8 Things You Are Doing To Sabotage Your Campaigns And How to Fix Them - Pt. 2

Your campaigns are looking better, but you still have some work left to do…

There’s certain truths that we as advertisers just have to face up to, one of them is that sometimes you’re going to fail. It’s an unfortunate fact, but seasoned marketers and new brands just starting out have this one big thing in common: they make mistakes.

Like we said in part 1 this is all part of a marketers journey, we all don’t know what we don’t know. That’s where it helps to have a little guidance.

In this blog post we’ll continue our deep dive into the various ways you may be sabotaging your ad campaigns, and showing you how to fix them with simple instructions and best practices.

It’s time for another round of tough love. Here’s how you’re probably sabotaging your FieldTest campaigns:

5. Running the same ads in every step of the funnel

This mistake is coming towards the middle of the list, but it might as well have been number one if you ask our creative team: Running the same ads in every step of your ad funnel (cue dramatic dun dun dun sound effect). This is a mistake that we see all too often, particularly with clients who have limited budgets for creative or limited creative capabilities. They come to us with a great product and a nice website but then load the same 3 or 4 ads into their awareness, consideration and action campaigns and wonder why they’re not seeing great results! This mistake is one that is fairly simple to correct, but it takes a bit of internalizing of the psychology of marketing, you have to get into your customers' heads a bit.

Think of the experience of discovering a new brand through advertising. You find them somewhere in your daily browsing, their product looks interesting or their ad copy really strikes you and piques your interest. You click their ad and check out their website for a bit, but really should get back to work, so you click away. Then, the next day, you see another ad for them and you’re reminded just how perfect their product really is for you, you click again and this time you put something in the basket - it really was the perfect product - but now’s not the time. You click away. The following day you see an ad that tells you not only is that perfect product still there waiting for you, but if you buy now you’ll get free shipping. That’s it, it’s time to pull the trigger.

You’ve just taken a stroll down what we call the marketing funnel, the process of convincing an intender (someone interested in a product) into a converter (someone who will buy it and come back for more). It’s the standard way of thinking about digital marketing, and for good reason - it’s been proven out time and time again. However, it doesn’t work without a bit of work from an informed marketer. We’ve written a lot about how to create ads that resonate at every step of the funnel, so check out the articles on the subject in our blog to really sink your teeth in, but the gist is this: Following the marketing funnel is considered a best practice for a reason, and by fitting your creatives and messaging to the three major stages of Awareness, Consideration, and Action you will help ease the customer into a lasting relationship with your brand and, more to the point, will help make it as easy as possible for them to pull their credit cars out and hit the purchase button. By running the same ads at every stage of the funnel you remove the psychological elements of marketing that make a customer feel considered and catered to, and ultimately make it harder for yourself to run an effective ad campaign.

6. Not using the FieldTest Audience Predictor 

If you’re using FieldTest we already know you’re a smart, savvy marketer, but even the best among us need a little assistance from time to time. You wouldn’t drive to a place you’ve never been using just your gut instincts to guide you, why are you doing the same for your marketing campaigns? 

We talk a lot about how our powerful technology helps marketers connect with their customers, but sadly many of our clients fail to put some of our most powerful marketing technology to use in their campaigns. Doesn’t sound like something you’d do, does it?

Our audience predictor AI is one of the most powerful tools we offer, giving you brand new audiences full of intenders who look and act a whole lot like your current customers, and putting it to use is easy! Once your FieldTest pixel is down (remember how important we told you that step was last week?) we begin to collect data on everybody who browses, clicks, or makes a purchase on your website. We then use this data to scrub millions of intender segments for other people who have similar profiles and purchasing habits and compile them into custom audiences tailored to your brand’s needs. Simply start a new campaign, use the My Pixel Audiences dropdown in your campaign builder and select either your My Site Visitors or Past Purchasers audiences and you’re all set! It’s that easy! 

Keep in mind these audiences may not appear immediately within your campaign builder, they take a couple weeks to a month to compile enough data to publish with full confidence and accuracy, but once they do they are one of the single most powerful tools available online to expand your audience and supercharge your campaigns.

7. Changing too much too fast

All too often marketers will decide their current initiative is not working and it is time to refresh their creatives or their audiences or their landing pages, or all at the same time!  We understand the desire to make a change, but as we mentioned in part 1 marketing is all about data and strategy. Nothing says ‘I don’t have a strategy’ like fully recompiling every step of your marketing in the middle of a campaign. 

Think of it like driving down a freeway and realizing you missed your exit. You wouldn’t simply crank the wheel right and drive straight over the median to correct course, you’d follow the rules of the road, take the next exit and find another route to get back on track. The same goes for your marketing, if you feel your current strategy isn’t working, don’t overcorrect and restart with all new everything! Start small with a few new images, see how they impact performance. Then swap out some new headlines, see how those work with your audiences. If you still don’t see a change, start up a new campaign with some new audience selections and see if you see a shift for the better. It’s all about taking your time, seeing what works, and not losing the momentum you’ve built. There’s nothing wrong with correcting course, but you have to follow the rules of the road to make sure you do so effectively.

8. Over-filtering your targeting

Last but certainly not least in the pantheon of mistakes we see advertisers make is one of the easier traps to fall into, overfiltering your targeting. This is a problem that arises when an advertiser builds out a new prospecting audience within their campaign builder and goes a little overboard trimming down their audience. It’s an easy mistake to make, and it’s understandable why it happens so often.

Most brand managers have a good picture in their heads of who their customers are, and it can be tempting to try to focus exclusively on the audience that seems like a perfect fit. But part of the magic of digital advertising is that with some smart targeting you’ll be able to market not only to the customers who you know love your brand, but you will be able to find new customers you never would have thought of!

Around the FieldTest offices we have a favorite example of this mistake: One of our earliest CBD clients came to us with the intention of only marketing to customers in major cities in states where cannabis was legal. Their logic was sound enough, people in the cities are typically more open to experimentation and by only targeting states where cannabis was legal for recreational use they avoided any possible bad vibes caused by marketing a product seen as adjacent to illegality. However, with some persuasion from our ad operations team, they were convinced to target everyone in the US just to confirm if their suspicions were correct. The results blew everyone away: their top performers were suburbs in Texas and Tennessee! Of course Los Angeles and Seattle also performed well, but by going broad with their targeting they were able to hit the targets they knew they should go after AND discover new markets to corner. That’s just one example of how over-filtering your targeting can bite you in the rear end.

There are other factors at play here, especially the way budget and audience size interact, but these are subjects for their own blog post. In the meantime, if you are worried you are not targeting enough people - or targeting too many - reach out to your FieldTest account representative and ask them to give you a hand. We love helping our clients make their campaigns work their absolute best!

The more you know, the better your campaigns will perform!

We all make mistakes, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, but the most important parts of our mistakes are the lessons we learn from them. With marketing campaigns there is no such thing as bad data, and if a move you’ve made ended up leading to poor performance it’s not the end of the world but the beginning of a new opportunity to do something different. Of course, it’s better to avoid these mistakes at all which is why we offer so many resources for guidance on strategy and best practices. If that’s not enough to set you in the right direction we also offer 24/7 support for all of our clients.

We want you to be successful, because your success is ours as well. We hope these last two blog posts will help put you on track to build the best campaigns of your marketing life. It’s all possible with FiledTest!

Get in touch to learn more about what you can accomplish with FieldTest’s powerful marketing tools