Kick off the new year with 3 smart digital advertising strategies

(BPT) – The new year is a time of new beginnings. In our personal lives, we implement resolutions to optimize our life to be more productive, healthier and happier. The new year is also a time to reset priorities. In our work lives we revisit our priorities and revise strategy in business. And with economic uncertainty, 2023 will be very important for businesses to reassess their promotional strategy. Kick off 2023 with a fresh ad strategy for your small to medium-sized business (SMB).Tasked with a new ad campaign, SMB advertisers face innumerable questions: When do you launch a digital campaign? What platform do you advertise on? How do you reach your target audience and track ROI? These questions, along with economic uncertainties, are forcing brands to implement new marketing strategies. Although the digital marketing space can feel overwhelming, the new year is the perfect moment for marketers to implement advertising strategies to help them forge deeper relationships with people and amplify their brand. Read on to learn three digital advertising strategies businesses can implement to work smarter, not harder, in 2023.1. Automate your efforts The constant demand for new and revised marketing campaigns tailored to your audience can feel overwhelming. It can take a lot of time to strategize, envision, write, design, update and optimize a successful digital marketing campaign. This constant demand for content tests an SMB’s ability to fully execute the planned marketing vision. Plus, the list of tasks for a campaign is extensive — from determining the budget to developing and distributing content, to analyzing and optimizing efforts … and everything in between. Marketers have much to do, but little time or resources to get the work done. The result? Mixing varying resources produces varying results.Automation can help with many of these challenges including ad copy suggestions, finding images and audience targeting. Consider tools that can remove the complexity of day-to-day operations and that can simplify content creation and identify audiences that may be valuable to your business. These tools that are embedded in the platform you’re using often work within a certain set of parameters that you define (vs. tools that are outside the platform) to create faster and better outcomes. They use various signals and machine learning capabilities to not only optimize your creative but to make adjustments in real-time and give your ad the best chances of showing to the right person at the right time in the right place. Tools that use automation take the complexity out of daily advertising campaign management to allow you to focus on other business priorities like quality, customer satisfaction and retention.2. Understand your customers’ evolving behaviors and their New Year’s resolutionsWhat does 2023 look like for your customers? What behaviors are they looking to change? What new habits are they hoping to implement? With user behavior changing since the pandemic, more people are working from home or hybrid, fusing their work and life. This means they are moving between personal tasks such as online shopping and work during the day and going from mobile to PC. As you review your ad strategy, think about your customer as the center of the plan instead of the product features or pricing. Learn more about your customers this year through surveys, emails, in-person conversations and review what your website traffic tells you about your customer.Understanding what is meaningful to your customer will help you create a campaign that resonates with them and target them on the channels and sites they’re most likely to be on. Staying connected and engaged with your customers is also crucial. Ensure you’re reaching them across all devices as they use search to research throughout the day and leverage social media channels to not only learn about your customers, but to take their feedback into consideration and forge deeper relationships with them.3. Use tools to better articulate ROI/ROAS How many platforms do you currently use to create, post and analyze your ad campaigns? The stress of platform fragmentation is another shared SMB hurdle; the many campaign and reporting tools, each with unique algorithms and ad formats, can cause marketer overwhelm. Marketers are often tasked with understanding reporting on each platform and then having to optimize those campaigns within and across each platform. They also must piece together multiple reports from different platforms to paint a clear picture of a campaign’s tangible return on investment (ROI) and return on ad spend (ROAS). Plus, because these platforms and tools are continuously evolving, with updates to features within each tool, marketers experience pressure to help keep up with ever-changing updates.Opt for using just one solution like Microsoft Advertising’s Smart Campaigns with Multi-platform to manage, revise and report the results from multiple platforms in one dashboard. SMBs can expand their reach and maximize their investment by using one ad tool to connect with customers across many platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram and Microsoft Advertising. Instead of creating ads on fragmented platforms to launch and monitor a campaign, SMBs can save time by running ads on multiple platforms in a matter of minutes. You can also use the Multi-platform feature to stay connected and engaged with your customers by managing your social media across channels in one place.As you step into 2023 with new campaign plans and target ROIs, use these three digital advertising strategies to empower your team in the right direction this new year.