As we march closer to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, CMOs and marketing leaders need to prepare for a significant shift in the digital advertising landscape. Election years have always posed unique challenges for advertisers, but the growing dominance of digital media has made the impact more profound than ever before.

In this article, we’ll explore the key factors that will shape the advertising environment in the coming months and provide actionable insights to help you navigate these turbulent waters.

The Digital Battleground

The rise of cord-cutting and the shift towards digital media consumption have fundamentally altered the advertising landscape in recent years. As traditional TV viewership declines, political campaigns have had to adapt their strategies to reach voters where they are spending their time: on digital platforms.

According to a recent report by eMarketer, the number of cord-cutters in the U.S. is expected to reach 65.1 million by the end of 2023, representing a 6.9% increase from 2022. This trend is projected to continue, with the number of cord-cutters reaching 72.2 million by 2025.

Moreover, a survey conducted by Pew Research Center in 2023 found that 62% of U.S. adults do not have a cable or satellite TV subscription, up from 61% in 2022 and 50% in 2019. This data further underscores the accelerating shift away from traditional TV and towards streaming and digital media platforms.

As these trends continue, political advertisers will have no choice but to follow their audiences to digital channels. In the 2022 midterm elections, digital ad spending by political campaigns reached $1.2 billion, a 50% increase from the 2018 midterms. With the 2024 presidential election on the horizon, this figure is expected to grow exponentially, as campaigns compete for the attention of an increasingly digital-first electorate.

For brands and advertisers, this means that the competition for digital ad space will be fiercer than ever before. As political ad spending continues to migrate to platforms like Meta, YouTube, and connected TV, the cost of advertising will likely surge, making it more challenging for non-political advertisers to reach their target audiences.

To navigate this complex and constantly evolving landscape, CMOs and their teams will need to be proactive, data-driven, and willing to experiment with new strategies and channels. By staying ahead of the curve and adapting to the changing media consumption habits of their audiences, brands can position themselves for success in the face of the electoral advertising onslaught.

Rising Costs and Limited Inventory

As political advertisers flood the digital market, the cost of advertising is expected to skyrocket. CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) will likely experience a steady climb throughout the year, with significant spikes anticipated in May, as college students come home from school and become more engaged in political conversations, and around major campaign events like presidential debates.

For media buyers and their teams, this means that the tried-and-true strategies of years past may no longer be sufficient. Brands will need to be nimble, adaptable, and willing to explore new tactics to stay ahead of the game.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday: A Perfect Storm

The challenges of election year advertising will be particularly acute during the critical holiday shopping season. Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which have historically been goldmines for advertisers, will be more expensive and competitive than ever in 2024, as they coincide with the final weeks of the presidential campaign.

To avoid being drowned out by the political noise, brands will need to start planning their holiday campaigns earlier than usual. Building up audiences and crafting compelling creative assets well in advance will be essential to success, as will a willingness to explore alternative channels and tactics. Relying on cold audiences come Q4 will lead to exceptionally high costs that may be detrimental to many businesses.

Navigating the Chaos

While the challenges of election year advertising can seem daunting, there are steps that media buyers and their teams can take to mitigate the impact and even thrive in this environment. Here are a few key strategies to keep in mind:

Start early and plan for contingencies: Begin planning your Q3 and Q4 campaigns as early as possible, with a focus on building up your target audiences and developing a robust library of creative assets.

Be sure to build in contingency budgets to account for potential cost increases, and be prepared to pivot your strategy as the landscape evolves.

Embrace alternative channels: Consider diversifying your media mix to include channels that may be less impacted by political ad spending, such as influencer marketing, podcast advertising, or sponsored content. Investing in owned media channels, like email marketing and mobile apps, can also provide a direct line to your customers without the need to compete for ad space.

Owned channels will be more important than ever. Use cheaper months leading up to the election to build your email lists and existing customer base so that your BF/CM can leverage your owned channels and warm audiences.

