Identifying Your Goals For Maximum Success • Perfect Audience Blog

September 27, 2020
lenakhalid
Retargeting

What are your goals as a marketer and advertiser?

Identifying your ultimate performance goals will help you decide how to tackle your marketing strategy.

What does success look like to the stakeholders of your organization? Depending on your company’s stage, size, and business model, these goals may look very different – a new startup may be focused on simply building name recognition and want to display its ads to as many prospective customers as possible, while an established e-commerce company may use retargeting ads as a way to encourage past purchasers to buy from them again. In our research study The State of Programmatic Advertising, we found that the most common business goals for digital advertising included driving sales, lead generation, brand awareness and customer retention.

Driving Sales (57%)

How many people have made a purchase as a result of your ad? You are likely to find those numbers increase based on the number of times they have seen your ad – customers who have seen retargeting ads are 70% more likely to convert than those that haven’t.

Lead Generation (48%)

Lead generation refers to collecting contact information from qualified prospects, and can be done through several formats. Often, your digital advertising campaign may feature an e-book or free guide that is gated behind a contact form. You can also consider using a promo offer, such as a discount code, for users who fill out a form with email and SMS information.

Brand Awareness (46%)

In the early stages of the marketing funnel, simply focusing on brand awareness is important. Building a campaign dedicated to retargeting prospects with brand-focused messaging will help them build familiarity and trust in your brand, priming them for future purchases.

Customer Retention (35%)

Another frequent goal for marketers is to re-engage customers who have lapsed. Retargeting campaigns are an ideal way to do this: you can upload the IP addresses of your lapsed customers to your advertising platform so that they will be retargeted with new promotional offers from your brand.

Other Goals

A number of other goals came up as additional priorities for marketers: Lead Nurturing and Social Engagement (18% each), Community Building (14%), and Message/Offer Testing (13%). No matter what your ultimate business goal is, you can optimize your ad campaigns effectively towards that target.

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Once Your Have Established Your Goals, How Do You Reach Them?

How are marketers reaching these strategic goals? Overwhelmingly, they are using programmatic advertising. In programmatic advertising, advertisers are able to segment audience groups based on set criteria, which might include age, sex, location, or job details, as well as “lookalike” audiences who have expressed interest in similar companies. They can display these ads to these audience members wherever they travel on the web, whether desktop or mobile, and deploy follow-up campaigns that are triggered by the user’s action. For instance, a prospect putting an item in her online shopping cart and abandoning it could trigger a “forgot something?” ad encouraging her to return to the website.

Of the survey respondents, 17% said they were very successful at programmatic advertising, and 74% said they were somewhat successful. Only 9% did not feel that they were successful at all with their programmatic advertising initiatives. So, for those who are doing well, what are they getting right?

They focused on top-performing strategies including audience targeting (72%), keyword targeting (40%), geo-targeting (26%), contextual targeting (25%), and retargeting (25%). While nearly a third of respondents handled their programmatic advertising campaigns exclusively in-house, 16% outsources everything to an outside agency, while 52% used a combination of in-house and outsources resources to achieve their goals.

When you take the time to identify your performance goals and what you want to get out of your campaign, you can adjust your priorities and focus accordingly, paving a road to advertising success!