13 Frightful Habits eMarketers Need to Break

RIP to these 13 Frightful Habits of Digital Marketers

It’s that time of year when the ghosts and ghouls appear. Are they hiding in your own marketing department, masking themselves as trustworthy habits?

If so, let’s bury those goblins in the crypt before they rise to haunt your team for years to come…

1. Managing your digital channels in silos

Inconsistency and lack of sharing between your paid search and paid social programs is like Halloween with all tricks and no treats. Your message needs to be consistent across your own teams and customer channels, and you should apply your learnings from each to improve your overall results. (See our blog on “Why Marketers Cannot Ignore Social.”)

2. Forgetting to test every campaign

Remember that time you had grand plans to be a zombie for Halloween but you waited until the last minute and were running all around town two hours before the party? And then you thought your make-up was going to be easy but it turned out to be really, really hard? You gave up and ended up going as a cowboy instead…

That’s what NOT TESTING is like. But worse.

It’s easy and simple to set-up split testing in Skai and your learnings will make every campaign that much better. (See our blog on “Split Test to Success on Facebook.”)

3. Getting all your candy from one house

You may be getting great results from one publisher but you shouldn’t assume that’s the only basket with tasty treats. Testing other publishers to see how you can drive incremental results for your business should be a best practice of all digital marketers. Ask us, we can show you how.

4. Letting your creative get stale

Wearing the same costume every year, again and again; we’ve all done it but don’t do it with your marketing.

It’s now possible to launch hundreds or even thousands of creative iterations (especially with Skai’s new Creative Manager), so you can concentrate on devising your next master strategy.

Don’t forget to set up Automatic Actions to pause your ads for you when they meet frequency.

5. Manually optimizing your campaigns

The Goonies came out 30 years ago. Let them go!

And, start letting the expert algorithms help optimize your campaigns for you. Skai’s Portfolio Optimization changes bids and allocates budgets in near real time to meet overall target ROI and CPA goals while scaling spend. Now that’s something to cackle about!

6. Not optimizing bids for different devices

It’s like having different Halloween costumes for every party. Many marketers shy away from setting device specific bids because it can be time consuming.

Skai’s algorithms automatically optimize bids for different devices, eliminating guesswork and enabling you to focus on more important efforts.

7. Not retargeting prospects who’ve shown interest in your offerings

Can you imagine skipping the houses that have the best candy? That’s what it’s like to ignore prospects who have already expressed interest via their search activity. Skai’s Intent-Driven Audiences enables you to re-target those searchers when they are on Facebook.

8. Relying on cookies for attribution

Cookies are not a viable way to track mobile usage so using relaying on them for attribution will only give you part of the story. Utilize smart pixels whenever possible. Plus, Skai’s cross-device measurement solutions go beyond the cookie to optimize the journey with a complete consumer view.

9. Not automating creative across search and social

This would be like bobbing for apples with your mouth taped shut. Impossible! Skai’s automated actions and Creative Manager take the hassle out of media updates ensuring the best creative is always displayed. Plus, as we mentioned above, search and social are just better together. Skai’s Infinity Suite is a surefire way to get your best story forward – across channels.

10. Not optimizing creative for mobile

The mobile shift evolution makes optimizing your creative for mobile viewing crucial to success. Mobile users are in a different mindset than desktop users so design your creative accordingly.

Test video, if you haven’t already. It’s known to increase engagement rates and the majority of video views are on mobile.

11. Not considering day-parting or day of week optimization

Would you go out trick or treating the day before Halloween? Or, the day after? If you do, you won’t have many treats and you’ll probably get the neighbors talking.

Be sure your ads are optimized to the time of day or day of week when they are most relevant and they make sense. Your customers (and budget!) will reward you for it.

12. Forgetting to quality check your ads

Be sure you have a quality control process in place. Just like you wouldn’t want your friends to let you go out of the house with your real hair showing from under your wig, triple check that your ads don’t have any spelling mistakes or incorrect URLs (Skai’s campaign preview controls can help).

TREAT: If you run Facebook Ads (you should be!), keep an eye on your relevancy score to ensure your ad is pertinent to the audience you’re targeting.

13. Not letting your brand’s personality shine through

Don’t wrap your brand up like a mummy. Be sure to let your brand’s personality infuse everything you do. It’s the best way to engage with your target audience and build a longterm relationship.

If you need help burying any of these frightful habits, please contact us. We’d love to hear from you. Hope you have a spooktacular Halloween!