online ads

The Biggest Thing Holding Back Your Online Ads Isn’t What You Think

Think you know why your online ads aren’t performing? Discover the real factors that impact online ads performance and how to boost your ROI effectively.

Online ads performance is often one of the biggest sources of frustration for marketing teams and business owners alike. It feels like you’ve done everything by the book, and yet you see minimal results. If that sounds like you, it’s probably because you didn’t do your homework first.

The biggest thing holding back your online ads has nothing to do with optimization (though of course that’s important) and everything to do with your understanding of your customers and how they make buying decisions.

So if you’ve shelled out a ton of money to marketing experts who claim to deliver big results and underperform time and again, it likely has to do with a misstep much earlier in the marketing planning process than in selecting keywords, drafting ad copy and optimizing ad spend.

What It Means to Really Know Your Customers

Good marketing plans include a full buyer persona outlining who your customers are, what they want, and what pain points they’ve experienced in their search for solutions to their marketing needs.

Too many marketing plans include antiquated customer bios, such as those that state the customer’s gender, income level and geography. But these bios only give you a tiny glimpse into who your customer is.

Modern marketing customer personas tell you more, such as:

  • Interests
  • Motivations
  • Objections
  • Pain points
  • Goals

And the deeper you go there, the more you can understand how your customers shop for products and solutions like what you offer and where they’ve been before they ever encounter your brand.

What Are Customer Insights?

Customer personas give way to customer insights or data that tells you more about consumer behavior, such as purchase history and decision-making. By tapping into these insights, you can gain perspective into what your customers value, where they seek recommendations, and how much they are willing to pay for products like yours.

While that might sound like information you only need for R&D, this data is worth far more than that. This tells you how to position your products and build personalized marketing messages that improve the customer experience, increase conversion and improve customer satisfaction.

Plus, when you have customer insights, you can use those to reduce friction points throughout the customer buying journey to make buying simple and straightforward.

The more customer insights you can glean, the better your emotional connections with your target audience will likely be.

How to Collect Customer Insights

If you haven’t given customer insights or buyer personas much attention up to this point, don’t worry, you still have time to revise the way in which you strategize your marketing. Instead of guessing or theorizing about how and why customers buy your products, you can use a variety of data sources to collect customer insights.

  • Surveys: During crucial moments in the customer buying journey, customers or prospects share what made them buy or not buy your products and services. This might be via a website pop-up or follow-up email if you have their email address. Loyal customers who have been around for many years hold valuable insights that might be worth gathering via in-person or digital one-on-one sessions.
  • Social media: Get real-time insights from your customers based on their interests, trends, and brand sentiment. Monitor what others are saying about you closely.
  • Website analytics: Your website holds a wealth of knowledge, so long as it’s getting some traffic from real customers and prospects. The hard part for companies getting started and looking to run ads is that they have a chicken and the egg scenario, where they need the ads to generate traffic, but they need traffic for data to inform the ads. More mature companies will find that their websites hold a wealth of information.
  • Customer feedback: The tickets and inquiries you get from your customers can tell you a great deal. Make sure you’re tracking customer inquiries and gathering data from customer service calls and emails. These will tell you more about your customer’s challenges and what’s not clear to them about setup processes, onboarding or product use.
  • Sales data: Look for purchase patterns or customer behavior and preferences to inform how you sell and where you market moving forward.
  • Customer relationship management (CRM) data: Ideally, you have good software and tools to inform your marketing team. If you aren’t sure what to buy, read our full guide on the affordable, robust platform Zoho One.
  • Third-party research: The challenge with this one is that it is costly to bring in market researchers to better understand your customers. But when you can afford it, this can provide great insights into what your customers want and need.
  • User testing: Watch and learn from how your customers use your products or services. This can help you adapt your products based on issues the customer faces or their preferences. User testing could lead you to new products or ideas you hadn’t considered.

A word of caution as you work to gather data for customer insights. Don’t go into it looking for a certain outcome. Marketers have a bias toward certain outcomes. And when they allow that bias to motivate their research, they come out of it with their own concepts instead of truly seeing how and why their customers buy their products.

The Difference Between Qualitative and Quantitative Data

One more thing marketers must know before drawing conclusions about their customers and their buying habits is the difference between qualitative and quantitative data. Qualitative tells you more about the customer’s feelings, opinions and what motivates them. Some ways you might gather this type of data include:

  • Rich text survey questions that allow a customer to share their thoughts
  • Customer interviews
  • Focus groups
  • Online comments and reviews

In contrast, quantitative data tells you how often, how much or how many with clear and definitive numbers. You might gather this type of data through:

  • Sales numbers
  • Customer behavior, such as click-through rates and conversion rates
  • Social media likes, shares and comment frequency
  • Website analytics
  • Multiple-choice or Likert-scale questions on a survey

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Informing Marketing Messaging

You have marketing data, now what? Just because you know why customers buy your products doesn’t mean you know what to do with that information.

