With a great amount of targeting data and ease of setting up campaigns, Facebook and LinkedIn are the go-to advertising platforms for many digital marketing advertisers.
While they’re easy to set up, you need to remember that part of running a successful campaign relies on understanding that it is not a set-it-and-forget-it process.
In fact, showing the same ad in a high frequency will likely result in your messaging getting stale. This is also known as ad fatigue.One of the most effective strategies that marketers can leverage to fight paid social ad fatigue is maintaining a creative refresh rate – the frequency of changing the creative.
In short, ad fatigue occurs when users become too accustomed to a certain type of ad. Essentially, even the most successful Facebook and LinkedIn ad campaigns will be affected by it.
As your campaign frequency gets higher, your target audience starts to see the same ads again and again. Consequently, they become less responsive to your creative. Ad fatigue prevents users from moving down the sales funnel and, ultimately, reduces your overall ROAS.
To deliver good results and make sure your content continues to inspire your audience, your campaigns require ongoing management, evaluation, and refresh.
It’s worth noting that not every ad that drops is experiencing ad fatigue – some are just not a home run. Repurposing a TV ad, for instance, is not going to cut it online, no matter how effective it was for your offline marketing campaign.The first thing you should do before jumping to a diagnosis is to check the clickthrough rates.
After all, CTR demonstrates how engaging your creative is, and whether it’s convincing enough to compel users to take the next step.Normally, clickthrough rates tend to get to a certain plateau level before they start to erode. As a general rule of thumb, you should consider changing the creative, and often the offer, when CTRs start eroding.This could happen in as little as one week for brands doing heavy ad spend, or it could be a month for campaigns with smaller budgets.
Whether you have an in-house marketing dream team or use an external agency, you know that good design takes time.
If you catch ad fatigue early on, however, you may be able to reverse its effects without having to create a brand new ad from scratch.
Overall, there are two main approaches you can employ to refresh your ad creative:
Sometimes, simple changes can be all you need to refresh your advertisements.
With this approach, you keep the underlying offer intact and introduce one or a combination of the following elements:
Changing up the look of your ad may not always be enough. If this is the case, you can step it up a gear and change the ad offer itself.
Because the offer can make or break a campaign, introducing a new one often has the greatest impact on ad performance.
Digital and social media advertising is something that you need to evaluate and work on continually.
To see success with paid social, you need to be creative and keep looking for new ways to reach out to your customers, expand your business, and ultimately better yourself as a marketer.
On a roll? Head to our blog and discover how creativity builds more meaningful advertising experiences.
My job is to match talented, motivated marketers with high-growth companies, arm teams for success, and then get out of the way.
