Quick Wins for the Savvy Marketer in You
By David Nyurenberg and Dr. Augustine Fou
The virus has caused many marketers to pause or cut back digital ad spend. Most notably you might have seen Coca Cola announce that they were significantly decreasing advertising spend.
Source: https://digiday.com/marketing/how-the-worlds-biggest-advertisers-are-spending-or-not/
But as the world opens back up, what are some quick wins -- optimizations to digital spend that marketers can do right away, save money and get better performance?
Search Marketing
Turn off branded keyword targeting. That means, if you’re Coke, stop buying the word “Coke” -- you’re gonna get that traffic anyway and you’re wasting money buying your own brand keywords.
Spend money buying your competitors’ keywords - we like to call this “competitive conquesting.” And spend money on generic, descriptive words -- the words that people are likely to search for when they think about buying your product.
This way, you spend less overall, and target your “most-likely-to-buy” audience.
Paid Social
Turn off FAN (Facebook Audience Network) so your ads run on Facebook proper (Facebook.com, FB app, Instagram, and WhatsApp). With less competition, quality reach at cost efficient rates is available on Facebook proper. And you avoid all of the fraud on the 3rd party sites outside of Facebook.
See what happened to this small business when they turned off FAN in their Facebook campaigns: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-two-small-businesses-beat-ad-fraud-dr-augustine-fou-/
Display & Programmatic
Turn off GDN (Google Display Network) and “Search Partners” for the same reasons as you would turn off FAN. This forces your ads to only show on Google proper and eliminates your exposure to all of the ad fraud on all of the sites in the display network and search partner sites.
Save 40 - 60% - eliminate middlemen fees which eat up 40 - 60 cents of every dollar you spend in digital by buying direct from good publishers that have real human audiences. Given the times, publishers are more accommodating than ever when it comes to rate negotiations around pmps. Now is the time to establish direct pipes to premium inventory and first party publisher data. This is also a great way to build the digital foundations to set your brand up for success in a post cookie world.
Pause Spend - oh, you did that already
Since you may have already done this, check to see if sales are impacted -- i.e. did sales go down? We realize that sales going down may be due to the virus -- i.e. retail stores are closed to shoppers. But if your sales didn’t go down, you should ask yourself the hard question - did the digital ad spend drive ANY incremental sales, or would those sales have happened anyway. This will guide your spending when the world opens back up... you may not need to spend as much in digital. In fact, you may only need to spend 10% of what you spent prior to the virus crisis to get the same impact and results. Imagine that - a 90% savings!