It should inform your marketing messaging or the way in which you convince your customers and prospects to visit your website, buy your product or schedule a demo.

Too often, marketing messaging comes from a room full of marketers who find a catch phrase or headline cute or catchy. And while that might be true and the customer might find it entertaining, it doesn’t mean it will motivate them to take the next step with your company.

Now that you have insights, you can use those insights to reach your customer by writing great ad copy.

For example, let’s say you own a pizza shop. You learn that customers tend to buy your pizzas for large gatherings due to your volume discounts, but they shy away from it for a casual Friday night, favoring the more gourmet options in the area.

Now you know that your target market is parties and events. So instead of claiming the best pizza in town, you should be claiming the best prices in town to feed your crew. No matter how creative you get with your catch phrases and headlines, targeting the gourmet pizza scene likely won’t resonate. Instead, your message might look more like:

Value and Quality Go Together Like Cheese and Pepperoni

Or

Fast, Simple, Delicious For You and Your Friends

Or

Tailgates Are Better Outside the Kitchen

Now you’ve used market data and insights to inform your messaging to make it that much more effective at guiding your customer toward exactly what they are looking for by speaking to their wants and needs, in this case, good pizza at a fair price for large orders.

Advertising Where Customers Research You

Now comes the slightly harder part. You need to understand how customers begin their buying journey. This starts before they visit your website and tells you where you should advertise. Too often, companies assume that Google is the end-all all be-all. And while that might be true for some brands, others find greater value in advertising on other platforms or using other Google ad formats outside of search results.

For example, your pizza company might find success marketing on social media to middle-aged parents who host birthday parties, sports celebrations or kids club gatherings. Using interests to reach parents before they decide what to serve at their next party could be better than using Google ads because, at that point, the parent might just be looking for a phone number to order, since they’ve decided who to order from for their party based on conversations with friends and family.

Use geofencing and location-based targeting to ensure you’re reaching customers who might be interested in your products or services if you own a brick-and-mortar location.

And if you have website traffic, retarget customers who visited your site but didn’t convert. While this requires more advanced website metrics and insights, it’s well worth the time in programming Google Analytics as to what a conversion is and what happens when a customer doesn’t convert.

When Influencers or Affiliates Make Sense

Today’s ads take many forms. You might not need to advertise solely using traditional ads. Influencer marketing can be just as effective or more effective, depending on your industry and the influencers available to you. The right influencer with a solid following that matches your target demographic is well worth it because those followers are there because they trust the influencer’s opinion on things.

When traditional social media ads produce mediocre results, influencers offer another opportunity to test and evaluate. Just make sure you have access to good metrics to decide whether this is a tactic you should keep employing. Some influencers offer more robust data post-campaign than others.

Another opportunity to consider with your online ads is affiliate marketing. This is when you use other brands to evaluate and talk about your brand to reach your audience. This might be a third-party website that reviews products and provides customers with insights into the product’s pros and cons, or it might be an influencer who genuinely loves using your product and wants to share that experience with their audience, while earning some money on each sale.

Testing, Tracking and Pivoting

Even with a wealth of data and customer feedback to guide you in your online ads and other marketing initiatives, you must test, track and pivot your campaigns.

What does that mean? Start with multiple ad sets where you test various messaging. Online ads are a great place to see what resonates best with your customers. From there, you can adjust messaging until you find the market differentiators that resonate best with your customers.

But you won’t find these wins if you don’t start with a variety of messages and watch your ads closely. Before making changes, make sure your ads have served enough impressions to give you good insights.

With time, your winning ad set might no longer win. You’ll need to freshen it up from time to time to keep it resonating with your prospects and customers effectively.

Sometimes, a company can’t find success with certain types of ads despite its best efforts. If you find that your reality, pivot. Don’t keep spending money in an area that isn’t working. Pivoting might mean bringing in experts to evaluate and adjust the ads for you, or it might mean testing new platforms to see if you can get better results elsewhere.

Regardless, online ads are not something you set up, leave and hope for great results. You must review and optimize them regularly.

Online Ad Experts with Impressive Marketing Know-How

Ultimately, if you choose to use a third party for your online ads, you need to make sure they know marketing strategy and not just online ad setup. That means discussing how they gather customer data to learn more about how your customers shop and explore products within your industry.

New Light Digital offers a team of experts that is well-versed in all aspects of marketing, not just online ads. We’ll develop strong ad sets, review your customer data to look for opportunities, and set your online campaigns up for success with deep insights into who your customers are and how they reach your company.
Schedule your free consultation now to learn more about our expertise and how we can help you take your online ads to the next level and improve ROI.

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