Optimizing your paid advertising strategy on Google, Facebook, and other platforms is one of the best marketing investments. Making your ads cheaper and more effective will instantly increase your ROI and profits.
A good paid advertising strategy depends on 3 factors:
- Creating relevant content
- Defining hyper-segmented audiences
- Distributing content to those audiences in the most profitable way possible
This article will discover 7 ways to optimize these 3 factors to achieve incredible results.
7 ways to improve your advertising strategy
1) Clearly define your goals
Yes, we all know that you have to start with the objectives. But we have all made the mistake of going directly to execution.
Before creating ads, you need to think about what you’re trying to achieve. We can classify paid advertising campaigns into three main objectives: brand awareness, leads, and sales.
Being clear from the beginning about what you want to achieve will help you correctly define the budget and the results you expect, as well as communicate with your team and your managers as the campaign progresses.
To clearly define the objectives of any marketing campaign:
- Specific (“specific”): we must define what we want to achieve as much as possible.
- Measurable (“measurable”): We must associate our goal with a quantifiable metric to objectively track our progress.
- Achievable (“Achievable”) – Overly ambitious and unrealistic goals only demotivate the team. When in doubt, it is better to set several smaller goals and gradually achieve them.
- Relevant (“relevant”): The objective must be critical to the company and customers and related to the business’s overall goals.
- Timely (“temporary”): the objectives must be associated with deadlines.
2) Correctly distribute the budget
Another mistake that paid advertising strategies often fall into is not having a budget plan.
According to the recommendations of Social Media Examiner, the ideal is to dedicate between 5 and 12% of the income to advertising. The first figure allows us to maintain a constant and progressive level of growth, while the second is to expand more aggressively.
Once the global advertising budget has been determined, we have to distribute it among the three main objectives of paid advertising:
- 20% should be used to generate brand awareness through training, interaction, and audience generation campaigns. We will measure the success of these campaigns through indicators such as reach, impressions, or event registrations.
- 60% is focused on generating leads and sales, which is the part most directly related to ROI and profits. Here the most crucial metric will logically be the leads and sales generated.
- Finally, the remaining 20% would go to remarketing campaigns. These ads are very effective since they are directed at users who have already entered our sales process. But we only have to invest a relatively small part of the budget here since we have to expand the funnel with new audiences, and these campaigns would not allow us to do so.
3) Analyze what has worked
If you have already launched paid advertising campaigns that have worked well, you have an excellent reference to better target your strategy.
Before launching a new campaign, review your best ads from the past and ask yourself these questions:
- What was the content of the ad?
- Did creativity stand out for any particular reason?
- What kind of headline did you use to grab attention?
- How much reach did you manage to generate in terms of unique users and impressions?
- How long was the ad active?
- How did you segment the audience?
- If it was a display campaign, which placements performed best?
With all this data as a reference, you can plan the new campaign using the metrics of the previous one as a reference and direct the budget based on the previous expense.
4) Segment your audience as much as possible
Paid advertising platforms like Google Ads or Facebook Ad Manager have endless options to define the audience your ads are targeting.
The starting point for creating a tailored audience is their general characteristics, such as demographics, location, gender, or device type. But these filters continue to generate vast audiences, and we are interested in fine-tuning them as much as possible to reduce the CPA (cost per acquisition).
Therefore, to make your ads relevant and efficient, you need to explore Custom Audiences one step further. These audiences allow you to hyper-segment your ads and adapt your creatives as much as possible to improve efficiency. For example, if your paid advertising strategy is based on Facebook Ads, you can create these audiences using the Lookalike Audiences feature.
To customize your audience, you can use parameters like:
- Customer lists – You can create a custom audience from customer data you own (for example, an email list).
- Traffic to your website or app: With this option, Facebook and Google look for people who have already visited your site or your app to generate an audience.
- Facebook Interactions – Select people who have engaged with specific audiences on your Facebook Page, for example, by watching one of your videos.
- Interests: you have endless options to choose from to find the public interested in the most relevant topics for your brand.
In addition, if you use Google Ads, you can review reports from previous campaigns to identify the most effective placements and target campaigns to users who have visited competitor pages.
5) Use your best organic content
Good news: if you want to create a brand awareness campaign, you don’t need to create content from scratch. Moreover, to achieve the best results, it is best to look at the organic content that has worked best for you and reuse it since you already know that it is the one that most connects with your audience.
Review the analytics of your website and other content marketing channels and filter the content that has been shared and generated the most significant number of interactions. Then turn them into social media ads geared toward awareness goals.
For maximum effectiveness, try to focus above all on “evergreen” content, that is, content that is not focused on current news and that you can share at any time of the year. This way, you won’t have to worry about constantly starting and stopping your ads.
6) Learn from your social networks
Like your organic content, your social networks are a gold mine regarding your audience’s tastes. In addition to getting insights from your channels, you can also research your competition to get answers to questions like what types of posts drive the most engagement.
To facilitate this analysis, we recommend using specialized tools such as BuzzSumo’s Facebook Page Analyzer, which allows you to compare your organic activity on social networks with up to 8 competitor pages.
To use it, you can first go to the Facebook Pages tool and write a topic that interests you in the search engine. You will see a bunch of results from pages related to that topic. Select the 9 you prefer and click on the option to compare selected pages. You will be able to see a complete report of the performance of these 9 pages, including data such as:
- Posts shared by the Page.
- Reactions to posts.
- Interaction with publications over time.
- Average interactions per day of publication.
- Average interactions per post hour.
- Average interactions by post type.
- Average interactions by several characters.
With all this data, you can create the ideal publication to generate the maximum interaction rates and convert it into a paid advertising campaign to generate more notoriety.
7) Align your paid advertising strategy with your sales cycle
To maximize your ROI, knowing when your audience is most receptive to your messages is essential.
Trend data can help you discern demand patterns and potential buying cycles based on product features. To get an idea, you can do keyword research on Google Trends and see in which months the most searches are done.
Then use this data to tailor your campaign planning. For example, if demand for your product spikes in the summer, you can launch awareness campaigns around May and spend more of your budget on the acquisition and remarketing in July and August.