Trying to do business during a pandemic is not easy. A couple of months ago, we at Digithy decided to offer free consulting services to businesses that are trying to adapt to this situation, changing something in their strategy or reinventing their business.
We’re offering practical help and suggestions for the next steps, and this brought us to talk to many companies around the world.
There are a couple of questions that I usually ask when I’m in these conversations, like What’s your goal? What have you done so far to achieve it?
The most common answer to the last one is We did some PPC, but ads are not converting.
I’m not here to say that you should always use PPC ads as the main marketing tool to generate leads. Quite the opposite: I usually tend to tell businesses to not start spending money immediately on advertising, because there are some steps to take before diving into that.
But if your answer is like the majority of businesses I talked to so far, then why are ads not converting?
The different advertising channels make it look easy to create and launch an ad, presenting you the different steps and warning you when there are some content gaps that need to be filled. But they don’t tell you if you’re creating a good ad from a qualitative perspective.
So here are 7 of the most common mistakes I found when I analyzed different businesses' PPC campaigns.
1. Unclear Goal
Goals are very important not only when talking about advertising but also your business in general. Before starting building an ad you should think about what you want to achieve with it.
Are you trying to bring people to a landing page? Is your goal to generate sales? Or do you want to collect their emails and contact your leads afterward?
For each one of these questions, there is a different way to approach your customers in the ads, and in order to differentiate the approach, you also need to understand your customer.
We always talk about the importance of getting to know the customer before taking any step further, also preparing a 5 steps guide to know your customer. When it's about advertising, I always insist with the clients that they do not rush into advertising before completing a few important steps.
So if you have a clear goal, and you know what you want to achieve with your advertisement, make sure you get to know your customer first. After that, you will be ready to start building a proper ad campaign.
2. Copy not matching the target audience interests
This part is connected to the previous one: it's very important to communicate the message correctly to your target audience.
So what will you need for that? Again, getting to know your customer.
Let's make a practical example.
Let's assume you are trying to sell an online cooking course and your target is mums - I know, such a clichè, but please follow me on this.
Your online course presents the following features:
It’s a very high-level course, taught by a Michelin star chef
The cooking classes are recorded into small chapters
Starts from basic to advance, and you can join at any point
The price is in the average range
Now if you had to pick only one of these characteristics, which one do you think would be the most interesting for mums?
At a glance I’d say the possibility to divide the course into different shorter chapters, knowing that a mom needs a flexible schedule, it’s important for her to start and stop easily. So when we get to know our customers we need to understand how they behave, what they are doing, and why the product or service you're trying to sell would be interesting for them.
Advertising needs to attract attention...
Bear in mind that what you are doing here is not trying to trick the customer and convincing them to buy something is not good for them. It's simply bringing up the characteristic that can be most important for them in order to make a decision.
Marketing needs to help customers make a decision.
3. Lack of keywords research
This is an extremely important part, not only for ad channels that require keywords in their implementation - e.g. Google -. When you run keyword research, you also understand what people are mostly looking for and what they are most interested in. This will help you build your message, write your copy, and choose how to display the message for your customer.
4. Insufficient knowledge of the audience and its behavior
Where should you start your ad? Not on the channel you know the most, and not what on the channel that is mostly used for ads. You should start an ad where you know that your audience is spending their time.
Taking into consideration the previous example: if I know that mums tend to spend more time on Facebook, then it would be senseless for me to decide and start an ad on LinkedIn.
5. Missing CTA
Most of the ads that are not converting I've been analyzing were lacking a strong Call To Action. After writing your copy, make sure you also added a CTA, which tells people what to do. It has to align with your copy, your target audience, the landing page, and most importantly, the ad goal. It can be a Learn More button where you send people to a page with more details about that product, or a Shop Now button directly to the product you're aiming to sell.
The landing page has to talk exactly about what you were talking about in the copy, and has to match your goal.
6. Missing deadline
There is no good lead generation ad without a deadline. Your ad might be good at attracting attention, but if you do not tell people why they should take action now, they might as well forget and lose track of your offer.
7. Insufficient knowledge of the ad channel
I left this part last, but it is actually the most important.
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the fact that everyone can click on Create a new ad and follow some steps does not mean that everyone is able to create a good quality one. It takes time, experience, learning, research, and deep knowledge of the different ad channels available, to properly create a compelling campaign. Every different advertising Channel, from Facebook to Instagram, to Twitter, to LinkedIn or Google, has different features, different targeting possibilities, different audiences, and different conversion processes.
I always say it’s better to ask for help and have a good ad in place instead of starting something that is just consuming your budget, leading to ads not converting into any quality lead.
Summing up
What you need to do is make sure you have a clear goal in mind, and that the CTA, the landing page, the copy, the image, the keywords, and the message are all connected to it.
If you need some help on the way, don’t forget, we are still offering free consultations!