So many choices..

Finding the audience & creative that works needs preparation, research, market knowledge and testing.

There are a lot of ways for you to spend you online advertising budget, and each platform will be happy to tell you why theirs is the best, so it can be tough to figure out exactly where your money will be most effective and provide the best return on your ad spend.

We need to kick off with a proper understanding of what you’re selling, and who your typical customer might be.  We can take that and discover the various ways in which people search that may lead them to becoming a conversion (product specific, solution based, category, informational) – then refine that data and start to build campaigns around visibility for the relevant phrases.

Alongside that, we need at least a basic understanding of your typical customer journey.  Are we talking about something that falls into impulse purchase territory for most people?  Is it a considered decision that takes time and discussion with other decision makers?  I might be happy to splash out £20 on a t-shirt I really like based on one ad, but there’s no chance I’m buying a couch without consulting with the family and researching the market a little.

That information (which we can gather and refine as we progress) informs the planning of your campaigns.  Prospecting ads which go to relevant but relatively broad searches and interests let you build an audience that demonstrates interest or engagement in your product or service, and then retargeting lets you further inform about the additional benefits, overcome potential objections and ensure potential customers are armed with the information they need to eventually convert.

The strategy depends heavily on the product or service and the market.

That’s why the best place to start isn’t jamming a lot of relevant keywords into a google ads campaign, it’s discussing the offering, thinking about the unique selling points and segmenting the market appropriately.  In turn, that lets us segment the ad campaigns to match and in doing so, take relevant messaging to audiences at each stage of their decision making.

That’s not one platform – for example, you might bring your initial traffic in via google ads or TikTok and retarget via Facebook and Instagram, or the social networks generate the awareness that’s then capitalised upon by other channels.

As you can imagine, it needs a test and learn strategy for you to get to the point where you know you have the best ads running for each of these segments and decision making points, but there are proven methods we use for initial segmentation which will get us off to a strong start.