Common Advertising Goals (and how to reach them)

So you’ve decided to take up advertising. Before you begin, it’s important to know what your goals are going to be for each campaign that you run. Without a plan, you may end up using the wrong messaging, targeting the wrong audience, or just simply leaving much too much up to chance. Read on to learn a bit about the common advertising goals you might have and how to tackle each one through digital advertising.

Brand Awareness

While you’re always looking to increase sales, there is much more than one road you can take to get there. Many times, especially when your business is new or is operating in a new market, you need to increase awareness about your product, service, or brand before people will consider buying. In order to do this, you want to use messaging that’s engaging and informative and target a specific audience type commonly referred to as “top of funnel” or “information seekers.”

The Top of the Funnel

Marketers learn, through their education and/or experience, that the buying process is a journey. In the beginning of the process, also known as the ‘top,’ people are searching for information about different products. If they’re looking to buy a car in the next few months, they’re probably comparing models and reading up on new features. Eventually, this person will move further down the buying process and decide on a car to buy. Before this person gets there, it’s important to serve them your ads with your information. This reinforces awareness of your brand, product or service, and increases the likelihood that they’ll remember and visit your store to make the purchase.

Campaign Setup for Brand Awareness

For a brand awareness campaign, you want to make sure you are targeting people in the ‘information seeking phase’. These are people actively browsing Google, asking questions on social media, and posting questions on various forums related to the product or service.

The ads you choose should be informative and engaging – offering information, NOT SELLING. This works best on social media, such as Facebook, LinkedIN, or Twitter. Since they may not be searching for your product specifically, targeting users through display ads is a form of outbound marketing that can put your message in front of them at just the right time in their buying journey.

Landing pages should be full of information specific to what the user was searching for. If you catch someone’s attention with a great ad but send to them to an irrelevant landing page, you will lose them. Point them towards a blog, FAQs, article, or anything else that helps them gain the information they’re seeking. While they may not buy today, they’ll gain trust in your brand and will use that in their purchasing decision down the line A great tip to keep them engaged is to have them sign up for your newsletter.

Website Traffic

While many businesses may view this as a metric rather than a goal or KPI, others benefit greatly from a campaign generated towards website traffic. Businesses who rely on their website and its offerings as their service, such as informational sites, need to draw users to their site in order to show them the full breadth of their offering.

Campaign Setup for Website Traffic

When creating ads to generate website traffic, focus on engaging content that’s topical and well-written. AVOID CLICK-BAIT at all costs. You can get tons of clicks on an ad if you promise them the world, but they won’t stay on your website if it isn’t what was advertised.

A good starting point is to select your best-written article or page on your website, often referred to as your ‘cornerstone content,’ and build an ad around that. You want to target people interested in the topic, so mix social media with search / display ads to find the right audience. Continue to tweak and tailor your audience based on who spends more time on your websites. It may take some trial and error, but having a test and learn mindset is a major priority in any digital marketing effort.

Lead Generation

Lead generation involves getting more interested potential clients to your business. While it is a precursor to sales, revenue, and ROI, it specifically deals with increasing the number of potential clients you or your sales team speak to within a given time. The simplest way to think of it is calls – lead generation gets your phone ringing more. Any business can benefit from a lead generation campaign, but one with a great sales strategy will get the most out of it.

Remember: In order for your lead generation efforts to be successful, you need to be able to speak to and close the leads. If you can’t answer more calls in the day, increase you capacity before generating leads.

Campaign Setup for Lead Generation

The backbone of a lead generation campaign lies in a contact form or phone number. Contact forms are typically preferred, as tracking the number of form submissions is easier than tracking the number of sales phone calls. You need to capture the leads, so some form of offer or enticing reason for a lead to sign up is preferred.

Like in any sales effort, avoid promising something unrelated to your product. A free hat for signing up for an email list may get you a lot of email lists, but you’ll be down a lot of hats and not up many customers. Something like 15% off their service price, a free consultation, or a free hat after they purchase your service ensures that the people signing up for your service are also interested in your product.

Depending on your service or product, it may make sense to invest more into search ads (like Google) or social media ads (Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn). Either way, you should probably be investing in both. Make sure the ad clearly states your offer or value proposition and encourages action. Your audience should be towards the middle or end of the buying phase and actively comparing offers.

Increase Sales

Aside from generating leads, you may have a goal to increase the total volume of sales. If you operate an online store, SaaS, or even a physical in-person store, you may want to set a goal to increase your sales in order to turn over inventory or make more overall revenue for the quarter. While in-store sales (retail, food) may involve different tools or ad setups as SaaS, the overall strategy remains the same – increase the number of sales by prioritizing ads towards people most likely to buy your product now.

Inventory Ads – A Quick Overview

While not specific to the ‘increase sales’ goal, it’s worth pausing to mention inventory ads. Inventory ads are available on Google and other advertising platforms and allow you to list your current available inventory for sale. This can be for in-store (physical locations) or e-commerce (or both), and is typically updated daily. This feature is a huge bonus for any business that sells any type of product, as it allows your products to show up on search results alongside big box retailers and national e-commerce brands. The ads show both online ordering and physical store inventory (when nearby the location), allowing you to capitalize on your sales no matter how your customers prefer to buy.