Craft compelling, shareable content: In a crowded and noisy advertising environment, creating content that resonates with your target audience will be more important than ever. Focus on developing authentic, engaging content that aligns with your brand values and speaks directly to your customers’ needs and desires.

By tapping into the power of emotional triggers and social proof, you can create content that not only cuts through the clutter but also inspires organic sharing and amplification.

Reflections

The 2024 election year will undoubtedly bring new challenges and complexities to the world of digital advertising. But by staying informed, adaptable, and strategic in your approach, you can navigate this landscape successfully and even find new opportunities for growth and engagement.

As a media buyer or agnecy, your role in steering your brand through these uncharted waters will be critical. By starting your planning early, embracing alternative channels and tactics, and focusing on creating authentic, resonant content, you can not only survive but thrive in the face of election year disruptions.

So while the road ahead may be uncertain, one thing is clear: the brands that approach this challenge with creativity, agility, and a steadfast commitment to their customers will be the ones that emerge stronger on the other side.

The post Battling for Attention in the 2024 Election Year Media Frenzy appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

There are a lot of ways that the upcoming change to Apple’s iOS 14 is being described.

An attack on business.

A long overdue win for consumers.

Something that will deeply affect the websites that you love.

A way for users to take back control of their digital footprint.

It may seem like a lot of fuss to make about an internal operating system, but it’s true—it really is as groundbreaking and polarizing as it’s being made out to be.

And when it comes to groundbreaking and polarizing technology changes, we know you, the marketer just trying to keep the customers rolling in, often struggle to know what’s really important and applies directly to you.

Hint: this one is really important, and it applies directly to you.

So we’ve broken down the basics of this change—what is actually happening, why, and what you need to do about it.

What’s Happening

In the coming weeks, Apple will be rolling out an update to its iOS 14 (the latest operating system for iPhones and iPads) that will allow users to control how they share their data, as well as who and what they share their data with. This change will be coming only weeks after Apple began requiring Privacy Labels, forcing companies and developers to share how your data will be used before you download a new app. Once implemented, the “opt-out” will be the most significant change ever made to an operating system as it pertains to data privacy.

Soon, your apps like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter (just to name a few) will be required to ask users for permission to track data on them. And there are lots of varying opinions on what effect this change will have, as well as who it will affect the most.

This change comes after not months, but years of discussion about privacy concerns. From election interference, to congressional investigations, to polarization, to general public distrust in tech companies, data privacy has been front and center in a national conversation about the power that tech and social media companies possess. Many feel that this new digital world has led to a lack, or outright loss, of control over your own personal data. This is Apple’s solution to that problem.

While most people, consumers and tech giants alike, would agree that an increase and focus on personal data security is a good thing, it does have a very massive effect one thing in particular: advertisement personalization.

What Does This Mean for Advertising

The expectation is that some, if not most, people will choose to opt-out of apps sharing their data. That means they will be getting much less relevant ad recommendations that could lead to overall decrease in user experience. The ads will still be there, they could just totally not pertain to the user’s interests.

Simply put, it could be harder for advertisers to reach their target audience like they do. That means online advertising, at least to iOS devices, could become significantly less effective.

Google and Facebook, the two biggest advertising networks in the world, have adamantly opposed this upcoming change. And Facebook argues that the change is going to hurt small businesses using its advertising platform.

Facebook is by far the most effective and affordable way for small businesses to advertise and generate awareness about their products. Because of the decrease in audience size, it’s going to harder to reach a mass amount of people. Advertisers will also have less guidance from data when figuring out what is and isn’t working. There’s likely to be a lot more guesswork when it comes to optimizing campaigns.

Whether you’re a small vendor using Facebook ads to sell products, or an app or content-based platform that shows advertisements to make money, Facebook argues this change to iOS will have a significant and negative affect on your business.

Here’s how.

