The next step is to align your budget with your marketing goals. Every company, business, or brand has different goals for their marketing efforts, but it can be difficult to accurately allocate marketing resources to reach each of them. Spend too little, and the money may be wasted on prospects outside your target markets. Spend too much, and you may end up with results that could have been achieved with a smaller investment. There is no exact formula that works for every brand.

Taking a full-funnel marketing approach will help. At the top of the funnel, building brand awareness is often underestimated when planning budgets, and in a lot of cases, it is the first line item to be cut. But when you view budgeting through the lens of a full-funnel strategy, you will spend to create value at every funnel stage. Your budget will also better reflect a long-term scope that looks at the bigger picture and keeps major goals on track. (See Pillar 1: A Clearly Defined Media Mix Strategy for a discussion of full-funnel marketing strategies and Pillar 2: Holistic Performance Metrics and Relevant KPIs for a fuller explanation of digital marketing metrics.)

Setting clearly defined goals will allow you to plan how much you will need to spend based on what success will look like. You can then approach your marketing campaigns with a high degree of confidence.

When it comes to digital marketing, it’s easier than ever to outline, design, schedule, and publish content. In some cases, you can access campaign data in real-time when ads go live. It can be tempting to adjust keywords, bids, and other variables as soon as results start coming in. After all, an effective digital marketing strategy depends on interpreting data and adjusting tactics quickly.

But sometimes, patience is the key to campaign planning. There are many components in a full-scale digital marketing campaign. Each part of the campaign deserves time to prove its worth and allow time for tangible results to develop. If you move on from any part of the campaign too soon, you may never know how effective your efforts could have been.

Successful advertising content needs to create an experience that engages users quickly while providing them with the value they are seeking. But in our data-driven marketing landscape, creative assets are often an afterthought of the overall strategy. What if they were instead at the center of the marketing strategy?

Developing an extensible content foundation enables marketers to extend advertising content across formats and channels. It sets up brand clients for creative success because it makes adding new capabilities and functionality to the media plan easy. This fourth pillar of our series explains how to develop a comprehensive content library and why it’s so important to programmatic marketing success.

The Objective

• Increase appointments and reduce cost-per-bookings across three U.S. locations
• Execute prospecting and retargeting tactics simultaneously
• Implement a hybrid service approach to maximize efficiency and results
• Enable smart healthcare digital marketing strategies

The Solution

Together, Choozle and SharpeVision optimize campaigns towards gaining new appointment bookings by using both prospecting and retargeting at the ad group level for data-driven healthcare digital marketing strategies.

For prospecting specifically, there is a strong reliance on targeting using BlueKai, DStillery, and Eyeota data to reach both in-market and past-purchasers of contact lenses and eyeglasses. Contextual keyword targeting is used to serve ads to those researching LASIK surgery or prescription lenses online. Lastly, longer campaign flights allowed for auto-optimizations to take effect while updates to creative assets were made every 30–90 days.

“Choozle has consistently proven to be a top performer for us. Month-over-month, I can count on the strategies we deploy in Choozle to drive new traffic to our site and steadily increase appointment bookings for each of our locations.”
–Jeff Archambault, Director of Marketing, SharpeVision MODERN LASIK

Key Results

• Average conversion per-impression (CPI) of 40% below traditional media types
• Retargeting efforts consistently deliver low CPIs across all media types MoM
• Choozle’s customer service and support ramped up our learning and success metrics were noticeable within the first 30-45 days

Next: Learn how Havenly increased their conversion rate by 32 percent, MoM.

1. Adjust Your Bids: The CPMs set during ad group creation are your base and max bids in the programmatic ad auction. The higher your base CPM, the greater the chance that your ad will appear, so heightening the threshold for your bid parameters expands your opportunities for winning impressions.
2. Shift Your Budgets: Reallocating budgets from a poor performing ad group to a well-performing ad group is an easy way to get the biggest bang for your buck. Also, take a look at which creatives are performing best and remove the assets that aren’t producing great results.
3. Build Preferred Lists and Block Lists: Build a block list of the sites that aren’t performing or accumulating enough impressions. Then, build a preferred list of the sites you want to serve even more inventory on (and add a bid multiplier between 1.25–1.5 to increase your chances). Tip: Add both a block list and a preferred list to your campaign and update it weekly for optimal performance.
4. Frequency Caps: If you wish to serve more or fewer impressions to a single user within a period of time, adjust the impression number and/or time frame of the impressions. In Choozle, the standard is 3 impressions per 8 hours. Tip: If you want to scale down, 1 impression per 24 hours is a good place to start.
5. Audience Adjustments: In your reporting, look at which data segments are performing the best, then eliminate the data segments that aren’t operating up to standard.
6. Geo Expansion: If your campaign is underpacing (aka not spending enough), your ads may not be serving to enough people. Try widening your audience by simply expanding your geo parameters, then give it a few days to see if spend catches up.
7. Dayparting: Dayparting allows you to customize the times and days when your ads will serve. For instance, if you’re B2B, it would make sense to only run ads during business hours. If you’re selling vacation packages, you might have better luck on the weekends.
8. Switch Up Your Goal: If your campaign goal is set to reach, but you actually want to encourage clicks, change your goal to CTR. This is a simple step to making sure the system knows what action to support.

No matter which of the above you decide to implement into your campaigns, always keep these general tips in mind:

• Remember, the digital marketing optimization you make should always be determined by your KPIs. Keep the end goal in mind, and only make the changes that will help you get there.
• In order to give your ad optimization enough time to take effect, only implement one or two every 4–7 days. This also ensures you’ll have enough data to know which are working and which aren’t.
• Don’t over-optimize, as you may end up cutting off too much of your inventory. Too narrow of an audience means more expensive CPMs and the risk of underpacing.

Next, chat with CE superstars Sam and Rob for more optimization tips and tricks.

This isn’t the first post we’ve written about the importance of your creative assets. No matter how exceptional your product or service is, how stellar your landing page looks, or how fabulous your team is, no one’s going to click your ad unless your creative is compelling—not to mention, being shown to the right people.