How to Advocate for Larger Digital Ad Budgets

Reasons to Advocate for More Digital Advertising Budget

Advertising budgets: we love to have them, but asking for more can be a challenge. As marketers, we are always being asked to “do more with less,” but cutting spending for campaigns can be detrimental to their performance.

Let’s uncover three reasons that restricting your budget could negatively impact your campaigns and keep your business from getting the right people to engage with your content.

1. Your Audience Outgrows Your Budget

Your campaigns all have an audience, and you always want to extract the most out of that audience. Identifying and being able to locate this audience often takes time and careful consideration to justify spending on them in the first place.

When it’s time to start serving ads, you want to make sure you are getting your message to resonate. To do this you’ll need to set a frequency that will get your message in front of that audience a reasonable number of times.

Consider these variables:

• Is it better to serve everyone only one or two ads, or have a more targeted group see your ad consistently throughout their day? This is something you can test yourself, but general best practice leans toward getting in front of your audience strategically and consistently throughout their day.
• Your ad being in the right place at the right time can make all the difference. With a low budget, your ads can be diluted and served too infrequently to any given member of your audience. This creates a hurdle and makes it a challenge to get your message to stick.

Increasing your digital advertising budgets directly correlates to increasing your impressions and the likelihood that you’re showing to all of your audience members at a reasonable volume to get conversions. This helps boost overall traffic performance, which increases page traffic, engagement, and lead volume.

2. You Lose the Opportunity to Gain Efficiency

Ad platforms work on a bidding system. This means that when the opportunity arises to serve an ad to an audience member, your creatives are entered into an auction against everyone else bidding for that ad spot. Not every impression is valued the same, and they can vary based on the type of impression, likelihood of the audience member to click and engage based on their digital profile, and how well they match your targeting overall.

When budget is a constraint, a few things happen that negatively impact performance:

• You will enter fewer auctions and have to rely on luck that the auctions you do enter are the right ones in your target audience to receive your ad messaging.
• If you’re bidding for leads or conversions, it will take a high bid amount to be able to win any auctions. This results in fewer impressions, which raises CPM (cost per milli), CPC (cost per click), and CPL (cost per lead). It might seem counterintuitive, but raising budget can and will lower your CPL!
• If you’re bidding for traffic, you will win low-cost auctions which often equate to lower quality of traffic. Demand Side Platforms know the people that engage with ads, and they cost more to get in front of.

3. You’re Unable to Test Your Campaigns

Testing takes time. The standard school of thought is “start the test and don’t touch it for two weeks.” This is only considering time, while the other part of a test is getting a critical mass of people to see your creative or visit a landing page to get an accurate picture of engagement.

Getting too little traffic or not enough eyes on your tests can be detrimental to testing and can prolong the testing period well beyond the intended two weeks. For seasonal or cyclical businesses, there may only be a short period of time to run a test, in which case it needs to be performed effectively and efficiently.

• Give campaigns enough of a budget to fully run the test in an effective manner.
• Get a critical mass of people and you’ll be able to draw stronger conclusions.
• Create an optimized set of creative and landing page to increase leads.

Especially with landing pages, a converting landing page on your site can be a pipeline for high quality leads to nurture for the future. Plus, what you learn from testing today can be shared information for your business that can continuously be grown on to continue improving and staying relevant from understanding what your target audience responds to.

Why Budget Matters

Remember, budget is part of campaign planning and should be carefully considered when selecting an audience, setting up campaign performance expectations, and planning tests.

Understanding the bidding nature of Demand Side Platforms can help too, but knowing that higher value impressions cost more is the basic building block of a more successful campaign.

When you weigh out costs versus potential performance of an ad campaign, increasing your ad spend can really help – and that doesn’t always mean you’ll actually spend it all, but it gives you more opportunity to get in front of ideal audiences at the right times.

With the reasons above, you can come to the table with solid knowledge to increase budget, whether you’re talking to your boss or a client.

Looking for more actionable steps that you can implement for effective B2B campaigns?

Check out the eBook: Our Guide to B2B Marketing Strategy: A Framework You Can Implement