Advertising campaigns are a vital part of business that you need to ensure that you plan properly from start to finish.
Every business is going to have to utilize advertising at some point, no matter what they might sell or how long they have been trading for.
Here are the points that need to be considered when planning and launching an advertising campaign.
What Is The Purpose?
The first step is to establish the purpose of the campaign in the first place.
Typically, advertising campaigns are used to push a certain product or service so you will want this to be at the heart of the campaign itself.
However, straight sales are not the only reason to run an ad campaign.
You might wish to test a new metric or feature of your business, so actively directing your customers to it might generate some useful data.
You could even decide to just push for downloads of a free piece of software or an e-book.
Whatever you decide, you need to make sure that you have a clear idea of what it is that you are trying to push through your ad campaign.
What Form Will the Offer Take?
You need to decide whether or not you are going to include an offer as part of the ad campaign to try to entice your customers to go there.
It could be as straight and simple as just directing them through a “Click Here!”-style button, or you might wish to offer them something more for their patronage.
For example, it is not uncommon to offer a special discount code or some other extra to get people to interact with your ad.
For example, if you were holding a sale, you might decide that you wish to offer a free shipping code on your ads.
Anyone who then came and bought something as a result of the ad would get a little bonus, and you will have a trackable metric that you can use to monitor the success of the campaign overall.
What Assets Will You Need?
It is incredibly important that you think up the assets that you need so that you are able to get them made up as soon as possible.
Most importantly, you need to ensure that these assets are the same across the board.
You need to make sure that there is a cohesive message across all of your platforms.
Start with your landing pages, and then ensure that everything else you make ties back into them.
The designs that you choose for your landing page could influence everything from your banner creation to the hashtags that you use on social media.
As soon as you have a completed list of assets, you should be able to begin making them up.
Something like your banner creation could take some time, especially if you decide to make up your own assets, but with one piece finished it should hopefully speed up the creation of the others.
How Long Will The Campaign Be?
You need to decide how long the campaign is going to be.
Just deciding to run it and stop it when you think it has gone on enough is only going to result in a lack of direction on your part.
If you are attempting to track something specific through this ad campaign, you will also struggle to do so.
By having a clear start and end date, you will be able to get everything you need for the campaign into order, and then will be able to collect a neat set of data at the end.
It will also give clarity to your customers.
If they have no idea when your sale is going to end, as an example, they might decide to leave shopping to a later date.
When they do decide to return to you, they find that the sale has ended, even though they had no warning that this would happen.
This is never going to be received well.
Having a clear start and end date can help with your scheduling, but it can also help you to push engagement.
Adding countdowns to your adverts for the end of the campaign is a fantastic way to build up excitement and engagement where you can!
What Platforms Will You Use?
You do need to make sure that you think carefully about the platforms that you are going to push the advertising campaign out on.
There are several that you might consider to be a must no matter what.
Creating assets for your own site and places like your email marketing could be top of the list.
However, you also need to think about other platforms that you might wish to use.
Nowadays, social media is massive, and it offers you a platform that you can’t really ignore. You might create advertising posts for somewhere like Facebook.
In addition to your own feed, you can pay to have them pushed out as sponsored posts.
This could help your advertising campaign to get exposure that you never dreamed of seeing otherwise.
Can You Track the Success of the Campaign?
Finally, you need to make sure that you have some sort of metric that you can use to track the success of the campaign.
Regardless of the platforms that you are posting it on or the options that you wish to offer your customers, you need to make sure that you can track different metrics.
Of course, the nature of the metric will be specific to the needs of your overall campaign.
It should tie back into the purpose of the campaign as a whole that you established above.
Once the campaign has come to an end, you will be able to analyze it to see if you have been successful overall.
These are just some of the things that you need to establish in order to create a successful advertising campaign.
If you can’t do it on your own, then you can consider hiring an advertising or a conversion rate optimization focused agency, like Clarity Enhanced.
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