Words: Belinda Connolly
Securing a strong ROI is the end game in paid digital marketing campaigns. A high ROI indicates that you’re not just hitting the mark with your target audience, but that you’re also generating leads and subsequent cost-efficient conversions.
Here are some strategies that can help enhance the ROI of your next paid campaign, whether your client is in the B2B or B2C space.
Amp up emotional engagement
Emotional engagement involves creating content that taps into audience feelings to make the brand more relatable and memorable. Doing this can help form deeper connections, enhance brand loyalty and drive consumer actions like purchases.
In 2019 Great Northern Brewing Co. used emotional engagement and precise targeting to become Australia’s top-selling beer. Their mini-documentary ‘The Great ReCamp’ told a touching story of a father and son rekindling their relationship through camping, subtly incorporating Great Northern Beer into their bonding moments. This campaign established a strong emotional connection with their audience, significantly enhancing their brand loyalty and sales.
To introduce emotional engagement to your audience try:
- Crafting narritives that connect with the audience. Use relatable situations, aspirations or overcoming common challenges to make the brand more memorable.
- Consider colours, facial expressions and tone of imagery. Visual cues are such an important part of driving emotional response.
- Leveraging music and sound effects to complement copy and visuals to enhance emotional impact.
Try the unexpected with experiential marketing
Experiential marketing is all about creating immersive experiences that allow consumers to interact with a brand and its products or services in a meaningful way. It goes beyond the traditional by engaging the senses, emotions and minds of consumers, often leading to a stronger connection with the brand.
M.J. Bale changed the perception of wool as a winter fabric in its range of Cool Wool suits by launching an immersive campaign that allowed customers to try on the suits in in-store heating chambers. Their paid campaign saw a Cool Wool suit-wearing weatherman visit the hottest places on the planet to show off how the suit kept him cool. This innovative product coupled with a unique marketing approach led to a 78% increase in suit sales and a massive 344% ROI.
Your brand may not have the budget to fly an influencer and film crew around the world, but you can improve ROI on your paid campaign by:
- Using paid ads to drive awareness of a live activation or event. The more unique the event the better engagement you will receive from your target audience.
- Encouraging user generated content (UGC). Videos and images taken by social media users at experiential marketing events helps to drive engagement, often leading to better ROI.
- Creating a bank of content. Capture authentic social content, which can be repurposed for various marketing channels including paid ads. This not only amplifies the impact of the original event but also provides the brand with a wealth of genuine content that resonates with its audience.
Purpose-driven marketing improves your bottom line
Purpose-driven marketing focuses on a company’s values to make a positive impact. It’s about aligning a brand’s core values and operations with a cause that resonates with its audience, often addressing social, cultural or environmental issues.
NRMA Insurance redefined its brand purpose with a purpose-driven marketing campaign that resonated deeply with the Australian public’s growing environmental concerns. Their initiative to plant a tree for every home insurance policy sold in the wake of the 2019 bushfire crisis not only addressed an environmental issue but also positioned NRMA as a brand that cares. Their paid campaign, which featured a koala on a gumtree with the tagline ‘every home is worth protecting’, reversed eight years of declining customer numbers.
Try purpose-driven marketing on your next campaign by:
- Aligning the campaign with core values. Your brand needs to identify its core values and the social or environmental cause that aligns with those values.
- Creating a narrative. Develop a storytelling aspect around the campaign, using images and language that tie in with your chosen cause.
- Using paid ads to promote the campaign across social media and search engines. The ads themselves should emphasise the cause and the brand’s commitment, rather than just the products.
Regardless of how you maximise ROI on paid campaigns, it is important that you have clear goals and KPIs set to measure and optimise. This helps track progress and measure success, ensuring that each paid campaign is aligned with the brand’s overall objectives – and budget.
