The primary reason why paid advertising (search, display, social) often fails | Weboptim
Investing money in a paid advertising campaign that is doomed to die is not the best strategy. Time and time again, companies starting out in advertising don't see success for the same reason: they don't know their audience. No trust, no recognition, so the cost per click is high and rising.
As it usually happens:
There is a CEO or owner who talks to the marketer: "We have a very good new product, let's show it to the world."
The marketer's answer is vivid: "Okay, we'll launch some online ads to help spread the message and get some traffic and conversions."
A few months later: "How's your paid advertising campaign going?", "Bad news, not so good."
The cycle
This is almost always the result of a cycle. There is a new campaign. The campaign is designed to sell something or get a reaction, it's trying to drive visitors to the website, to multiple subpages, and it's trying to get conversions. So we buy Facebook, Instagram ads, maybe we advertise on Linkedin and Twitter. We probably use the Google Display network. All these sources are trying to drive traffic to the website, which is then converted into conversions or money.
Well, what happens is that they have a high click cost. Initially, this cost is almost always high because these are new campaigns and we don't have experience with any of these platforms.
Of course, these high CPC costs will normalise if we get high engagement. But instead of proving this engagement, we often settle for low click-through rates, low engagement and low conversion rates. People don't put us there.
Why is this happening?
If these metrics are low, if click-through rates are low on the platforms, if no one engages with Facebook ads, no one interacts with Instagram ads, no one clicks on Adwords ads or display ads, costs go up and as a result these campaigns become much harder to monetise and reach far fewer people. So the audience reach is lower, the cost of reaching one person goes up.
This is basically because..
- the audience we're trying to reach has never heard of us. They don't know who we are.
- they don't know, trust or like our products, they don't click. They don't buy, they don't share, they don't like.
Of course there are exceptions. You can see some new companies whose product types fit well with Instagram ads, capture the audience's attention and don't need an existing brand audience. So this is not always the case, but it is often the case.
The solution
There is only one solution and it is not very nice. You have to know your audience before you spend money on advertising.
That means investing in organic channels - content, SEO, press, PR, sponsorship, events - all the places where people can get to know your brand and product name.
Brand advertising can really do that. TV advertising, for example, can reduce cost per click, increase engagement and click-through rates because people have heard of us, they know who we are. Magazine and offline advertising work in a similar way. Sometimes even display advertising is effective.
The second option is to
Promote primarily or exclusively to an audience that is already available to us.
You can do this the same way Google remarketing works. You can do the same on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, upload email addresses to create a custom audience. We can target people who already follow us. Through these, we can achieve better engagement, better click-through rates, better conversion rates, lower click-through costs and reach a wider audience.
But if we don't do these things first, many times these investments go to waste. Look for niche layers where advertising can work primarily.
Source: moz.com