Advertising is not magic; it’s a well-constructed process. People aren’t going to buy something from a brand just because it ran an ad. There are other rules at work here. It usually starts with the question – what does the company want to get out of the ad? As a rule, most want one thing – to attract customers. Literally, this request can be understood as: bring us customers who will be willing to buy right now. And in this goal, there is a serious problem.
The Sales Department Isn’t Ready to Sell
It happens that the sales department is used to working only with the hot audience – those who come to the company with a specific purpose to buy. In essence, these people only need to prepare an invoice for payment. If the sales department is solely concerned with this kind of task, the business is constantly losing potential customers.
This means that salespeople cannot work with an audience that is not ready to buy right now and still has doubts, considering, among other things, the offers of competitors. These people need to be persuaded. And this is the job of the sales department, regardless of whether it offers clients to try poker online or buy expensive wedding dresses.
If the sales department isn’t ready to work, the advertising will probably be more trouble than good. When the company starts getting calls from potential customers, salespeople won’t be able to sell them anything.
Remember that advertising by itself doesn’t sell. It only brings people who are interested in the product. Next, people need to work with them.
Not Formulated Purpose for Advertising
You need to write down the sales funnel, to understand what stages the potential client goes through.
The correct goal for advertising is not to attract those who are ready to buy immediately but to involve potential customers in the sales funnel. Involve them from a stage with a low entry threshold, especially if you have to work with an expensive or complex product.
Once people are involved in the sales funnel, they need to be promoted through that funnel. Even if they are far from buying, they need to be reminded from time to time.
The Sales Funnel Isn’t Set up
Let’s say your company provides apartment repair services. Before you sign a contract, you provide a consultation on the service. That way, you can attract customers at the consultation stage. But people don’t actually sign up for a consultation for nothing, they learn about you from somewhere. The pre-consultation stage is getting to know you. In order to get the target audience to know as much as possible about the company, they usually create content and post it online.
It’s the interested audience that you need to push for the free consultation. You can run advertising campaigns that will suggest ordering a consultation. You can also promote content to introduce the company to as many people as possible, thereby increasing conversion to the next stage of the funnel.
Not Measuring Results
It’s impossible to manage online advertising, optimize and improve its effectiveness without measuring results. After formulating the goal of an advertising campaign, it’s worth asking the question – is the result you want to get measurable in principle?
If you need the result of attracting customers, in other words, specific deals and payments, then you need to be sure that you are technically able to track who exactly of those who saw the ad eventually became a client. This task is solved by end-to-end analytics.
You Run One Ad for All Stages of the Sales Funnel
The more complex the sales funnel, the more likely it is that you have to run separate types of ad campaigns with their own metrics for each stage of the funnel.
Once you’ve determined what you want to run ads for, figure out how you’ll measure the result, what techniques you’ll use, and what the margin of error of any particular measurement method is.
For advertising to work, you need to implement analytics beforehand. And it’s not just installing a metric counter on your site. You need to determine what target actions a user can perform on the site.
Then you need to break down all the actions into stages of the sales funnel. After that, set up technical event tracking by installing counters from all the advertising systems you’re going to advertise in.
Determine for which ad campaigns what action will be a priority. For example, if you decide to have a free webinar for your potential clients, the ad campaign that gathers an audience will have registrations for the event as the main metric.
The Marketing Base Isn’t Prepared
This is what the future advertising campaign is built on. This description of the product, its features, the target audience, the allocation of individual segments.
Understand why people buy your product, what features are decisive for different segments of the audience.
Group these segments, write down for each what is important to them, what are the objections of a particular segment and what becomes a barrier to purchase.
Without all this preparatory work, you will not be able to run effective advertising, namely to create those advertising texts and creatives that will work.
Not Researching Your Competitors
By talking to your customers, you will find out exactly who your competitors are. When making a purchase, they choose from a variety of options that sometimes don’t even cross your mind. And all of this needs to be taken into account when creating future advertising campaigns.
Mistakes Made When Creating an Offeror
An offer is a specific wording of what you offer people and in what words. For example, if at the stage of studying the segments of the target audience you realized that there are people for whom fast delivery is very important, then all the advertising creativity should revolve around this advantage. It’s important to use visuals that support this message.
No Technical Audit
Before launching the ads, test how the ad pages display on different devices and in different browsers. Test the actions an engaged customer will take.
If the landing page displays poorly, loads slowly, and can’t be used to place an order, the campaign is bound to fail.
