5 Questions To Ask Yourself Before Starting Your Next Digital Ad Campaign

Rebecca Felker

Patience, planning, and time are crucial elements of building an effective digital display ad campaign. According to data compiled by Invesp, the average person is served over 1,700 banner ads per month. Can you guess how many we view? Only half of them! With that many banner ads served, how can we know if ours ads are in the half that gets viewed? While there is no way of knowing for sure, we can take actions to optimize our campaigns to reach our intended audience. Let’s look at 5 important questions to guide you through planning a winning display ad campaign:

1. What is the main objective of your campaign?

Getting real clear on what you want to achieve through your campaign will help you to build a solid foundation for it. This is essential for creating a winning campaign. You want to create and set SMART campaign objectives.  SMART objectives are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely to keep your goals quantitative and on track.

2. Who is your target customer and what resonates with them?

Reports show we reach our intended audience 44% of the time overall. Considering this is less than 50%, understanding who your audience is and their behaviors and habits is crucial to your campaign. We need to know not only who they are, but where they live, age and gender. The more we know about our target customer, the better we’ll be able to communicate with them. Are you trying to reach the C-suite in the northeast or homeowners in the northwest? Honing in on your audience and determining your personas will help you make intelligent choices in your messaging and understand how your service or product can benefit them.

3. What are your target placements?

Defining your overall goal and target audience will, in large, determine your traffic sources. For example, if you want to make a cardiologist’s lives easier, your banner ads would probably do well on medical association websites and an forums specific to physicians in the field of cardiology. You may also want to consider reaching the broader and more general population of your audience by utilizing Google, Bing or Yahoo. And then let’s not forget the social channels like Facebook, that reaches groups amid its one billion users.

4. What makes you stand out from the competition?

Understanding who your competitors are and what they are doing in the market will take you one step ahead in the sea of online campaigns. First, determine who they are. Then, consider what types of online marketing they are engaged in, look at campaigns they’ve done in the past and whether they were successful or not. Look at their customers and determine how you can differentiate yourself from your competitors – what benefits can you provide that competitors can’t, where do you add value and allow the customer to see solutions they didn’t know were possible?

5. What is your budget?

With most of your planning process complete at this point, you may already have a number in your head before you think about the specifics of your digital ad campaign. Once you have the details of your campaign, your budget will be based on your overall goals (i.e. target audience, target sites, etc.). Go back through to allot and prioritize your budget based on where you’ll get the most exposure of your target audience.

Ask yourself these questions and you’ll be well on your way to producing an online campaign that will benefit your customers and your bottom line. What will your winning campaign be?