Building Paid Campaigns for Multi-Channel/Audience Brands
Just about any business in any industry can benefit from running paid ads, whether the campaigns are driving traffic and brand awareness, or looking for high-touch, niche conversions in a highly competitive and sensitive market.
Over the last few years, Formada has amassed considerable experience in building full-funnel, multi-channel strategies for businesses in healthcare, finance, law, and more.
But as you might imagine, designing effective paid advertising campaigns for multi-channel, multi-audience brands is a challenging task.
Why? Well, simply put, there are many more variables to consider.
Look at it this way: E-commerce sales is a much more straightforward campaign approach. The consumer has a need, the business sells a product or service that fills that need. There’s a relatively direct line between the two. It doesn’t mean that they’re easy, but the pathways are clearer.
More complex campaigns, like those we’ve built for recruitment businesses, require meeting the end-user (the recruit) precisely where they are in their career journey — and that can be a lot of different places!
The potential recruit could be still a student, a recent graduate, or an established professional looking to ascend to the next level of their profession. Often, these audiences might not even yet know that they’re in need of such services!
Sure, some users are actively seeking out recruitment, but most are in a much higher place in the marketing funnel. In order to overcome the many obstacles you’ll face in multi-channel/audience campaigns, you need to lean into contextual targeting, in this case, demographic and job title-based data.
Having this depth of information is an incredibly valuable resource, but managing multiple data sets from a variety of sources also means increased room for error. But before we get too deep into the details, let’s go over some of the basics.
The Strategy Behind Successful Multi-Channel/Audience Campaigns
So when it comes to designing successful paid media campaigns, there are plenty of factors that affect the outcome or performance of your strategy:
Content — Image? Text? Video? A combination? What kind of campaign are we running?
Design — How are we leveraging the brand identity and its values to engage the audience?
Copywriting — What’s the message? What are we asking people to do?
Budget — How much are we able to consistently invest in the campaign?
Placement or Ad Type — Where will our audiences be able to see our ads?
And while all of the above factors are critically important to the campaign’s success, reaching the right user at the right time is arguably the most imperative.
Like I mentioned previously, we use a variety of user data available to create campaigns, whether it’s building new, custom audiences through top-of-funnel branding and awareness tactics, or using pre-built audience segments. We might even purchase secure lists of contacts through service partners. The combination of our different audiences, deployment methods, and campaign management are designed to create a successful, properly targeted ad.
You also have to ensure your campaigns don’t overlap. Targeting three separate audiences that exist in the same sector can be extremely challenging. It would be far easier to simply let the campaigns overlap, but it is very important that they remain siloed, otherwise the integrity of your campaign data will become increasingly flawed over time.
What Multi-Channel/Audience Campaigns Look Like In Practice
In the case of our regional recruiting partner, they face a multitude of challenges in reaching their three main audiences: health and data privacy laws, new ad platform restrictions (e.g., no more title-targeting on Meta), and the built-in difficulty of placing jobs in very-rural markets.
In addition, they need to find three extremely different user types — partnering businesses, providers, near-graduates/residents — all of whom represent vastly different objectives, essentially requiring three unique strategies.
To achieve this, we designed a full-funnel marketing approach that utilizes 5–7 separate ad platforms. Each of these platforms works in a different way, to meet a different type of user at a different stage in their “customer journey” or lifecycle.
Some platforms are better than others at driving traffic and delivering content at scale, and others are better at finding high-intent, lower-funnel converters, but it’s important that each of these is utilized to work together and nurture users down the funnel and keep them engaged.
We also use a variety of platforms, audience tools, pixels, and ad types to reach our desired conversion goals. It’s also important that we’re following data compliance standards and are working with secure and verified partners and software to protect client and user information.
With this particular client, we prioritize flexibility and making data-informed decisions. Their goals as an organization are fluid, and each audience they work with has different needs and different benchmarks, so we make sure that we’re being receptive and adjusting strategies as-needed.
This partnership and approach has led to some incredible results.
What Multi-Channel/Audience Campaigns Results Look Like
Here are just some of the success metrics we’ve seen this year with this recruiting client. The data reflects the time period that the campaigns have been under Formada management compared to their previous period of performance.
Google Ads (including Search and Display)
- 37% decrease in spend
- 63% increase in Impressions
- 12% increase in Clicks
- 44% drop in Cost Per Click ($3.88 vs. $6.91)
- 2 more Conversions (157 vs. 155) for over $66,000 less — a 38% drop in Cost per Conversion
Meta Ads (flat spend)
- 314% increase in Clicks
- 69% drop in Cost Per Click ($6.21 vs. $20.07)
- 1,249% increase in CTR
LinkedIn Ads (B2B)
- 115% increase in spend
- A 214% increase in Clicks
- A 32.1% drop in Cost Per Click ($9.52 vs. $14.02)
- A 90% increase in CTR
LinkedIn Ads (B2C)
- 60.7% increase in spend
- 156% increase in Impressions
- 184% increase in Clicks
- 10.6% increase in Click Through Rate
- 37.3% decrease in CPM
- 43.3% decrease in CPC
The Future of Multi-Channel/Audience Campaigns
With digital marketing and the dynamic nature of paid ads, there’s always room for improvement. There are always opportunities for optimization.
There’s an ever-complex and growing need for specialized, top-tier digital paid advertising campaigns. While in the past you might have been on the cutting edge if you were running paid search ads, now many of these once non-traditional digital marketing tactics are considered commonplace — even expected as a standard — if you’re to thrive beyond, let alone survive alongside, your competition.
That’s why working with Formada not only provides cutting-edge technical capabilities, but also hands-on, personable, and transparent management that informs the client how their ad dollars are spent, and what’s being done to improve the performance of their campaigns.
It’s essential that, no matter how digital marketing evolves, that we should be giving special consideration to:
- Building a good audience strategy
- The variety of different data source and audience types that are available for use when targeting digital advertising campaigns
- Proper data management and continuous optimization
- How different types of ad placements/ad platforms work differently and find different types of users at different stages of the marketing funnel
- Ongoing nurturing of leads through multiple steps across multiple channels
Our work with our recruiting partner has seen great success in expanding the reach of their content, finding relevant and valuable user conversions, and delivering new, dynamic campaigns across multiple touch-points.
Want To Learn More About Multi-Channel Campaigns?
We work incredibly close with all of our partners in order to ensure that we’re always properly targeting their ads to relevant audiences in a timely manner. These tactics simply won’t work if you’re not paying attention to who your ads are being delivered to. Your business deserves the same level of attention. We treat your ad dollars as though they’re ours.
If you want to learn more about how we can create a custom, full-funnel, multi-audience strategy to support your business goals, then let’s talk! Our goal is to help you achieve yours. Contact us today to learn more.