For starters, Facebook expects this change will immediately alter the effectiveness of the Audience Network. Without the ability for publishers to share data and information with the advertisers, businesses won’t be able to access their own user data to spend their advertising dollars efficiently. And, with the shrinking pool of consumers, Facebook is expecting the use of the Audience Network to become significantly less popular for advertisers.

All in all, Facebook may eventually remove the Audience Network from iOS. Meaning, by implementing AN ads, you will only be reaching non-Apple device users. But that remains to be seen, and it will take some time for them to assess if that’s really what they want to do.

To be fair, we’ve always had questions about its effectiveness in the first place. Although it works for some, it typically resulted in numerous amounts of accidental clicks and bot interactions. For us at DM, this will change very little.

Facebook also expects this will heavily impact advertising effectiveness for primarily mobile users. If someone is using Facebook and clicks on a link that directs them to their mobile browser, Facebook can’t track any of that information. Because of that, things like Conversion tracking and retargeting campaigns are going to suffer.

Last but not least, Facebook is introducing Aggregated Event Management to do some tracking without collecting specific, personal data. We have limited information about this, but we do know one thing: Facebook is limiting users to 8 conversion events (“buy now,” “add to cart,” “checkout,” etc.) per domain. And the advertiser will be able to prioritize which conversion events they want to track. This gives advertisers some sort of information about the effectiveness of their advertising and selling process.

Keep in mind, this is per domain. That could really affect ecommerce businesses that sell lots of products and, therefore, have lots of products on their website. It’s possible this will change or only take certain events into account for tracking, but there is really no way to know until it launches.

What You Need to do Right Now

The best thing you can do right now, according to Facebook, is verify your domain. This is especially critical for businesses with pixels used by multiple Business Managers or personal ad accounts. Domain verification will ensure no immediate or future disruption in the ability to configure conversion events.

The next thing is to begin planning to only use 8 conversion events. That means you are going to have to rank the conversion events that matter most to you. Because, once you prioritize those, ad sets not using those 8 events will be automatically paused.

After that, continue to prepare. 28-day click-through, 28-day view-through, and 7-day view-through attribution windows will not be supported. Historical data for these windows will remain accessible via the Ads Insights API. But be aware, way that many of these were measuring results is going to change, so figuring out how to quantify success through advertising is going to have to change too.

You should also adopt the Comparing Windows feature to see how conversions attributed to ads compare across different attribution windows. This allows you to better anticipate the impact to reported conversions as a result of upcoming attribution window changes.

Final Thoughts

This change has probably made your marketing plan a lot more complicated. These are admittedly massive changes, but the best thing you can do is prepare to be flexible. Things are changing for everyone. With that being said, here are some immediate thoughts and questions.

For starters, how can you really deduce if a campaign was effective or not? This is going to be a million-dollar question for the near future. With the way we measure effectiveness and our metrics changing as a result of this update, the people who figure out how to measure success will be the ones leading the way in this new paradigm.

Secondly, how can we reach all of the Apple users that opt-out? There are currently 264 million people in Facebook’s iOS users. And most of those users are in the US. If half of them decide to opt out, what ways will be able to reach them?

At the end of the day, you’ll have to get creative. And we are guessing that organic advertising campaigns may suddenly become more popular.

Facebook may be right—this may impact small business most, and it will impact the least savvy the most. Don’t panic, but be ready to change your approach. Right now, there’s lots of ambiguity that will be cleared up with experience. Once these changes roll out, we can start pivoting. Prepare the best you can… but this is a wait-and-see moment. This is simply a dress rehearsal for what is inevitable. The focus on data sharing and privacy is not going away anytime soon.

The post What Apple’s iOS 14 Update Means for Your Business appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Yes, we mean anyone. New marketers or experienced marketers just dipping their toes into the Facebook world can find huge success on Facebook. The key is to set up your first ad, hit publish, and immediately put your learning cap on.

Every ad you create on Facebook will be a learning opportunity about what works best for your audience on Facebook and what you can do BETTER next time.

