An effective advertising campaign is critical to the growth of your company. After all, it helps generate brand awareness, drives traffic to your business, and helps boost conversions. However, its success relies on numerous factors.
From targeting the right audience and developing valuable content that resonates to tracking valuable metrics that guide your strategy, there are several potential pitfalls to impede results. That’s why it’s important to recognize common advertising mistakes and learn how to avoid them.
6 Common Advertising Mistakes
Creating an effective ad campaign takes research, careful planning, and in-depth assessment. You can increase the likelihood of success by avoiding these six common advertising mistakes.
1. You’re Using the Same Approach for Native Ads and Banner Ads
Native ads are paid ads whose content and style makes them appear to be a natural part of the web page they’re on. They typically serve to educate and inform your audience, rather than deliver a sales pitch. Many advertisers treat these like banner ads, and while both of these can be powerful tools for your overall digital marketing campaign, they are not the same thing.
Banner ads are designed to stand out from their surrounding content to attract audience attention and entice conversions. They promote offerings and drive sales, and as a result can actually deter some viewers from engaging with them. Native advertising should feel more coherent on the page and raise brand awareness in a less intrusive way, reaching people who are already seeking solutions to their needs. Create native ads that don’t stand out, but use valuable information to draw viewers in. This will entice people to click on the ad and increase conversion rates.
2. Your KPIs Don’t Align With Your Goals
Before you begin any advertising campaign, your first step should be to define your goals. Once you know what you’re trying to achieve, you’ll know what KPIs you need to track to gauge the success and effectiveness of your campaign. If your goal is to boost engagement, your KPIs should include downloads, conversions, and registrations. If your goal is to increase brand awareness, you’ll want to track CTR, impressions, and behavior metrics.
While KPIs are important for tracking progress and success, they’re essential for optimizing your current efforts and for shaping future campaigns. Understanding what works and what needs improvement helps you reach your audience more effectively with each new advertising strategy.
3. Your Content Doesn’t Resonate
Today’s consumers are more interested in receiving valuable content that meets their specific needs than they are about quality products at affordable prices. That’s why today’s advertisers must deliver meaningful information that resonates. This is especially true with native advertising. Native content should not only deliver value, but also blend in with the other content on the publisher’s page. If it doesn’t, people will ignore it just like those previously-mentioned banner ads.
Become familiar with the page on which your native ads will reside. Craft content that mimics its look, feel, and tone. Make quality a priority and draft compelling headlines that lead into educational material. Explain clearly why your solution meets the needs of the viewer, and why your company should earn their trust and their business.
4. You’re Not Attuned to the Customer Journey
People have different needs at each stage of the sales funnel. Many advertisers don’t pay attention to where consumers are in their customer journey. As a result, they deliver ads that are irrelevant and ineffective. Top-of-funnel customers are in the awareness stage, researching their options and just learning about your brand and its products. Ads directed at these people should be informative, recognizing their pain points and empathizing with their situation.
Bottom-of-funnel customers are ready for action. They’ve done their research, know what they want, and are ready to buy. Your ads targeting these people should confirm that they’ve made the right decision and help them convert. Sending this message to a top-of-funnel person not only doesn’t meet the needs of the consumer, it might actually deter them from becoming a customer. Tune in to the customer journey and create your content accordingly.
5. You’re Not Testing Your Ads First
There are numerous variables that impact an ad’s success. Layout, images, content, and placement can all affect a campaign’s results. Consider testing your ads before you do a full-out launch to see what aspects you might improve for maximum effectiveness. Not only will you hone in on an ad design that is successful, you’ll learn a lot about your target audience in the process.
Consider crafting three versions of your ad to see which one yields the best response. Among those three ads, try:
- Soft-sell vs. catchy headlines
- Various media platforms
- Text-only vs. image-heavy landing pages
All of these factors can impact your results and help you create current and future ads that are more likely to boost sales.
6. You’ve Chosen the Wrong Platform
Advertisers will sometimes focus on the platforms with which they’re most familiar, but don’t realize that’s not where their target audience spends their time. Choosing the right platform is essential to the success of your campaign. That’s where audience research plays a major role in the outcome of your digital strategy. Information like age, gender, and interests can help you gain a better understanding of which online platforms your audience is using.
If your audience prefers video content, you should consider advertising on YouTube. If your audience consists of professionals, then your ads should appear on LinkedIn. To ensure you’re delivering the right information to the right people, you have to know which platforms they use and how they prefer to receive their information.
Create an Effective Advertising Campaign
RevContent is a leading content marketing and native advertising platform that helps you create seamless ads that integrate with your content. We aim to help you drive high-quality traffic and increase revenue through targeted native ads that resonate with your audience. Let us help you avoid common advertising pitfalls.
Contact us today to learn how we can help you create an effective and successful advertising campaign.
