How to stay agile yet cost efficient?

A study reveals that 91% of brands has moved at least some of their digital marketing efforts in-house. With the current market situation, this number has most likely increased, as brand are cutting their costs and striving to do even more in-house. 

As marketers, the key challenge in dealing with a crisis as dynamic and widespread as this one, is the ongoing uncertainty and unfamiliarity. This means that we as marketers must be just as dynamic. We need to be able to change our messaging with the same speed as the news changes. 

As we are working from our home offices, our patterns of behaviour change. The way we search and the channels we are on, aren’t necessarily the same as they would have been if the COVID-19 situation had not occurred. You therefore need the ability to reach your target audience across a wide range of digital platforms and channels, and you need to have a tool agile enough to change your channels, ads and messaging instantly if the need occurs.

Our best tips on how to remain agile in your advertisement strategy:

1. Make sure you reach your audience where and when they are online

Make sure that you have a tool that enables you to target different users at different times of the day, week or month. If we take our current COVID-19 situation as a recurring example, we are now staying up later, and spending more time online than we normally would. Our “searching peak-hours” have been pushed to later during the afternoon, and according to Wordstream, we are now seeing a spike in late night searches.

2. Make sure that you remain on brand in your communication

According to BrandZ, stronger brands recovered up to nine times faster after the financial crisis in 2008/2009 than weaker brands did. Don’t fall into the temptation to break brand guidelines because you feel the need to be creative in response to what is happening in the market. The risk when so many of us are working from home is that we do not follow our brand guidelines when creating ads. Going off message and off brand can hurt your position in the long term. Be creative, but make sure you have Ad templates that ensures that your brand is taken care of in the process. Both you and your brand should be dynamic, in the right way.

Also read: How to use brand identity guides for proper brand management.

3. Make changes in real time across platforms to get the most out of your promotions

Nothing drains your resources more than manual changes, and there is always a risk that you miss out on changes in one channel if you are running promotions across different platforms, as brands usually do.  Establish smart and efficient workflows to ensure that nothing is being forgotten. Automation is part of our lives, and having a tool that ensures changes across all platforms and channels is a life saver.

4. Analyze and adapt

Tracking all versions of your ads and viewing them by impressions, video impressions, and clicks across all media platforms the ads have been published to is essential. Make sure you know which of your ads are performing and underperforming and make real time changes to the ads that you would like to see better results from. We recommend using a tool that allows you to both see the ad results and adjust the content in one place for a smoother and more efficient process. 

Manage your dynamic content - at your fingertips

Keeping track of your brand, messaging, channels and performance while also staying aligned with the market situation can be more than overwhelming for most marketers. However, there are tools that can ease your workload and effectively distribute your updates with a keystroke. For more information, get in touch with the experts at BrandMaster.