3 Things You Can Do to Quickly Improve Ad Response Rates

The advent of digital advertising offered business owners more places than ever to spread awareness of their products and services. With more and more budget allocated to these channels, the need to improve ad response rates and demonstrate ROI is crucial. Achieving this with a full marketing team is difficult enough, but for small business marketers with limited resources it can be especially tough. If you only think about marketing when results drop or a new campaign is launched, that won't be enough. Set the right tools and initiatives in place, however, and you can expect to see ads, online or out in the real world, drive greater engagement and conversions.  

3 Ways to Improve Ad Response Rates

With the goal of quickly seeing results from your advertising and getting more for your money, here are three areas you can adjust to improve ad response rates. 

Fine-Tune Your Targeting

There’s more than one way to get your message to the right people. When you have your ideal buyer(s) fully defined and understand your ad platforms inside out, enhanced targeting opens up a new way to improve ad response rates. This happens when you blend contextual targeting - i.e. gettings ads placed on relevant sites and physical locations where your target market hangs out - and behavioral targeting, which aligns your messaging with those most likely to enjoy it. The latter is especially powerful because it's based on multiple sources of consumer actions, such as online search history and browsing activity, as well as real-world behavior such as purchase history and location-based check-ins. The more exact your targeting, the greater the impact on your advertising effectiveness. set your criteria, the more efficient you can be with your budget, as the clicks you receive will be of a higher quality and more likely to convert. 

Get a Better Phone Number

Vanity phone numbers continue to demonstrate the ability to increase call volume, regardless of the advertising channel you use. With so many competing promotions and campaigns, adding an extra hook to your ads immediately helps them to stand out. Furthermore, a custom phone number also doubles as a memorable call to action. This not only makes your advertising more efficient, with a marketing hook and contact details wrapped up in one brand asset, it also creates an urgency in the customer's mind. The subtle implication of a prominent phone number sets our mind to link the desire to learn more with the ability to quickly connect via a call. That mental process happens on an unconscious level but every additional call holds the potential for real-world results.  By adding a vanity number to your advertising campaign, response rates and call volumes will increase, maximizing the return on what is a very affordable brand asset when compared to other marketing costs. [search-tag] 

Implement Continuous Improvement Testing

Most small business marketers dabble with testing their campaigns in easily accessible places like email subject lines and search ads, but very few put this powerful approach to work across all advertising channels. The quickest and most accessible place to start is A/B testing every ad you create. Create a baseline control version for every channel and compare it to several single-variable alternatives. As you observe which one generates the strongest response, you can start promoting it on a wider scale. After establishing another baselines, you can brainstorm potential improvements with your team and repeat this process. Remember, even the best of the batch can still be made better! So even as your current optimized campaign starts to improve ad response rates, you can get to work on the next phase of testing. From multiple small tests, your business will gain a commitment to continuous improvement and see overall results grow as a result. In order for business owners and marketing teams to improve the effectiveness of any ad channel, they must harness what they know about consumer behavior, validated performance data, and memorable marketing assets and put them to work in perfect harmony. Blend these three aspects of your advertising strategy and you'll quickly see improved ad response rates and more prospects entering your sales pipeline.