So let’s get you started on publishing your first Facebook ad so you can become a baller Facebook marketer. (We believe in you!)

Here are the 5 steps to creating your first Facebook ad.

#1: Figure Out Your Offer and CTA

The first step in creating a Facebook ad is knowing what you’re advertising. What’s your offer and how are you asking people to buy in? Your offer can range from asking people to click-through to your website all the way to asking for them to take out their wallets and buy your stuff.

Here are a few examples of different types of offers:

• Lead magnet
• Discount code
• Buy one, get one
• Free trial

Figuring out your offer depends on the goal of your Facebook ad. Do you want it to drive more traffic to your website? Would it be ideal if you grow your email list? Is the main goal to get more sales?

For example, if you want to drive more traffic to your website, you’ll want to offer a lead magnet, discount code, or buy one, get one offer that motivates the person to see your ad to check out the details on your site.

If your goal is to grow your email list, you’ll want to offer a lead magnet that requires a person to put their email address into a form so you can send them the ebook, video, course, etc. (and then add them to your email funnel).

Or, if your goal is to get more sales, you want to offer a discount code or buy-one-get-one offer that makes the person click through your ad to your website so they can shop your products.

Here are two examples of DigitalMarketer offers from our Facebook ads. The first offer has the goal of getting people to come to our website and read our article How to Find Writers For Your Blog,

Whoever reads this article is going to see 2 calls-to-action inside for our latest promo. The promo inside of our blog posts generally asks for a reader’s email address to receive a lead magnet, subscribe to our DM Insider newsletter, and sometimes buy a low-tier offer (but this isn’t very often).

There are 3 main goals behind this Facebook ad:

1. Show our content to a cold audience that wasn’t aware of the DigitalMarketer brand (Stage 1 of the Customer Value Journey)
2. Get readers to turn into leads by signing up to receive the promo
3. Pixel the people who clicked through to our website so we can target them with ads again

Here’s another ad that we’re running with the offer of a free trial of our Lab membership,

A person that clicks on this ad is going to be taken to our Claim Your Trial of Lab landing page, where they’ll read more information on our Lab membership. There are 2 goals for this Facebook ad:

1. Get Lab free trial subscriptions
2. Pixel the people who visited this page (they’re now very warm leads)

Once you’ve looked at your goal and figured out what offer works well for it, you can figure out what your call-to-action is. This will be pretty easy since you’re already going to know what action you need someone to take to achieve your goal.

For example, if we want somebody to read our article, our CTA is “Learn More”. If we want somebody to sign up for a free trial of Lab, our CTA is “Sign Up”.

If we were asking somebody to buy a product, our CTA would be “Buy Now”.

Alright, now that we have our offer and CTA we can start working on the ad creative.

#2: Write Your Copy and Make Your Visuals

With your offer and CTA in hand, it’s time to pull together the copy and visuals that are going to help get your point across. This is your ad creative and it’s a crucial, crucial, crucial part of your ad. If your copy, visuals, or both are off—you’re not going to get the results you were looking for.

Before you start writing your copy and making your images or recording your video, figure out where you want this ad to be seen. 

• Do you want it to be an ad in Facebook and Instagram feeds?
• Is it going to be an Instagram story?

Knowing how your ad is going to look is going to tell you what copy you need and how your visual should look.

Let’s start with creating A+ copy that makes your customer avatar think, “Hey…that’s exactly what I’m looking for.”

Here are a few copywriting strategies that are tried and proven:

The Power of One

This copywriting strategy uses a good idea, core emotion, captivating story, or inevitable response to grab someone’s attention. Examples of these are:

Good idea: How to Use Neuromarketing In Your Facebook Ads

Core Emotion: A garbage truck worth of plastic is dumped in the ocean every minute.

Captivating Story: A customer testimonial talking about the difference a product has made on their life, business, etc.

