Optimization of Social Media Advertising Cost and Business Performance

There is a word that guides the decisions of many companies: profit. However, many entrepreneurs forget about another word as important as this one: “cost.” This term can define business performance.

Online marketing has become an amazingly powerful tool for using data to grow your business. You can run hundreds (or thousands) of different ad campaigns across dozens of ad networks and platforms, targeting very specific types of potential customers and measuring every aspect of campaign performance.

The challenge is how to optimize your online marketing spend to get the most from your dollars! Of those thousands of campaigns, which are performing well? Which is costing you too much, and you should stop them all together? Which ads are attracting the customers that go on to become your most loyal?

The answer to those questions can change on a daily (or even hourly) basis. Since online advertising is so competitive, the cost of reaching customers changes constantly. You need to optimize your marketing every day to ensure you maximize your return. The data generated by all those campaigns can be overwhelming, and it can be hard to know where to start.

In order to optimize your digital marketing budget, the first step knows where your customers and prospects spend time online. This way, you can direct your resources to the appropriate places and maximize the return on your spending. The results of this kind of investigation often surprise marketers, as they might have assumptions as to where their ideal customer is active online.

For example, suppose your company puts a lot of the digital marketing budget into LinkedIn, only to learn that an inordinate percentage of your customers spend most of their time on Facebook. In that case, that’s not an efficient use of marketing dollars.

Using analytics and advanced metrics, your digital marketing team can track where your target audience spends its time, how long they stay, and what typically causes them to leave. Of course, to gather this information, it’s also necessary to create your ideal customer persona so you know what you are looking for.

If you have a digital marketing budget, then you should also have buyer personas to work with. However, if for some reason that hasn’t happened, create detailed personas of your ideal customer or client that include age, gender, job title, income, family life, hobbies, interests, and anything else that is relevant.

Get rid of distracting vanity metrics.

Cutting down on PPC budgets for financial reasons means you must make the most out of every minute and dollar you do spend. You need this efficiency to get through such a period and eventually get your budgets back to what they used to be. To be as cost-effective as possible, you need to be more focused, so here’s what you need to do:

Get rid of data columns that you don’t use daily and that do not bring you any added value in your day-to-day optimizations.

Test Multiple Channels

Digital marketing can be a fickle activity, and what works for one marketer may not always work for another.  Early in the budgeting process, your company should have established key performance indicators (KPIs). By testing across several channels and comparing performance against your KPIs, you’ll get a better sense of working and what isn’t. You may find that you’re getting a noticeably higher conversion rate on one channel over all the others or your cost per conversion is quite a bit lower or higher on one channel.

Testing across multiple channels allows you to capitalize on opportunities and avoid areas where you’re not getting worthwhile results. At this point, you can optimize your digital marketing budget by focusing on those channels that are providing the highest return on investment (ROI). In all likelihood, the 80/20 rule can be applied or possibly even 90/10, depending on your industry.

Cross-Channel Remarketing

Remarketing is an activity that’s easy to let slide and can provide a good return for minimal investment. For those who don’t know, remarketing or retargeting allows you to show ads to web surfers who have visited your site or clicked on one of your ads but didn’t convert. They have already shown an interest, and now your ads will show up as they surf on other sites and platforms.

In the past, remarketing didn’t follow web visitors to different channels. But with cross-channel remarketing, someone can click on a Google ad and then see follow-up ads on Twitteror Facebook. Your organization can optimize budget by giving prospects second and third chances to interact with your brand after their initial contact. And as with any PPC ad, you will only pay if the ad gets clicked on.

Continually Test and Refine

Optimization is an ongoing process, especially when it comes to digital marketing. With so many tools available to test and measure results, it’s important to keep testing even after you have decided on specific channels to focus your efforts.

Even the smallest tweaks in a campaign can yield wildly different results. For example, an email campaign could produce a favorable ROI, and then a simple switch in the email sequence or a different type of subject line may boost it even more.

If the goal is to always get the most out of your digital marketing dollars, your marketing team needs to keep refining the campaigns across all platforms and testing new ideas, strategies, and concepts.  A slight change in a campaign won’t result in higher expenditure most of the time, so if it produces a greater ROI than before, you have effectively optimized your marketing budget with improved results.

Ensure Sales and Marketing Are Aligned

Because optimizing your digital results will also help you maximize your budget, it’s essential to have the marketing and sales departments work together to accomplish your goals.  There is no direct contact with many online marketing initiatives with a member of the sales team, and purchases are made online.

But if your sales funnel includes the sales team, then these must be aligned to convert leads into paying customers. Only with a collaborative effort can sales and marketing form a cohesive unit and get the results you need.

Conclusion

There are many variables at play regarding setting and optimizing your organization’s digital marketing budget, and these variables can change quickly and without warning. However, using these strategies should help to ensure your budget stretches further and is being used on the platforms that get results. However, for optimum Cost vs ads performance result, you can count on Infowise Analytics advertising Agency  for professional advice