If throwing money around could buy you customers, only rich businesses would become richer. You need to ask yourself – Am I pouring a lot of money into paid ad campaigns and not seeing results? I may be doing something wrong.
The Internet is a vast space where people skim through the newest content in minutes. To ensure that your ad reaches the right people, it’s important to invest smartly in ad campaigns. The landscape of paid ad campaigns is far bigger than you realise. Many businesses cater to their audience by reaching them through online channels. For most businesses, paid ads are effective and generate significant ROI. However, in many cases, businesses have no idea how much they are supposed to invest in an ad, how to choose platforms to run ads or how to target people who will resonate with their brand.
Ad campaigns are not a piece of cake. How do you make sure that your ads are effective? How do you ensure that your customers like the ad? Are you making sure that your business leverages advertising tools and platforms smartly to drive conversions? Let’s find out what paid ads are, how they benefit businesses, and why your paid campaigns are not working.
Paid Ads
Paid advertising is the newest trend where businesses reach a wider audience by running digital campaigns. Businesses pay to run ads on different digital platforms. There are different kinds of paid ads you can use for your business, product or service promotion. Paid ads are an excellent way to target your audience, increase visibility, improve business scalability and witness immediate impact.
At the top of the list are search ads. When customers go to search engines like Google Chrome to look find products or services, they get the top results on the search engine results page. The most common form of search ads is Google Ads. You can run other forms of paid ads on social media. Businesses run ad campaigns on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter). There are also video ads that you can run on YouTube. Finally, there are remarketing ads where businesses target customers who have previously interacted with the posted content.
Why Do Your Paid Campaigns Fail
Despite the efforts put into digital marketing through paid ads, why do businesses fail to scale their campaigns effectively?
There can be a number of reasons behind failed paid ad campaigns. You run ads to drive conversions, improve engagement and generate leads. But if your ad campaigns are not delivering expected results, you may need to find gaps in your existing campaign strategy or change it altogether.
Let’s look at some of the potential reasons why your paid campaigns fail to deliver and scale –
Poor Audience Targeting
You may be targeting your audience wrong. Paid ad platforms like Meta Ads Manager allow businesses to select demographics, interests and behaviour. Based on this data, you can target a wide range of audiences.
Suppose you run a bakery business and aim to target events like marriages, birthdays, anniversaries, etc, to deliver cakes. You can select the demographics on ad tools like Meta Ads Manager. You will need to provide the interests of your potential audience, along with the location and life events. All of this data will help you in targeting the right audience for your business. You can learn more about Meta Ads to improve audience targeting.
Hence, don’t just run your ads to a very wide audience. Select your audience carefully based on their location, interests and behavioural aspects. It may be possible that your ad is reaching thousands of people, but they are just not your potential customers.
Budget Misallocation
You must be aware that there are different platforms where you can run paid ad campaigns. It can be Google Ads, social media ads, banner ads on websites and mobile apps, video ads on YouTube or remarketing ads to target customers. You will need to determine where you will find your potential customers.
Did you know that over 70% of the Gen Z population researches products and brands on social media before making a purchase? For instance, if you are selling a product that Gen Z will resonate with, you can choose social media sites to run your paid ad campaigns. If you are a product-focused company that caters to a mixed audience, find out where your customers go to search for it. You can run Google Ads to provide a search-based visibility to your customers.
To put it simply, your budget misallocation is one of the many reasons your paid campaigns are not scaling. You can choose to run ads on different platforms. But you must allocate a larger part of the budget to the platforms where you think your customers will be present. You can categorise your ad budget on different platforms.
Weak Creatives
If your paid campaigns are not scaling, you may be using weak creatives. If your ad messages and creatives do not reflect the benefits of the product, the customers may not understand it. Try and create inspiring ads which leave a footprint in your customers’ minds. The creatives should be focusing on the benefits of the product instead of its features. Use relevant images and keep it simple. Authenticity is paramount. Your creatives should feel human and not too corporate. Don’t hide behind the bling and bring in actual creative ads that make an impact on your conversions, engagements and reach. For example, it should evoke an emotional response. Customers are forced to think about your brand. You can do this by creating catchy messages, a personalised tone and ad copies that look like they are made by real humans (and not artificial intelligence).
Issues with the Landing Page
Another factor behind limited engagement and conversion is an issue with the landing page. When customers see an ad they are interested in, they follow the CTA (call to action button). You must include relevant CTAs on your landing page so customers can follow up. The loading speed of the landing page must be effective. There should be simple and structured navigation on your landing page. In addition, you must ensure that your ad designs (banner, brochures, etc) are simple and deliver an important message.
Lack of Data-Driven Optimisation
You shouldn’t ignore the key metrics that help a business understand how its ads are performing. You should analyse key performance metrics like CVR (conversion rate), ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) and CPA (Cost per Acquisition). Professional ad platforms, like Meta Ads Manager, can help in evaluating the overall ad performance. A higher CVR percentage leads to a better ROAS. However, to maximise ROAS, you must optimise both CVR and CPA.
What Should You Do?
Paid ads are a great way to help your brand reach potential customers. The first step is doing a lot of research into understanding who your audience is. Your ads are not targeted at everyone. Your research will tell you where your customers are. If they are widely surfing social media platforms, your ads should target platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The paid ads will reach a large number of people, but the conversion rate depends on how your product solves their problem.
So, instead of focusing too much on your ‘products’, focus on how your product solves customers’ problems. You do not need flashy creatives or overly corporate designs. Meet your customers at their level. Place your content as per your marketing funnel. In addition, put some serious thought into your remarketing ad campaigns to target the audience who knows you already. You can create a winning marketing funnel campaign and run ads to reach potential customers. Ultimately, your goal is not to go for cheap clicks but quality traffic.
To Sum Up
Paid advertising will be optimum when every funnel is doing its job. The primary issues behind not scaling paid ads include no target market, no marketing funnel, budget misallocation, lack of analytics and flashy creatives. Your business will benefit immensely from paid campaigns if you know everything about your customer. The professional ad dashboards offer complete user control, where you can check analytics of how your ads are performing.
Let’s sort your marketing funnel and track those ads to better understand how we move forward. You can consult our marketing experts to leverage paid ad campaigns that drive growth and boost visibility. Your creatives should speak the language of your brand, and our experts at VerveOnlineMarketing will help you achieve that.
