5 Cost-Efficient Ways To Take Your Digital Ads To The Next Level

Gaining consumers’ attention online is more challenging than ever, with a continuous stream of brands begging for clicks. Users are becoming more sophisticated and highly selective about whom they trust, besides the fact that online competition is ever-increasing, not only in terms of what is being sold, but the methods deployed in which to sell them.

If promoting your business seems hard enough, promoting it online with constantly shifting parameters of what is accepted and expected by the consumer and search engines can make it an even trickier game. In this article, we’ll give you some insights that will allow you to stand out from the crowd without overspending, and create impactful digital ads that truly make a difference.

Continue reading for our 5 cost-efficient ways to take your digital ads to the next level.

1. Make Use Of Illustrations And Video

Visual presentation is an excellent example of the classic cliche ‘first impressions matter.’ 

The graphics used in your ads should be brand-compatible with your organisation’s logos, fonts, and colours. The Adobe Express design app is a budget-friendly tool for quickly creating impressive visual content for mobile and web advertisements.

It offers a wealth of templates to get users of all skill levels started in creating flyers, video stories, banner ads, and much more. It’s an all-in-one tool that makes building creative design content fast, easy, and inexpensive. Eye-catching visuals are a crucial part of digital marketing, so it’s worth spending a decent amount of time to make sure you get yours right.

Marketing material should have compelling sales copy that conveys your value proposition concisely from start to finish, offering an emotional appeal throughout the text that evokes specific responses from your audience, such as urgency, curiosity, and excitement. The conclusion should include a call-to-action (CTA), summarising the message and guiding users to click or email for more information, or an easy link to the part of the site where they can buy now.

2. Create Impressive Landing Pages

Improve user engagement and conversions by ensuring your sales pages’ content is congruent with the information and copy of your ads. If your advertising promises specific products, discounts, proposals, or solutions to a problem, be sure the landing pages deliver. Consistency between the two platforms ensures users won’t lose interest and switch to a competitor instead. In essence, the ad they are interested enough to click on needs to lead to a page where they can buy that thing – or at least an essential part of it. For example, if your advert shows a model in running trainers for your online shoe store, you must stock the exact trainers in the picture, or users may feel disappointed and disengaged when they discover you don’t.

Great content is useless however if users can’t load the page on their desktop or mobile devices. Make sure your page load speed is optimised for diverse platforms (especially on smartphones) by keeping image sizes low, using browser caching, and keeping scripts to the bare minimum.

Avoid external links and unnecessary form fields to minimise distractions on the page and keep visitors focused on your message and completing your desired sales-related action. Use easy-to-read text with concise headings and descriptive supporting images. Include positive customer reviews, testimonials and impartial third-party research to increase credibility and build trust with potential buyers.

To maximise your promotion’s impact, conducting ongoing comparison testing is essential to identify which variations of the campaign have more impact on your audience. Brainstorm different versions of the headlines and copy. Figure out which CTAs result in the highest conversion and sign-up rates, and experiment with varying ad locations and schedules across each platform.

3. Refine Who Your Ads Are Targeting

Assuming you intimately know your preferred market, be sure the ad campaign is refined to focus on each of these individual groups, rather than casting a wide net to see who responds.

Before finalising the campaign, strive for more granularity. Group your audience into smaller niches based on demographics such as age, culture, career, and hobbies. Achieve better ad focus by tailoring them to resonate more with specific subsets.

Create customised messages for specific groups based on their familiarity with your brand. For example, you can make one offer to your email list or people who’ve already interacted with your company somehow, perhaps on one of your social media feeds. Meanwhile, your ad campaigns may evoke feelings of gratitude and mutual loyalty for your more regular customers.

An attractive group you can attempt to generate renewed interest from is those who’ve already purchased, but perhaps three months or longer ago. Encourage them to return with a special ‘welcome back’ or ‘bring a friend’ style offer, either through social media marketing or via mailing lists. This type of re-marketing doesn’t include any new spending, and often, consumers will welcome the opportunity to grab a juicy offer from a company they already had one good experience with.

4. Use Affiliate Marketing

A strategy that entails affiliate marketing can improve digital ad performance depending on the nature of your products and services. The main advantage is that you only ‘pay’ for an actual result, ie. when a customer uses it to complete a sale through one of your partner’s links or codes promoting your brand in their blog or products page. 

Another plus is flexibility and scalability at your discretion. You can expand your network based on performance metrics, allocating the best resources or benefits to the highest-performing partners, further enhancing cost-effectiveness.

Affiliate models increase your exposure and reach when your partners actively promote your brand, so be especially selective when choosing affiliates. Look for mutually beneficial angles to incentivise their continued participation, and prevent the effort from becoming stale and fizzling out. When trying to reach new markets, this is a highly effective strategy.

5. Find The Best Platform For Your Ads

Your products, services, and the business you build up around you are unique to you and your employees. You should have a strong brand image that you know how to convey on external sites too, even from a poster or video that gets no more than a few seconds of attention. Similarly, the numerous online platforms all have specific applications, content, and user bases subdivided by particular cultures and demographics.

Test the waters by running the ads you think will achieve a high conversion rate in each community. Certain social media sites like Instagram favour the 18 – 30 young adult crowd, so ads on these platforms for traditionally older-demographic products such as lawn mowers would likely flop. In contrast, search engines serving localised, suburban, and rural communities might be a better option.

When deciding where to spend your valuable advertising dollars, remember it may be better to focus on the platforms whose purpose and clientele better align with your industry and target consumer. The ads themselves should be eye-catching, and lead to well optimised sites that make buying the product or service they’re displaying simple and straightforward. Use affiliate marketing and external connections to spread your brand image, and prepare to be flexible, tossing out what doesn’t work, and always innovating to try new strategies.

What works one year may not work the next, and certain demographics may respond to one ad that another entirely ignores. Digital marketing is a constantly changing but essential part of promoting your business, so stick at it, and follow these ideas to come up with ways to do so more cost-effectively.