Scaling profitably is a major challenge for brands. Most aren’t able to achieve that kind of growth because they’re missing the tools and strategies they need to be successful.
Here’s what we make sure is in place before scaling our clients.
Full-funnel advertising approach
Brands regularly over-invest in “performance marketing.” They focus only on high ROAS marketing strategies. Optimizing towards a high ROAS can hold you back from scaling your campaigns.
Instead, identify your optimal ROAS and create a strategy that follows customers through the whole customer journey.
Investing in the full customer journey allows you to introduce the brand to new consumers and build a larger audience of potential customers. Over time, this helps the brand grow and scale.
Omnichannel advertising approach
Consumers need to engage with brands multiple times in different ways. Creating an omnichannel approach ensures that you consistently reach consumers where they are and when they are most receptive to your messaging.
Also, as you begin to scale your advertising, you’ll reach diminishing returns on your advertising channels since most brands focus only on Google, Facebook, and Instagram, their ability to scale stalls over time.
For example, TikTok has become a high-value channel for driving e-commerce purchases. When Facebook’s CPM began to rise, and ROAS started to suffer, we helped our clients shift funds into TikTok to maintain their campaign efficiencies.
Diversifying your advertising channels allows you to identify new ways to reach your target audiences and manage volatility in the market.
Sophisticated media planning & forecasting
As you scale your campaigns, staying organized becomes more and more important.
Creating a detailed media plan ensures you know your investments by channel, the primary KPIs, and how you expect the campaigns to scale over time.
We’ve found that the media plans not only help our clients, but also help media teams by setting KPI benchmarks and goals.
When campaigns fall behind, the forecast allows a strategist to quickly diagnose the issues and create a plan of action to remedy the situation. Similarly, when campaigns are exceeding the forecast, we can coordinate with the client to ensure there are no logistics or inventory issues that will be a concern.
Knowing your targets allows you to gauge the success of the campaigns and identify what’s driving that growth. You can’t optimize what you don’t track.
Comprehensive ad tracking & attribution
Growing campaigns requires maximizing your resources on channels and tactics that drive the best results. To know what is performing well, you need to have a comprehensive (and accurate) ad tracking plan.
We regularly see brands make optimization decisions based on reporting that shows only attributed metrics. Only relying on attributed metrics can lead brands to think campaigns perform better than they actually do.
The problems with attributed or engine-level metrics arise when running omnichannel campaigns. Conversions can be attributed to multiple channels, leading to double (sometimes triple) counting.
When working with our clients, we help them understand their goals and create a measurement plan. The measurement plan outlines how we’ll measure success and what attribution model we’ll use to make decisions.
We regularly recommend tracking last-click data from Google Analytics since it de-dupes purchases. As you continue to scale and collect data, a media mix model can give you better insights into how your budgets are performing and where you can scale effectively.
How you measure your results depends on where you are in scaling your business. Measurement plans should be thoughtful and strategic decisions to ensure you are making the best decisions for your brand.
Detailed learning agenda
It’s rare that a scaling campaign will grow quickly right away. Instead, sustainable growth comes from incremental optimizations to the campaigns. You can achieve this by consistently testing elements of your advertising.
Most brands believe they are doing well with a/b testing their campaigns. The reality is that most brands are not achieving the results they want because they don’t follow an organized testing methodology or understand what they should actually be testing.
For example, brands will spend time and resources testing the color of a button instead of testing the messaging hook or channel. Focusing on tests that will drive meaningful and incremental improvements is important.
We recommend brands create a learning agenda. The learning should outline a testing strategy that responds to campaign metrics and builds upon itself. The more tests you run, the more effective the campaign should become and the easier it should scale.
What’s next?
Scaling media campaigns requires smart planning, measurement, and testing. Implementing some of the outlined strategies will help you scale faster and grow more efficiently.
Not sure how to scale your brand? Click here to learn more about our paid media strategy workshops.