Inevitable Response: You’ll Laugh When You Realize How Many Times You’ve Made This Copywriting Mistake

Benefits Over Features

Don’t use your ad space to talk about the features of your product. These features are what makes you excited, but not your customers. Your customers get excited about the BENEFITS those features will have.

For example, a productivity management tool shouldn’t be highlighting their sleek, easy to use interface—that’s a feature. They should be talking about how much time someone saves by using their tool, that’s a benefit.

Use FOMO, Urgency, and Scarcity

Copywriting uses these emotional triggers to show someone why they should be buying a product, signing up for a product, or opting in.

• FOMO makes people feel left out and like they want to hop on the wagon
• Urgency motivates someone to take the CTA as soon as possible
• Scarcity shows a lack of product, opportunity, etc. and creates a faster conversion

When you use these triggers, you want to make sure that you’re not spreading negative or fearful messages. As a marketer, you have a responsibility to empower people—not scare them into taking the action you want. For example, when we market our Lab membership we never say, “If you don’t join Lab, you’re going to be a terrible marketer.”

That’s spreading negativity and fearful messaging that somebody needs our product to be a great marketer. That’s not what we’re about.

Instead, we’ll say, “Join thousands of other marketers who are learning the best marketing strategies available right now.” This creates a FOMO of not being one of those thousands of marketers, without making somebody feel badly about themselves.

Now, let’s focus on your visuals, whether that’s a single image or video, a carousel, or a collection of images. Remember, your visual is going to have copy included on it. If you’re posting a product image, you can put the price of the product on the image.

For the most part, you can assume that people are going to see your image first, and read your copy after. So you’ll want to put tons of attention on how your visual represents your offer and brand.

For example, take a look at the visual Allie Bloyd is using.

The first thing you notice is the text that reads, 5-Day Local Content Creation Challenge. The second thing you notice is Allie herself. This is a great example of using your ad visual to show your offer (in Allie’s case it’s the 5-Day Local Content Creation Challenge) and making it on brand. For Allie, on-brand is bright colors and a bright image. It’s also her!

Phew, now that we’ve worked through the creative process behind your Facebook ad, it’s time to dive into Facebook Ads Manager and publish it!

#3: Create a Campaign

The first part of creating an ad in Ads Manager is to create a campaign. In this part of your ad creation you’re going to be:

• Choosing your objective
• Deciding to run A/B tests
• Turning on or off campaign budget optimization (CBO)

Let’s quickly go through each of these.

#1: Choosing your objective

This is going to go back to the goal that we talked about in Step #1. What is the goal of your ad? Depending on that goal, you’re going to choose your objective. By choosing the objective here, you’re telling Facebook that this is what a win looks like to you. If you want people to click through to your website, by clicking on the “Traffic” objective you let Facebook know that this is the goal of your ad.

Here are all of your campaign objective options:

#2: A/B Tests

Turning on A/B tests just means that you’re going to publish more than one ad with the same objective. Just like you run A/B tests in email funnels or on landing pages, you want to see which ad performs the best.

If you want to run A/B tests, just turn the toggle on and choose what your test variable is going to be.

#3: Campaign Budget Optimization

Campaign budget optimization (CBO) distributes your budget across all of the ad sets in your campaign. Depending on what ad set performs best, it will put more of your budget towards the ads in that ad set.

You can turn this on if you’re going to have multiple ad sets with varying ad creatives. Once you turn it on, Facebook will ask you what your campaign budget is and then automatically move that budget around ad sets depending on their performance (based off of your campaign objective).

And just like that, you have a campaign!

#4: Create an Ad Set

You’ve made it to the second to last step of creating a Facebook ad! Let’s take a big gulp of coffee together—mmm, magical bean juice. With the caffeine coursing through our veins, we’re ready to make this ad set, the ad(s), and then hit PUBLISH!

Here’s what you’ll be doing when you create your ad set:

• Choosing your conversion event
• Choosing to turn on/off dynamic creation
• Choosing budget and schedule

Choosing your audience

• Choosing your placements
• Optimizing and delivery

Let’s go through each option.

