have been substantially lower. The skin’s natural texture, tone, and color would have been lost due to the loosening of collagen and elastin fibers. This means you can advertise Vitamin C serum, moisturizer, and eye cream. The last age group of 35-45 has different needs of skin care, since people at this age group are worried about wrinkles and skin aging. For them, you can advertise anti-aging cream, Vitamin B3 serum, and antioxidant cream.
Putting Aside Current Customers
Bigger reach and new customers are great to have and even become indicators that your business is growing. You may want to generate content that attracts potential customers and get them to purchase your products or services. But what about your current customers? Retaining existing customers is just as critical, if not more important, as it is to acquire new ones. Therefore, your digital ads should focus not only on obtaining new customers, but also ‘remind’ old and current customers that your business is still up and going.
In your marketing efforts, make sure you are reaching out to current customers. Offer deals to encourage regular customers who want to buy from you again. Retain them by giving them special discount codes and deals. Remember that giving a deal does not imply that clients will not pay full price for other items. The goal is that you can draw them to your website, and while they may purchase reduced stuff, other items may also spark their interest. This is one of the easiest strategies to keep your customer base strong.
Read Also: Digital Marketing Trends of 2022
The Fault in the Landing Page
Landing pages are an essential part of any successful online promotional campaign, and they have the potential to make or break your strategy. Yet, so many companies are getting it wrong by making costly blunders that are costing them a lot of leads. One common error made by businesses is having a homepage that serves as a landing page. How so? A homepage typically contains roughly 40 links, which cover everything from social network links to privacy regulations. Having too many options on your landing page may fail you in persuading visitors to take one single desired action.
Another fault in the landing page is a click mismatch. For example, you are pushing the sale of sunscreen that is currently on a discount, so you put an ad copy about it, but when it is clicked, it will redirect to the overall skincare product list. Visitors will feel like they are being lied to and newsflash: it is definitely not good for your sales conversion.
To handle these two major issues, the principles you need to have in hand are user-friendliness and efficiency. This is why having a landing page with a basic and user-friendly design is critical. A well-structured landing page with matching colors and fonts gives you a more professional and convincing appearance. You also need to make sure that you have a direct, single call-to-action (CTA) stand out so any visitor’s attention is drawn to your landing page CTA. According to a study conducted by Visual Website Optimizer, making the CTA more visible might result in a 232% boost in generating leads!
Unappealing Visuals
If you think visuals do not matter, since you truly believe that ‘great copies are all that matter’, it is possible that you are already making a mistake. Sure, the message is definitely what you are trying to convey in digital ads, but this makes visuals even more important than ever because frankly, visuals speak louder. Unreadable texts above a colorful background are just one out of many common mistakes when it comes to unappealing visual ads. Other than aesthetic matters, details of layout are often overlooked as well. For instance, you cannot simply apply a 4:4 (square) aspect ratio, like for Instagram ads, to Facebook story ads whose aspect ratio is 16:9.
It is not enough to stop at creating relevant and distinctive content while ignoring whether your digital ads are enough to be a real head-turner online. Using infographics, charts, eye-catching banners, and other types of visual information will make your content appear more sensible and appealing. You must ensure that your content is appealing, so before distributing it to ad platforms, you may want to conduct an anonymous survey among your internal team or employees to give an honest opinion about your ads.
Mundane Ads
There is one hard pill to swallow: people are bound to get tired of your ads, no matter how fantastic they were in their initial deployment. Not being able to move on from one specific ad or a single ad style for years can deliver your business to experiencing ad fatigue. This is what happens when your target audience sees your advertising so frequently that they grow bored and stop engaging with them. Ad fatigue occurs when your click-through rate (CTR) decreases as your ad frequency increases. Decreased engagement with your ads indicates that your audience is seeing it but it is not grabbing their attention or motivating them to interact with it. Users will not see the information in the future if they do not connect with your brand.
Although ad fatigue is bound to happen at some point, there are ways to prevent it from harming your entire business operation. Small modifications in the design and look of the campaigns can sometimes resolve this issue. You can also attempt to do frequency capping, meaning that you restrict the number of times a user may be influenced by the same ad. Additionally, A/B tests can help you reach the most valued audience for your campaign. Exclude people who have already engaged with your Ads so that they can be viewed by those who have yet to be reached. Remember to keep track of how well your campaigns are doing and where your attention should be directed.
Skipping ROAS
You may never know how successful your campaign was if you simply keep throwing money at your online advertising platforms without evaluating any significant data. This is why return-on-ad-spend (ROAS), a term for calculating the amount of revenue earned for every penny spent on advertising, is important. Unfortunately, many businesses skip or put aside the ROAS as they do not know its importance. ROAS equips you with a comprehensive, big-picture view of whether or not a campaign is paying off. You may end up making unwise decisions based on limited knowledge if you do not measure ROAS.
Define a critical conversion measure for your campaign and calculate the worth of that conversion to your brand. This is the value of your conversion. To calculate ROAS, divide your conversion value by the cost of the ad. This will assist you in determining the performance of your advertising strategy. Many people are exclusively concerned with CPA (cost-per-action) or CPC (cost-per-click) (cost-per-conversion). Although this is valuable, it just reveals to you the cost of that one activity and does not provide as much insight into how your marketing activities directly affect your revenues. Consider your profit margins. A high-profit margin allows you to continue the campaign with a low ROAS, while a low-profit margin needs a substantially higher ROAS and low advertising expenses to be profitable.
Now that your business is up and running with many competitors weighing in, you cannot afford to make mistakes that are actually preventable in maximizing your digital ads. Not being ignorant towards small details (that may go wrong if left unresolved) is the very first step towards making your digital ads strategy better.
If you are still unsure whether you are making the most out of your digital marketing strategy, let us be of help. Contact us and we will happily lend a helping hand!