Every startup needs a steady flow of new clients to continue growing. That’s why your company’s marketing department is so important. If it can consistently drive leads to your sales staff, then you’re well on your way to growth and success. Much of this will be determined by your startup’s ad performance. The better your ads perform, the more people and companies you’ll have going to your website and reading about what makes your startup great. But optimizing your ad performance can be tough. Keep reading to discover 10 strategies that you can start using to start getting more out of your ads immediately.
5 Ways To Boost Your PPC Ad Performance
1. Start By Creating an Ideal Customer Profile
Your startup’s PPC ads will only be effective if you understand exactly who you’re targeting. That’s why it’s important to have a clearly defined ideal customer profile in place before you launch any PPC campaigns.
Your ideal customer profile is an overview of the specific type of company or person that you’re going to be targeting with your ads. Once you know the characteristics of your ideal customer, you can use that information to easily target companies or people that are as close of a match to that as possible.
2. Always Track Your Conversion Rates
To be successful with PPC ads, you need to consistently refunnel your marketing dollars away from your worst performers and towards your best ones. It’s impossible to do this if you aren’t tracking your conversion rates.
Startups that track their conversion rates can be more agile with how they spend their limited marketing budget. Over time, this can add up to have a huge impact on the overall effectiveness of your campaigns.
3. A/B Test Consistently
Startups also need to make sure they’re optimizing their PPC ads as much as possible to ensure that they deliver the best results. Note this isn’t a one-and-done process. Continuously test slightly different versions of the same ads perform against one another to figure out the right combination of text, imagery, and landing page to deliver results. A/B testing is crucial to your PPC marketing strategy.
4. Work on Improving Your Bidding Strategy
If you run ads on Google, your bidding strategy will greatly impact your startup’s ad performance. It will impact how many people see your ads, when they see them, and how often you get conversions.
Here are some best practices to keep in mind while working on your bidding strategy:
- Start by determining your goals, then select a bidding strategy.
- Evaluate the performance of your ads and make adjustments as needed.
- Don’t make decisions too quickly. Give your ads time to succeed before pulling the plug.
- Optimize your attribution models and conversation tracking practices before you call an ad a success or a failure
5. Don’t Neglect Your Landing Pages
Marketing departments will spend time and energy figuring out how to get people to click on the ads they run. Getting people to click on your ads indeed matters a great deal, but don’t neglect your landing pages in the process. Your landing pages have just as big of an impact on your conversions as the quality of your ads. You need to create clean, organized landing pages with short forms that are easy to fill out. If your polished ads send users to a messy website, they’ll probably turn away before they see how great your startup is.
5 Ways To Improve Your Social Media Ad Performance
1. Focus on Improving Your Quality Score
Quality Score is a metric used to track the amount you pay per ad click. Every social media platform uses a version of this metric to determine how well your ads rank and how much you pay for them.
If you have a high Quality Score, your ad performance will improve and your costs will reduce. The best way to improve this score on social media is to improve your engagement rates. You can do that by focusing on advertising your very best content and excluding everything else (at least initially).
2. Target Specific Segments of Your Audience
One common mistake that startups make with social media advertising is targeting too large of a market segment. It’s usually not a good idea to send out all of your content to your entire audience simultaneously.
Rather, each piece of content you publish will be more relevant to some parts of your audience than others. Figuring out how to consistently display the content you publish to your audience’s right segment is an essential step to boosting your ad performance on social media.
3. Try Out Video Ads
People who use social media are inundated with a massive amount of text-based content on their feeds. There are only so many descriptions of articles and blog posts that people can look at before they start to mindlessly scroll past.
Start publishing video content. And have a bit of fun with it to entice your audience to check out what you have to say. At the very least, interspersing your regular content with video ads is a great way to break up the monotony.
4. Expand the Number of Platforms You Advertise On
Some startups tend to get locked on a single social media platform and do most, if not all, of their advertising on it. Your audience can be found on several platforms. And some of these may be more conducive to your ad performance than others.
For example, if you run a fashion ecomm startup, you’d focus on social media platforms that have a visual emphasis like Instagram and Pinterest. But you wouldn’t want to entirely neglect other popular platforms like Twitter and Facebook. These social media websites can still be a valuable source of new leads for you.
5. Always Retarget
Retargeting is a way to reconnect with internet users who have already seen your ads once. It’s an essential strategy that you need to use with your social media advertising campaigns.
When someone sees your ad the first time, they may not convert into a paying customer right away. Retargeted ads allow you to stay front and center in that lead’s mind so that, if they decide to buy a product or service like yours at a later date, you’re ready to convert them.
When you use retargeting, you significantly expand the pool of leads you’re reaching out to with your social ads. Platforms will even let you customize how you retarget existing leads so you can optimize your strategies for your company’s long-term success.
5 Ways to Boost Your Email Ad Performance
Email ads can be another super effective way to get your startup in front of more potential customers. Here are five tips to make yours more effective.
Make Sure Your Emails Are Mobile-Friendly
Today, 47% of people check their email on mobile devices. So if your messages aren’t mobile-friendly, you could be alienating a huge chunk of your audience.
Send emails that are easy to scroll through vertically, a single-column design is best. You may also want to make sure that any links included (such as your CTA) are large enough to be easily tapped on a mobile device.
Personalize, Personalize, Personalize
Personalization is a huge part of creating successful email marketing campaigns. If you’re not doing it, you risk having your messages blend in with all of the others.
Personalization helps your emails stand out. And that’s, ultimately, the first step toward leveraging email marketing to achieve your startup’s sales goals.
Refine Your Subject Line
The first thing that your audience sees when you send an email is the message’s subject line. It needs to grab their attention, otherwise, it’ll be ignored.
So how do you create a compelling subject line?
Keep them clear, specific, and short. And if you can, try to personalize the subject line with the person’s name or a statistic you know is relevant to their interests. By focusing on these things and creating more compelling subject lines, you significantly increase the chances of your startup’s next email marketing campaign being a success.
Clarify Your CTAs
If you’re sending out marketing emails, you’re doing so because you want your audience to take a specific action. That might be reading a blog post, signing up for a webinar, or accessing a demo version of your product.
Whatever you’re hoping to achieve with your campaigns, the goal and actions need to be clear to your audience. If your CTAs don’t succinctly and precisely capture the specific action you want your readers to take, there’s a much smaller chance they will take your desired action.
Keep Your Emails Short
Most people are already really busy with personal and professional obligations and don’t have time to read through the details of every email they receive.
That’s why it’s important to keep your emails short and sweet. When you say what you need to say in as few words as possible, it increases the chances that a reader makes it to the end of your messages.
Get the Data You Need to Improve Your Startup’s Ad Performance Through LeadLander
If you want to optimize your startup’s ad performance across all channels, you need consistent access to high-quality data. More specifically, you need to know who’s visiting your website, what they’re doing while they’re there, and which ads they clicked on to make it to you.
LeadLander gives you access to all of this data and more in a simple platform that anyone in your organization can use. Our tool is ideal for each of the following:
- Discovering new leads, you haven’t encountered elsewhere
- Validating interest from existing leads
- Receiving real-time alerts for known and unknown website visitors
- Improving the accuracy of your sales pipeline
- Understanding which of your landing pages are performing well and which need improvement
We’re currently offering a free 14-day trial of LeadLander, which you can sign up for without any credit card information. Visit our website to get started.