How Not to Run a Paid Media Campaign
Most of the time you’ll read a blog post or article about how best to run a paid media campaign. This could be on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn. We might find a lot of examples of paid campaigns that are pretty good, but might need some tweaking – perhaps it could use a better image or a more prominent call to action.
I am a pretty active user of LinkedIn. I scroll through my feed several times a day, even on the weekends. I enjoy reading about business news, inspiring quotes, and stories about small business wins. For the past month or so, I would stumble upon a LinkedIn ad for hail damage. I live in Denver, hail damage happens often, so that seems like a plausible ad for the area. Here is the ad itself:
The ad starts off like a normal ad. There is some copy about “if you need help with hail damage”. The image of a car with hail damage is relevant. All is off to a good start.
That’s not how you want to run a paid media campaign.
For a number of reasons:
- You are spending budget on paid media and not bringing users to a landing page where they can learn more about your business or sign up for an appointment to repair their hail damage
- It’s a bad user experience. The user clicks through the ad, expecting to land on a page talking about how to repair hail damage, only to end up back on the ad image
- It’s turning away potential paying customers.
Additionally, the other piece of this whole story is that users actually indicated in the comments that the link was not working (I also chimed in the comments). Here is a screenshot of the thread:
So moral of the digital marketing story here:
Test your paid media campaigns before you set them live! You are spending budget on this. Make sure it’s working correctly!
Read your social media comments and listen to your customers. They might have something important to say.
And hire someone who is an expert at running paid media. They are more likely to set up campaigns correctly, test them and be accountable for the budget you spend.
If you need an expert in paid media, check out our Case Study with YPO and reach out to us!