Brand Builders Part 24: Are You Making the Most of Digital Advertising?

A big part of getting your message out is digital advertising. Now, there’s a lot of ways to lose your money real quick, probably quicker in digital advertising than going to Vegas. So, you really have to be careful. You want to look at all the opportunities. Do you want to run ads through the Google network? Do you want to run ads through the Facebook network? Do you want to use LinkedIn ads? Are you thinking about doing a re-targeting campaign? That means somebody goes to your website, and then your ads follow them around for 30 days. There are so many options.

So, don’t go headfirst into something you don’t understand and get a couple of different opinions. It’s kind of like having a service provider come out to your house. You don’t necessarily want to buy an AC from the first guy you see, because those ACs can get real expensive, real fast. Second, digital advertising. The things you should be asking them are how many different opportunities are you going to be, right? So, that’s your width, how many different places will your ads appear? Then you want to know about frequency. How often will the same people see your ads over and over again? That’s very important.

You want to know about who is going to be around you, and what ads will surround you. Because if you are out there, and you have a fine, upstanding, reputable company, but you’re going to have ads that are maybe less than stellar or competitors, you want to make sure you’ve got a little space and distance from people that either you don’t want to be associated with, or they’re direct competitors of yours. You also want to know how long the runs are going to be. Because you have to be able to understand the frequency over that entire time. If they’re saying you’re gonna have a 2.7 frequency over a year. Well, I don’t know about you, I can’t remember what I ate for lunch yesterday, much less messages I saw six months ago. So, you need to have that frequency in a much shorter timeframe.

We need to see messages, you know, 7, 14, 21 times in a week for it to really sink in. When I was in media buying school at the time, which was a few years ago, granted, but on average, people saw about 1500 Maybe 1800 ads a day. You want to guess what it is now? We’re talking 5000, 6000, 7000, 8000 ads a day that people are seeing. So, if you’re going to cut through all that clutter, you better have some great placement and a really good message to be able to build your brand.