The following article is part of a new series presented by Jewish Content Network which will discuss business ideas, marketing advice, and feature new business technologies, in an effort to help small business and organizations thrive and succeed. 

At the Jewish Content Network, we see hundreds of advertisers run campaigns – some more successful, some less.

We’ve compiled a list of best practices to get the most out of your ad campaign. These come from our own extensive experience as well as marketing best-practices.

If you’re putting money into your ads, it’s important that you maximize the return on your financial investment.

Understand your audience

When advertising, target just one core audience, your best existing or potential clients, and speak to them. Try to target their emotions – their fears, concerns, hopes and dreams and build your text and graphics around that.

Don’t dilute your message by trying to reach everyone.

Be specific

Continuing from the previous point, the more specific you are, the more results you will get from your ads. For example, linking to your homepage will get you less results than linking to a specific clothing line you’re trying to promote.

Trying to get people to buy all your products will result in people not buying any of them. Hone in on one niche and build an ad campaign around it. Then duplicate it with another niche if you want.

Link to landing pages

Because staying focused is so important, the best place your ad can link to is a page created just for that ad. Don’t link to a picture, or even to the homepage of your site. Link to a specially created page that continues exactly where the ad left off.

You might spark people’s attention with a creative headline, and then follow up with an in-depth article that continues the discussion. These types of pages are called “landing pages” because it’s where the visitor “lands” when he clicks the ad.

Typically, they are designed with minimum distractions and have one clear action the visitor should take. We offer a built-in landing page creator to help you easily create custom landing pages in seconds – this article is one!

Be clear on what your audience should do

The call to action (CTA) is a key point of every campaign. What is the one thing you want people to do? Identify it and focus all your efforts on getting them to do it.

• Want them to buy something? Put the product on the page and make it easy to buy.
• Want them to sign up to your newsletter? Put a sign up form right on the page and give people an incentive to sign up.
• Want them to contact you? Put multiple ways to contact you right on the page and make them clickable for easy access (phone numbers can be links as well).

There should always be something specific you get people to do. Just doing a campaign to “build awareness” is dumping money down the drain.

Use great graphics and copy

In a world of diminishing attention spans, the more professional and attention-grabbing your ads, the more effective they will be. Copywriting is the art of writing headlines and advertising text that compels people to buy.

Make sure your headlines are short and engaging, and your text is clearly written and grammatically correct. DON’T USE A LOT OF ALL CAPS. IT JUST SOUNDS LIKE YOU’RE SHOUTING. Most importantly, try creating content that informs and entertains, and is not just a direct “buy now” sell.

Test multiple versions

We get asked all the time what the best thing to do is for specific campaigns. The truth is, we usually don’t know. There are too many variables to predict human behavior, and the best thing to do is test.

Create two or more versions of the same ad and then pause the ones that perform the least. This is called A/B testing, where you test version A against version B and see which ones works better.

Pro Tip:

Use the A/B testing capabilities of the platform to test multiple variations of your ad. In the example below, we tried different colored backgrounds on our otherwise identical ads. The ones with the blue and orange backgrounds performed the worst, and we turned it off.

Align all media

Keep all the aspects of your advertising the same. In marketing terms, this is called a “campaign” and it means that the graphics and text you use should be uniform no matter where they appear. Whether you are advertising on Instagram or on a site, both the ads and the destinations should all be in alignment.

When advertising on the Jewish Content Network, for example it’s perfectly ok, and actually recommended, to use the same image from the landing page in the ad itself.

Chaim Chernoff is the Chief Marketing Officer at the Jewish Content Network. Always on the lookout for latest digital marketing trends, Chaim aims to help businesses expand their presence and grow their business in the digital world. He can be reached at [email protected]

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