You are about to commence an online campaign. Your budget has been set, you have done your banners, included a Call-to-action (CTA), placed it on relevant display advertising platforms and, finally, you kick-start the campaign excited only to discover after a period that your campaign is not doing so well. You get frustrated and as far as you are concerned the campaign is a failure.
Before you label your campaign just that, here are some things to consider. You just might have goofed in at least one way. We will consider some of the reasons why your campaigns seem to fail.
1. Understanding your audience/market
No matter how knowledgeable you might be, even as an online/digital marketer, lacking in-depth knowledge of your market/audience can be the number reason why your campaign fails. Like the saying goes, if you want to be a good fisherman, think like a fish. You need to know your audience’ wants and needs. You need to know; what they are searching for; sites they visit; their interests, in other words, know how they think. Not understanding your audience is like one who uses the best equipment to hunt for a shark in fresh water. Understanding your audience enables you target appropriately.
2. Relevant image text and Call to Action (CTA)
Your campaigns need to have a good descriptive banner with relevant CTA. It is the way you get people to take action when they see any of your campaigns. So imagine you are starting your online campaign and you need people to partake in your quiz so that they can win a trip to watch the UEFA finals. You put out two banner ads – we will call them sample 1 and sample 2 respectively.
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Now, sample 1 is just a banner without an image text or a CTA (non-descriptive banner) while sample 2 is a banner having both. Sample 1 can pass for a reminder of the semi-final fixtures (for the football enthusiasts) and, definitely, not a banner ad because there is nothing to show that it is one in the first place. No prospective visitor will likely click on this, unless out of curiosity. However, sample 2 is definitely a banner ad. It is simply saying that you have the opportunity to watch the finals by taking part in the quiz. It surely has a chance of being clicked.
3. Reasonable goals or expectations from the campaign
A half-filled or a half-empty cup is the reflection from different individuals on the same item. I have seen, on many occasions, where clients want to have it all. They even feel that their big budgets can get them whatever they desire. They forget that they can’t force the proverbial horse to drink though they succeeded in taking it to the stream. There is a BIG difference between ‘Paid advertising’ and ‘Buying traffic’. It is always good to have expectation levels that are not on the high side so as not to be heavily disappointed when things go a bit wrong. There should be room for alternatives. For example, if your goal is to sell X product of an item Y, alternatives could be: Was there an improvement in your site’s traffic? Did you get more sign-ups or subscriptions during the campaign as compared to before the campaign? Were there notable sales of other items other than item Y? If your alternatives are positive then it could be that the campaign was not bad after all. The problem could be the nature of the campaign item.
4. Nature of your product
Some products sell faster than others. A company that sells phones will sell 100x more than a company that sells cars. A car company will sell many cars even before a John Deere sells one of its heavy duty equipment. In terms of expectations, the phone company will have the greatest expectation while the company that deals in heavy equipment will have the least expectation for its online campaigns.
5. Good quality banner ads
For your Ads to speak well of your brand you need to have good looking banners. They could be in jpeg, png or gif formats but needs to be appealing to the eyes. Flashing images are no more welcomed. They have been relegated to the ‘Spam’ category. Banners should be less wordy – images should do more of the talking. A very good banner ad should be understood almost by looking at the image and adding a CTA and image texts to further buttress what the image is trying to say.
If you have tried this and many more and the campaign still isn’t working, then it is either you need to
- Give out more incentives but not at the detriment of the business. Such incentives could be in the form of: a car dealer offering 6 months free servicing for every customer that buys a car on their lot or a bus company offering to give a free night’s accommodation to every customer traveling on a particular bus route etc. OR
- The problem could be from the product angle as perceived from the public eye. This is usually the case with new products or it could be that past users experience with one of your products has made them skeptical about any other product you are offering. Recall that a customer with a bad user experience will likely tell 10 more people about that experience and those 10 will likely not buy the product. To solve this would require heavy advertising – both offline and online and even re-branding.
**This discussion is not just limited to companies offering products. It can also be applied to the service industry**
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