6 Steps to Get to Day 90: How to Get Your Campaigns to Take Flight
Here at FieldTest we work hard to ensure that our clients are given the tools to grow their brands as quickly and effectively as possible. We know that growth plans are never one-size-fits-all, every brand will have unique needs in order to achieve their marketing goals, and that’s why we give you the tools to customize your advertising campaigns to tailor them to your unique brand vision. With that said, there is some advice any brand can take in order to ensure that their marketing performs its absolute best and gives them the advantage they need to scale effectively.
The first 90 days of an ad campaign are pivotal to its long term success. 90% of our campaigns reach positive ROAS by week 5, and over 80% of our clients report meeting or exceeding their marketing goals by day 90 of their FieldTest campaigns. This begs the question, what exactly do these successful campaigns do in these crucial weeks to get their campaigns to take off? This week on the blog we’ll kick off a special 2-part guide for brands both big and small to make the absolute most out of those pivotal 90 days, both with their FieldTest ad campaigns and beyond. So, without further ado, let’s talk about what you can do to make the most of your pivotal first 90 days!
1: Have a good strategy
The first step to a successful first 90 days begins before you start your first campaign, in your initial planning stages. These first moments of a campaign are where you’ll lay the foundation for your initial buys and create the conditions by which you will begin to measure your performance metrics. Basically, this is where you will set the tone for the rest of your campaign and it all begins before you spend dollar one on marketing. This means choosing the right audience, sending their traffic to the right landing pages using ads with the right creative and the right messaging then setting your campaign off with the right budget. You can learn more about our creative and targeting in our deep-dive guide here.
One of the most important decisions to make is to recognize how much you have to spend on marketing your business and make a forward looking plan for at least six months into the future. One thing we see time and time again is a client thinking that the first month of marketing spend is going to see such a large ROAS that they will simply continue to reinvest the surplus every month. Let us be clear: this strategy rarely to never yields positive results. You should at least have enough marketing spend for the first three months set aside. If you can forecast six months out, even better. And if you are lucky enough to be able to look at your monthly marketing budget a full 12 months into the future...well you are really setting yourself and your brand up for success. Stated more simply: don’t jeopardize the longevity of your company by thinking that two months of marketing budget is going to yield enough results to make you flush with cash in that timeframe. This takes patience and proper planning, friends.
One tip for your forward thinking budget: it might make the most sense to not spend an even amount the first three months. Instead, take your total quarterly budget for the three months and start lower and add more budget in months 2 and 3. Here’s an example: say you have $60,000 earmarked for the first three months. Instead of spending an even $20K a month, start a little lower your first month and go bigger in month 2 and even bigger in month 3. So maybe it looks like:
Month 1: $10,000
Month 2: $20,000
Month 3: $30,000
Why stagger the spend like this? Simply put, when you’re starting out you have the least amount of actionable data because you haven’t started spending yet. In month 2, you know have enough learnings to make a measured $10K increase and push the extra budget to the highest performing creatives, audience segments, etc. And the same is true for the Month 3 increase. By this point you should be in a nice groove with ROAS, conversions, traffic to the site with all the arrows pointing you towards what you need to do more of. When you start smaller, you are able to scale better against the things you are seeing be successful.
While it is rare for brands to see positive ROAS in the first month, there are several signs that your campaign is performing well as-is and is due for a budget increase. A strong increase in traffic to your site, repeated engagement on specific creatives by the same customer, seeing your CPC and CPM numbers decrease. These are all signs that your campaign is on the right track and could see a nice performance boost with some additional spend.
Once you’ve determined your strategy is working and your ads are working as expected with your target audiences it’s time to move on to the next step:
2: Ramp it up
You’ve built out a creative strategy that works and have the results show it, now is the time to follow through and ramp up your campaign. What exactly does that mean? As your success metrics increase, your first step should be to increase your budget to match. That test budget we mentioned before? Now is the time to start adding onto it and seeing if your results remain steady at a new budget trajectory.
Going back to the $10k monthly budget we mentioned before, now would be the time to start increasing your monthly spend closer to that number. If metrics maintain steady growth along with spend, you’re good to go! If they begin to falter a bit, don’t panic! This is your first chance to start pushing your ROAS into the green with creative optimizations and it is perfectly normal for growing campaigns to need a little love in order to perform their absolute best at larger monthly spends.
Try adding a few new upper funnel creatives and expanding your awareness reach a bit while really honing in on your conversion retargeting ads.
Once you’re satisfied with the results of your campaign it’s time to move along to step number 3:
3: Iterate on what’s working
Now that you’ve laid a solid foundation with a sound strategy and honed in your creative, targeting and budget to achieve maximal results it becomes time for one of the most important steps: continuing to iterate on what’s working. At this point you’ve done a ton of work to get the foundation built for success, now you simply have to replicate it! The FieldTest platform makes it easy to discover which ads are performing well with which audiences from you campaign dashboard, this data will be your roadmap to creative iteration.
The first thing you’ll want to check is which creatives are driving the highest impressions and clicks at the lowest CPCs (Cost Per Click). These will be your best performing awareness ads and are the key to driving traffic to your site. If you notice one particular creative approach or headline is working far better than the rest, create some new ads using the same concept or creative. Awareness campaigns rely heavily on strong visuals and headlines so try not to deviate too much from what’s working, but instead “remix” what has driven success. The goal is to spread your good ideas as far as they can without spreading them too thin or fundamentally changing them. By paring down your ads to only what’s working then doubling or tripling down on those ideas you can safely bet you will continue the steady stream of traffic to your website.
Next, you’ll want to look at your action creatives and look at which ones are driving the most conversions. These will be your guide to which messaging is resonating most with your awareness audiences and lookalikes. Now is the time to create some new ads with slightly different headlines or creative. This doesn’t have to be a radical refresh in concepts, in fact that’s something we want to avoid (this is all about iterating on what’s working, after all). Instead, simply create some new ads in order to defeat some of the creative fatigue that tends to rear its head when ads have been used for extended periods of time. This should be enough to keep your success going well into your first 90 days!
If you’ve made it this far, pat yourself on the back! You’re well on your way to a strong first 90 days and beyond. That’s not the whole story, however. These are the first three steps in getting your campaign to the 90 day point but there are still more tricks of the trade that can help you grow your marketing even beyond that crucial milestone. Next week we’ll talk about how you can parlay the success you’ve created in these first weeks into a long term marketing strategy that will deliver ROAS and scale like you never imagined before, so keep eyes on the FieldTest blog!