Paramount to the success of your inventory ads, however, is your ability to update your inventory on a daily basis. Investing in a programmer or advertising specialist that can set this up for you is well worth it.

Campaign Setup for Increase Sales Goals

For a sales or volume-based goal, you want to prioritize an audience that is most likely to purchase now. You have two main sources of figuring this out:

1. Your internal data
2. External / AI-assisted data

Your own internal data is typically the best starting point, as it can paint the best picture of your ideal consumer. This includes order history, membership data, or anything else your storing and using to analyze your business. Many platforms, including Google, allow you to upload customer data in a hashed, privacy-safe way and use it to inform the AI of what your ideal consumer looks like. The ad platform can then use this information to serve ads to new potential customers that may be as likely to purchase.

External or AI-assisted data can come from many sources, but the most common is to use the tools available to you in your ad platform. Setting a campaign goal of “increase sales” will help guide the automatic ad-serving tools to try and tailor your audience towards ones most likely to purchase. However, AI is only as good as the data you feed it, so it’s always best to pair with internal data to get the ball rolling in the right direction.

A mix of the two can be found in remarketing campaign setups. In a remarketing campaign, you use website data to create a list of users that visited your site and took a meaningful action. Most commonly, this list will be built off people who visited a page but didn’t sign up, or started a shopping cart but didn’t check out. Ad platforms will use this data to serve ads to those specific users and people like them, ensuring your AI-assisted data is always growing.

Your ads should be direct action – show your product and give them a quick and easy way to purchase. Inventory ads, discussed above, allows consumers to browse and purchase directly from the search results. Also consider using discounts or special time-limited offers to encourage an increase in sales. Send offers to your existing customers, as well. The goal is to push the volume of sales, so do so while staying within your margins.

Increase Return on Investment (ROI)

Your lead flow is strong, sales are up, and you upgraded your server to handle all the new traffic to your website. When capacity gets to its limit and all the rest of the gears are running well, the next step is undoubtedly increasing your profit and growing your business. Return on investment goals play a key role here in allowing you to squeeze the most efficiency out of your current marketing spend.

Key to truly understanding your ROI, however, is mastering a cross-collaboration and data analysis setup that is often easier to say than do. A few things are necessary for a strong ROI strategy, including:

1. A ton of useful, current internal data (and the means to analyze it)
2. Cross collaboration between many departments, including finance, marketing, and operations.
3. Budget set for testing and experimentation
4. Time

Let’s run through those a little:

Internal Data

Ad platforms, like Google, have great tools to help you track your ROI and spend down to the ad and click. However, any sales or conversions that happened outside of Google, such as in your physical store, will not be counted unless you specifically add it. You may also want to understand your ROI as it pertains to all of your marketing spend, including materials and offline promotions. In order to properly understand any of these figures, you need to have a strong internal data set and the means to analyze and understand it.

Cross Collaboration

To access and understand all of your data and KPIs, you need to reach across many departments to get the full picture. This can often be a challenge for companies used to operating in silos. A good way to get started is to come up with shared KPIs with the executive team. A shared KPI of revenue between finance and sales can help keep both accountable without letting any department feel like they are being dragged down by the other. When KPIs are shared, working towards company goals becomes exciting and the teams begin to move in lock-step.

Experimentation and Testing Budgets

If this isn’t something your currently budgeting for, you should consider it when assessing your ROI. In order to fully understand ROI and optimize towards the things that improve it, you will need to run tests and experiments on your data and campaign setups. Such experiments include Marketing Mix Models, which take into account all marketing functions, Lift Experiments, which analyze the increase in a metric based on a change in a campaign, and Regression analysis, which helps predict future results by helping to identify relationships between two metrics. A percent of your total ad spend should be budgeted towards experiments in order to maximize the efficiency of all of your campaigns (not just ROI).

Time

Critically tied to the previous item in this list, time is necessary to run your experiments and tests and fully optimize your ROI campaigns. To help speed things along, predictive analysis such as Regression Analysis can help you make strategic decisions on key metrics to optimize for in order to get better results. While doing this, you’ll still need to run your tests and experiments to optimize individual campaigns, ads, etc.

Campaign Setup for Increase ROI Goals

Campaign setup is going to be largely decided by your experimentation, testing, and predictive analysis results. Optimize towards the best ‘winners’ of your results and continue to test new variations as time goes on. For social media ads, consider reusing an ad or post that worked well in the past, or including it in your experimentation.

Similar to increase sales, you want to make sure your encouraging direct action and ensuring high conversion rates. Your Lift experiments can help you understand how a change in one of your ads can effect your sales and your volume, allowing you to find the sweet spot between the two that leads to the best ROI.

In Conclusion

These are only a few of the goals you may have when running online ads, but they are a great starting point for any business. Other goals, like getting more app downloads, follow similar logic as what was described above. Remember to test and experiment whenever you can, and maintain consistency between your ad copy and your landing pages for the best user experience and ad optimization.

See you next time!