I’m sure anyone reading this article is either keen to create a new campaign or renew an existing one. Squeezing the pennies out of an advertising campaign is no simple feat, so here are some the things that you should be taking into consideration at every stage of cultivating an advertising campaign.
Structure is the foundation for revenue
Meanwhile, in the real world, imagine this for a second. You are spending hundreds of thousands if not millions of pounds on a house. Now, you wouldn’t start with a foundation that was cobbled together as it’d just fall down in a few years as you start to pile everything on.
Focusing those initial efforts on creating and understanding how to structure campaigns is an important step to developing campaigns that are maintainable and scalable.
Over-complication is a sin, but keeping things simple and understandable is a great place to start. One of our personal favourite ways to use micro campaigns with a very specific objective, for example, boosting an individual product range or singular product.
Start small and scale
Quite often people will get a budget and start to load in the keywords and generally go a little crazy, seriously…
For most small businesses and starter campaigns, you should be setting aside a decent chunk of time to manage it. The next step is to start really small, working through micro campaigns progressively increasing on the overall bulk of the campaign.
This approach enables you to quickly cut losses and proactively shift focus in the direction that is improving your bottom line. There is nothing wrong with taking longer to create something that results in less waste.
On the flip side, a large campaign can sometimes become a complicated mess that’ll end up draining your budget without you realising!
Testing is vital
Sometimes we are in a hurry when a campaign is created and it’ll produce some viable results then it gets put away til the end of time. Seriously, time and time again businesses are failing to push forward or develop their campaigns.
Whether this is out of fear or a sheer lack of time, there are always improvements to be made.
Some campaigns might benefit from an increase in lead generation through releasing an overly extended budget through between particular hours that yield the highest results. Other campaigns could benefit from a particular platform being targeted.
You might be surprised at what can happen when you put on your data scientist hat.
Never forget the maintenance
Lastly, creating awesome campaigns is all about the ongoing maintenance. Look through your data and ensure that each campaign that you have built is running within parameters, but don’t forget to drill down into your campaigns.
Look for the things that are making you money and the things that aren’t. Analysis the changes and understanding the returns can help you to spot errors in your budget, positioning, and allow you to increase revenue.
In my time I’ve seen thousands wasted on campaigns that weren’t properly maintained, potentially millions in wasted possible revenue. Whether this was a keyword that simply ate the budget with little in the way of returns or a keyword that needed a little more budget to release the potential.
The mantra of advertising
At the end of the day, these are just my opinions… but they do cover some of the core principals of advertising.
Being strategic with your planning will help you to develop awesome campaigns that are easy to build upon but also maintain. But don’t forget to be ambitious, constantly testing and refining to strengthen your revenue.
Don’t forget to be bold either. Some of the biggest successes I’ve had with campaigns came from a little bit of experimentation!
