How to increase revenue without increasing spend

CallTrackingMetrics, an SaaS provider of call tracking and contact center solutions, recently published a comprehensive e-book aimed at helping advertisers get better efficiency from their paid media spend.

The e-book, The Digital Advertiser’s Guide to Uncovering Hidden Revenue Opportunities Without Increasing Spend, is a blueprint for advertisers who want to get more bang from their digital media buck, particularly now that it’s difficult (if not impossible) to leverage traditional outlets like trade shows and conferences.

CallTrackingMetrics takes a three-step approach to helping businesses improve the performance of their digital ad campaigns, as follows:

1. Understand your unique growth opportunities
2. Optimize your channels and test for improvement
3. Utilize the right tools to help scale and save time

CallTrackingMetrics writes, “The reality is that not every channel is going to deliver amazing results for your business, so it actually is a good practice to focus your budget on channels that find success—even if you’re still left wishing for more dollars to play with.”

In this post, we’ll summarize some of the key approaches contained in the e-book. The complete guide contains 18 pages of statistics, case studies, and guidelines aimed at helping businesses produce more revenue from their digital ad campaigns without increasing their existing budget.

The (Read more...) copy of CallTrackingMetrics’s “The Digital Advertiser’s Guide to Uncovering Hidden Revenue Opportunities Without Increasing Spend” is available for download from here.

Content produced in partnership with CallTrackingMetrics.

A checklist for getting started

The best place to start when deciding how to optimize your existing ad spend is to take inventory of what’s already working for you—and what isn’t. CallTrackingMetrics’s brief checklist places this squarely at the top, as illustrated in the following graphic:

Source: CallTrackingMetrics

Once you’ve mapped out the landscape of what’s working well, the next step is to define your success metrics, including how you plan to measure your KPIs.

It’s important to set realistic expectations here. To this end, CallTrackingMetrics recommends performing market research to get a better understanding of the benchmarks in your industry.

Per CallTrackingMetrics, “It can be helpful to perform market research around industry benchmarks for conversion rates and other metrics to establish your own KPIs (key performance indicators).”

After you’ve established KPIs based on realistic industry benchmarks, you can move on to identifying channels to include in your digital media plan. CallTrackingMetrics ties this to a basic buying funnel that includes Awareness, Consideration, and Purchase for a “full funnel approach.”

Each tactic reaches prospects at a different phase of the funnel, although some tactics apply to more than one point in the funnel.

For example, search marketing can generate awareness depending on what keywords you’re targeting and it can also reach prospects when they’re further along the consideration phase of the funnel.

Source: CallTrackingMetrics

Once you’ve completed all three parts of CallTrackingMetrics’s checklist, you’ll have a comprehensive digital media plan ready to go.

Part two—you’re not done yet

Planning and launching digital ads is only the first step in ensuring that your paid media dollars are working hard to fuel growth and revenue for your organization. Testing and optimization are what come next once the ads are live.

Even small changes to campaign settings, targeting, and channels can have a big impact on performance. CallTrackingMetrics’s provides an overview of some quick checks you can apply to your live campaigns to ensure efficiency—and consistency—across ads and platforms.

Examples include, but aren’t limited to, the following:

• Ad scheduling: Review your ad scheduling to ensure that you’re not running ads during days and times that don’t produce optimal results.
• Bid objectives: Do your bid objectives match your campaign goals (e.g., traffic versus leads versus sales)?
• Ad extensions: Google allows advertisers to augment the copy in their ads with many different types of ad extensions. Are you leveraging these so that you’re getting the best performance from your ad copy?

In addition to campaign settings, CallTrackingMetrics provides a very comprehensive overview of targeting tactics and strategies aimed at helping you achieve optimal campaign efficiency. These include audience targeting, retargeting, keyword exclusions, and testing.

Source: CallTrackingMetrics

The right tools make a difference

The final step of the e-book addresses the importance of investing in the right tools so that you can save time and resources when managing and optimizing campaigns.

“The key is to invest in tools that control costs and boost conversions and revenue—not just within the purview of marketing, but across your entire organization,” writes CallTrackingMetrics.

There are a wealth of tools, platforms, and martech solutions available to help launch, manage, and optimize ad campaigns. CallTrackingMetrics includes a list of questions that businesses can use to help identify which tools to invest in. Here’s a partial list:

• Does it save time?
• Does it consolidate more than one system?
• Does it help you scale?
• Does it help you make smart budgeting and optimization decisions?

CallTrackingMetrics writes, “When you understand what inspires customers to contact you, you then have the opportunity to improve the customer experience, empower your sales team with knowledge on how to better sell, and increase your overall productivity and resource management.”

To get a more in depth view, download the complete e-book, The Digital Advertiser’s Guide to Uncovering Hidden Revenue Opportunities Without Increasing Spend, from here.