Whether your goal is conversion volume, cost efficiency, or targeting an action further down the sales funnel, setting expectations for your paid digital advertising in advance can benefit you in more ways than one.
Digital Marketing Strategist and PPC Specialist, Danielle Simoneau says “Opening the lines of communication can help with optimization and overall success of campaigns.”
Why you should discuss goals before campaign launch
Unbounce reported 98% of advertisers are wasting money on ads. That’s some pretty heavy stuff. Does that mean you should completely omit paid advertising from your digital strategy? No. You’re just doing it wrong.
Oftentimes, discussing and documenting what success looks like for your company is skipped over for one reason or another. Urgency to launch new initiatives is a common one.
Maybe you haven’t discussed the overall goal of your paid digital advertising strategy. Maybe you think you don’t have time to have the discussion. Or maybe you’re moving way too fast and the conversation hasn’t even crossed your mind.
Each of these scenarios happen often enough and as a strategic digital marketing partner it’s our job to safeguard against it happening to our clients.
Where do you start?
Determine how you’ll measure success of paid digital advertising campaigns
We can’t stress enough how important it is to determine how we’ll measure success prior to launching new campaigns. This is done on a per-client basis because end goals, strategies and specific initiatives are never one-size-fits-all.
When moving too quickly, you risk critical details slipping through the cracks. You might say “we need to get this campaign up and running” and completely leave out what you actually want to achieve. Those critical details can get lost in translation with so many moving parts, but our digital marketing team is accustomed to keeping an eye out for this.
Before digging into research and strategy development, we need to understand the why. When Danielle and the rest of our PPC Specialists are working with clients they’ll push for a discussion around why we’re executing a paid digital advertising strategy.
Knowing what’s driving the campaign ensures everyone is on the same page before we dig in and sets appropriate expectations on both sides. This helps your PPC Specialist better position your campaigns to prove ROI and results based on what you’re expecting to achieve.
Define a campaign performance measurement plan to lay the foundation for success
You might say your goal is top of funnel leads (i.e. people filling out a form), but the results you really want are MQLs that fit very specific criteria. Without carving out time to define how we’re measuring success and determine whether a specific initiative is going to directly affect your goals and objectives, we’d be doing you a disservice as a strategic digital marketing partner.
We’ll always push for these types of discussions because we know it gives your campaigns an advantage when we take time to do things the right way. Launching and managing successful campaigns is our responsibility as a partner and we take that seriously.
Have you developed a strategic plan for measuring success of your paid digital advertising campaigns?
Get in touch today to learn how we can create, launch and optimize successful campaigns for your company.
Stay tuned for Part 2 later this week where we’ll cover the importance of alignment between paid digital advertising goals and business objectives.
