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We’ve worked with thousands of clients, from almost every industry—real estate, legal, e-commerce, education, medical, political, and more. Which means we’ve seen a LOT of different business marketing strategies. We know what works best and what will eventually flop.
In this blog, we’ve put together the most common advertising questions we receive from clients, including their biggest hurdles, challenges, and errors. We quickly take their problems and turn them into challenges to solve. And they end up with amazing results.
Common Marketing Mistakes We Often See
Your Brand is Too Generic
Every company needs something that shows they are different and better than their competition. They need a unique selling proposition in their ads, on their site, and a cohesive voice and branding to back that up.
Your Targeting is Too Broad
Going after too large of a geographic region without enough budget behind a campaign will make it so the right audience does not see your ads as many times as needed to get them to convert. We often see people who believe their audience is very niche or granular when they’re actually going after 5 major metropolitans mixed with two very broad demographics. This common misconception often leads to advertisers believing they should see results fast, but they are not getting adequate ad penetration and the repetition needed to be successful. These marketers need to fine tune their targeting to be more specific and adjust their messaging to be more personalized to those specific groups.
You’re Relying on Emotion Instead of Data
If you aren’t tracking results, start there. After that, let the campaign run long enough to have data and analyze the data often. Finally, make actionable decisions based on the data, not on your emotions.
Genius Monkey COO Travis Champ said that some advertisers think they know exactly what their target audience looks like, but they’re often just assuming they know this information instead of relying on data.
Champ said, “It can be a struggle for some to make the switch of relying on and utilizing the data when it goes against what they traditionally know about their industry and company. Programmatic and digital marketing in general may often go against the mindset of traditional marketing, which is a hard thing to adapt to. It’s important to be open-minded.”
For example, a golf apparel brand may believe their audience is finding their brand from golf and other sports-related websites, such as ESPN. However, after running programmatic for a few weeks, they see the data shows a large percent of customers found them through a recipe website. The company may not believe that data is accurate because they assume the wrong audience was targeted. After a few months, however, they may come to realize that their customers really are coming from these other websites they may never have thought of before.
You’re Not Split Testing or You’re Testing Incorrectly
Most savvy marketers have run split tests, but many don’t test on a consistent basis. Perhaps they ran a split test three years ago and found that ads with the color red worked better than ads with the color blue in them, so they decided to run red ads forever. The problem with this is that your audience changes month to month—buyers are always changing—so you should be testing more frequently.
Champ said, “I’m not the same person I was last year, so I’m not going to click on the same thing. If you’re not split testing, you’re probably losing potential customers, and may in turn end up getting left in the dust.”
For those who are running split tests, make sure you’re testing correctly. Be sure to include a control in your ad sets and avoid having too many variables. If there’s no control or anything consistent, you won’t know why one ad performed better than another.
You Aren’t Taking Knowledge from One Campaign to the Whole Business
What you learn from your split testing and campaign data should be applied to all other parts of your business.
Let’s take an auto dealer, for example. If they learn that “$500 off” works better than an APR percentage rate advertisement, they need to take that offer and put it on their websites, in their TV ads, and anywhere else they do business. Apply what you learn to other elements of your marketing.
Genius Monkey Has the Fix
Here at Genius Monkey, we pride ourselves on education and experience for our clients. The programmatic space is often new or misunderstood, so we continually help our clients learn why we do what we do.
Champ said that he often sees advertisers new to programmatic come to Genius Monkey with a lower budget and broad targeting goals. These clients often want to target the entire nation but only have one generic message to share—they don’t create specific messages catered toward various demographics.
“You should have an open mind when you explore or opt into any new marketing medium,” Champ said. “You have to take input from the vendor and make adjustments. That’s hard for some marketers, but that’s why Fully Managed systems usually outperform Self-Serve platforms—having that expertise to help you and give you that input usually yields better results.”