#1: Conversion Event

The conversion event that you’ll get to choose is going to be based on the campaign objective that you chose in Step #3. For example, if you clicked on Traffic as your campaign objective, here’s what you’re going to see as your conversion event options.

#2: Dynamic Creative

Dynamic creative gives Facebook control over creating different variations of your ad using the copy and visuals that you upload for this ad set. 

• If you turn dynamic creative on, Facebook will show variations of the ad and visuals that you supplied to your audience and then figure out what variation is the most successful at getting the campaign objective
• If you don’t turn dynamic creative on, then Facebook will use the ad copy and visuals that you upload for each ad

#3: Budget and Schedule

If you’ve been nervous that Facebook is going to send you a massive bill because you messed something up when you set up your campaign, here’s the part where you don’t have to worry anymore.

This is the part where you’ll set your daily budget for each ad set. For example, you can say that you want to spend $20 per day. If you have 2 ads in this ad set, you’ll be spending $10 per day on each ad UNLESS you chose campaign budget optimization. In that case, Facebook will spend the budget on whichever ad is performing best.

You’ll also choose your schedule in this part of Ads Manager. You can determine your start date and your end date (see below). End dates are optional, since you can choose to just keep your ad running indefinitely until it stops converting.

#4: Audience

Alright, time to decide who’s being invited to your Facebook party! This is a really important part of creating your Facebook ad—if it’s not being shown to the right people then you’re not going to get the conversions you hoped for.

You’ll choose your audience based off of:

1. Location
2. Age
3. Gender
4. Interests
5. Languages
6. Connections

#5: Placements

Now, it’s time to choose where the ad is going to be seen. This involves both the platform and where within the platform it’s seen. For example, you can choose for your ad to only be shown on Instagram stories. Or, you can have your ad be a feed post that shows up on Facebook and Instagram.

Facebook will ask you if you want Automatic Placements or Manual Placements. Automatic placements will give Facebook the option to place your ad across any of feeds, stories, apps and sites, etc. Manual Placements gives you the option to choose what platform and where on the platform you want your ad placed.

Here’s the first few options you’ll see if you choose Manual Placements: 

#6: Optimization and Delivery

Within your ad set, you’ll optimize for an event. You can use this option to optimize for the goal that you chose in Step #1 or for different events per ad set. Here are the options you’ll see for the events you can optimize your ad set for:

Depending on the optimization that you choose, you can set cost control or bid control that puts a budget on the event. This is optional.

And just like that—we have an ad set!!

That means there’s only one more thing to do… put ads in it

#5: Create an Ad

The final step in creating your first Facebook ad is to…actually create the ad! Now that we’ve done all the background work, it’s time to make the part of the ad that our audience is going to see. Grab your copy and your visuals—it’s time to plug and play.

Here’s how you’re going to create your ad:

• Choose Identity
• Choose Ad Setup
• Create Ad Creative
• Set Up Tracking
• Publish

Again, let’s go through these in quick detail.

#1: Identity

Identity is the Facebook page, Instagram profile or person that is going to publish the ad. If you have a business Instagram account, this will be linked to your Facebook page.

#2: Ad Setup

In Ad Setup, you’ll choose between 2 options:

1. Single image or video
2. Carousel

A carousel ad has several images or videos that someone can scroll through. Here’s an example from DrinkMud.

#3: Ad Creative

This is where you’ll copy and paste your copy and upload your images or videos. You’ll have options like Primary Text, Headline (optional), Description, Website URL, and Call to Action.

While you’re putting the above information in, you’ll see your ad start to come together on the right-hand side. Take time to preview the ad in all of its placements to make sure that it looks good. If it doesn’t, you can go back into your ad set (Step #4) and turn that placement off using Manual Placement.

#4: Tracking

We wouldn’t be marketers if we weren’t planning on tracking our ads’ success! In the final step of setting up your Facebook ad, you’re going to choose where you want to track conversions. 

