5 Times You Should Update Your Ads
An integral part of a successful digital marketing campaign are advertisements that capture attention. The goal of a marketing campaign is for a brand’s advertisement to have an impact. An ad that loses its appeal is no longer a resource.
It’s human nature that over time we get tired of seeing the same thing when it’s in front of us all the time. That can go for TV shows, music, and advertising we see in print, on billboards and online. The same old repetitive messages just don’t resonate when they are used over and over. Advertising is not immune from this. Brands should be aware that their messages lose their impact over time. Marketers need to continuously improve the marketing to keep their brand in the minds of customers. Advertising is a tool to promote deals or sales and give traction to business promotions. But, like any resource, change keeps it sharp and effective.
Ad fatigue, sometimes called banner blindness, is real, not some mythical monster in the marketing world. Put it this way: if managing a business were a comic book movie, marketing is the superhero and ad fatigue is the villain. Ad fatigue can drag down a steady marketing campaign. Some brands fall harder than others, especially the ones that require some sort of action from the audience. Every time an ad plays over, it becomes costlier to influence a buying response. A brand can solve this by changing its ad content and knowing the right time to do so.
Here’s what to keep in mind.
Seasons
Brands try to keep themselves up-to-date with the approaching seasons, especially retail businesses, which have to release next season’s collections before the current one ends. Even if your brand isn’t one that deals in fashion, it’s still important to remember seasonal promotion and update what’s relevant to your brand. People who repeatedly see older ads process them the same way they think of expired goods: eventually what they’re seeing and reading passes the relevancy date.
New Products
It’s essential to mention new and upcoming products in ad campaigns, but “new” only works for so long. Customers are constantly hit with messages about new products, and they tend to remember what they see and read. You run the risk of dating your brand if you keep trying to spin older products as new too long after that window has closed.
Meeting Needs
Whatever you are marketing, the main objective is meeting a customer’s needs in exchange for their dollar, otherwise you lose out to competitors who are just waiting for you to stumble. Even if your brand delivers products for which there is always a need, you have to make sure to market it in a way that appeals to customers now. Sure, soap is timeless and everyone uses it, but you can’t advertise it the same way all the time. Tired messaging wears off with customers eventually. Marketers must continually be searching for that current need, asking, “in what ways do customers need my product now?”
Data-triggered advertising
Weather and location-triggered advertising allow marketers to tailor a highly-personalized message to a customer based on their location or the environmental conditions they are experiencing. Using geo-location data and GPS, marketers utilize these tools to market based on a very specific need—for example, advertisements for gloves and scarves on a snowy day.
Watch the Calendar
We’ve discussed seasonal advertising, but what about each month itself? An advertisement is likely to have lost its luster after 30 days. Keep an eye on the calendar and think of ways to keep your advertising content relevant and up to date. Summer and winter last months, but spring advertising that looks the same in May as it did in March is bound to lose interest, traffic and response. It’s important to keep advertising looking fresh. And it doesn’t always have to be a major overhaul. A new color, a tweak to a headline and body copy and an updated image can have a big impact in drawing customers’ attention.
Ad fatigue can stall a digital marketing campaign. You don’t want your customers to become so familiar with the message you’re sending that they turn away from it entirely. It’s important to keep your ad content fresh and relevant by regularly updating the copy and images. Customers won’t proceed down the sales funnel if the same, tired message is what awaits them through the buying journey. You can avoid ad fatigue by implementing these considerations into your next advertising campaign.