A holistic, tactical approach can hugely reduce your costs per lead.

You’ve spent years creating a great product. You’ve poured money and resources into giving it the branding it needs to stand out in a busy marketplace, and you’re ready to use paid media to see it truly soar.

But how can you be sure you’ll reach the goals you’ve set for your campaign?

While paid media campaigns have consistently produced great results for many, there is an equally substantial number of people for whom it simply never pays off. How can you be sure that you are going to get maximum mileage out of your paid media campaign and be able to sustain and improve it over time?

Fortunately, the factors that combine to make paid media flighting a sustainable, value-adding strategy can be quick to deploy with structured thinking and frameworks. Even better, all the data you need to make the right choices for optimisation is at your fingertips.

When you start analysing data to generate penetrating insights about the human behaviour your customers’ exhibit, you are well on your way to making paid media flighting sustainable.

Timing Is Everything

It’s a well known fact that in digital marketing, branded messaging at certain times of day outperforms the same messaging during less optimal hours. For example:

• Email marketers have long known that leveraging the time factor for email campaigns increases open rates and produces better ROI

• Social media marketers have poured over thousands of data points to determine the best rel="noopener noreferrer" time of day for posting to Facebook (Hint: Wednesdays at 3:00 PM)
• These are adjusted averages using the aggregate collection of all users’ data to derive insights. This is freely available data. However, timings really begin to generate value when you start to pay attention to your specific users’ preferences and understand how factors such as day of week change their intent and behaviour.

This distinction may seem like a subtle one, but it makes all the difference in the world.

Case Study – Loans.com.au

The owners of Loans.com.au (home loans) contacted Deepend for advice on the optimisation of their paid media strategy.

First up, we got out of our seats. Our approach was to replicate the customer experience as best we could to fully understand how factors such as flighting are important. Deepend attended house viewings and auctions to gain a sense of how the audience used digital, then developed hypotheses as to the nuances and what we would see in the data to validate or challenge these hypotheses.

For example, flighting and aligning with the right device. Take the phrase ‘home loan approval’ – the intent of a customer searching for this phrase on a mobile on a Saturday afternoon (potentially they have just viewed their dream house), changes significantly compared to another customer searching for the same phrase on their desktop device at work on a slow Wednesday morning (where it is likely urgency is not as high). We looked for patterns in the data to validate this, and when it rang true, we factored it into our messaging and the customer journey we offer.

Based on gathered insights and validating hypotheses such as these, we then conducted a media audit to ensure campaign structures enabled us to leverage these behaviours. This progressed to a full review of the Loans.com.au customer base, their needs, their expectations, and the factors that would combine to lead them to research mortgage providers online.

We used this analysis to focus the company’s paid media flighting around strategically significant times of day in order maximise the campaign’s effectiveness. We reduced wasted ad spend, which almost halved the company’s cost per lead while more than doubling its monthly lead volume.

Sometimes, a small adjustment in timing is all it takes to generate maximum improvement.

Do you suspect that adjusting your approach to paid media flighting could produce similar results for your organisation? Speak to one of our digital marketing experts to find out.

Find out more about leveraging the power of data to optimise your Digital Media Strategy.