All of the results from your ad are going to be saved in your Ads Manager so you can see the budget, results, reach, impressions, cost per result, amount spent, frequency and unique clicks of your campaigns (depending on what information is relevant to your objective).

#5: PUBLISH!

Now, it’s time to hit the pretty green button in the right-hand corner and set your ad to live! We don’t want to be totally anti-climactic here, but you will have to wait for Facebook to approve your ad before it’s officially live.

But, once they do, your ad will be live for the world to see.

This is the foundation of creating Facebook ads. There are tons of strategies and tips around using Facebook ads that you can start to implement as you get more familiar with the platform and start to build your audience.

We just want you to remember one thing: even if your Facebook ad “fails” because it didn’t hit the campaign objective you were looking for… it’s not actually a failure. You still learned something that brought you closer to getting the traffic and conversions you’re looking for.

Good luck out there! We’ll see you on the feed

The post 5 Steps To Create Your First Facebook Ad appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

But, the trick is what comes after you get people on your sales page. What’s the best way to move your website visitors through your funnel to get conversions?

I call this, the million-dollar digital marketing question. (Feel free to send me your answers .)

Here’s my answer: stagger your creative and show different ads to people at different stages of the Customer Value Journey.

What We Did

At DigitalMarketer, we have some pretty complex funnels. One of our most important conversions is getting people to start a free two-week trial of Lab. As the Paid Ads Manager (hey, nice to meet you ), it’s my job to make this happen in the most efficient way possible. We want to do this at the lowest cost possible so we can scale.

I was able to cut our cost per conversion in half by doing one simple thing: introducing testimonial creative to our warm audience that hadn’t converted yet.

Here’s how I set up these testimonial ads for our warm audience:

Objective: Conversions

Targeting: Everyone who has been on our website or engaged with us on social channels and is not a member of Lab

Placements: All placements except for Audience Network

Creative: We tested 3 variations of the testimonial ads for this initial test and used dynamic ad copy

Why It Works

If it sounds too easy to really have created a 50% decrease in conversion costs, I get it. But, with my right hand raised—I swear this is all we did. Here’s why this works so well.

Asking someone who isn’t familiar with DigitalMarketer or our products to sign up for a $95 per month membership is a big ask. We already knew this, which is why we offer our two-week free trial so people can get to experience all the value that Lab offers in a low risk way. Getting people to start the trial is a huge indicator of success for us.

But, it can also be a bit difficult. To start a free trial, we have them put their credit card information in…which is also a big ask for somebody that isn’t familiar with our brand or products. That’s when the testimonials work their magic.

When people see testimonials, they get the reassurance that our membership actually provides a lot of value—and they don’t have to just take our word for it. Now is a good time to shout out all of our awesome Lab members who have said such kind words about Lab. (We you.)

Testimonials are working really well for our warm audience but it’s very important to note that they’re NOT working well for our cold audience. When I ran these ads to our cold audience they didn’t get any conversions. These ads are only being seen by our warm audience that excludes current Lab members, since we don’t need to advertise to our current customers.

How We’re Moving Forward

Our next goal is to scale these results in an efficient way. Since we are only running these ads to warm audiences, our spend level is pretty low. In warm audiences, I let my frequency dictate my spend levels. I am shooting for just enough ad spend to have a frequency of around 2.0 in a 7 day reporting window.

In order to scale these results, we need to grow the size of these audiences so we can spend more money on them while sticking to my strict frequency cap. This means that I need to optimize our top of funnel strategy next so we can bring in cheaper (but still quality) traffic that grows our warm audience pool.

Feel free to test this out for your own businesses and let us know how it goes for you.

Just remember, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to media buying so this may or may not be a useful strategy to you. The important thing is that you NEVER. STOP. TESTING.

Ever .

The post [Case Study] How DigitalMarketer Cut Our Cost Per Conversion By Over 50% In Less Than 7 days appeared first on DigitalMarketer.