5 Things You Should Do To Continually Innovate Your Advertising
Advertising strategies are constantly changing and what worked before can quickly become ineffective. Continually optimizing and innovating your advertising is the only way to scale your business and stay ahead of the market.
We look at the idea of “constant improvement” as a process and culture you need to cultivate. Here are five ways we get our teams at QRY to continually think of new ways to make our campaigns more successful.
1: Always be learning.
Our very first core value is “be curious”. We live that core value because the more you learn, the more likely you are to be inspired and think of new ways to solve problems.
When it comes to advertising, you can learn from a number of different places. Look at your competitors to see what they’re doing, stay up to date on the latest in advertising technology & strategies, and track consumer trends.
We use Feedly, as a tool to aggregate the latest news and insights from publishers, bloggers, and influencers. This helps us stay informed and easily share content across the agency.
2: Think about the customer.
The most impactful innovations start with the customer's needs. The goal of advertising is to engage potential customers and guide them towards a purchase.
It’s important for you to understand their pain points, how they want to engage with the brand, and how their behaviors are changing over time.
Not sure how to learn about your customers?
Start by asking them questions. Don’t be afraid to talk to your customers and find out what they’re thinking.
Once you know what drives your customers, you’ll be able to implement new marketing ideas that are meaningful and impact the business.
3: Look beyond your industry.
Not all innovations need to be something brand new. Instead, you can learn a lot from other industries, markets, and businesses.
Just because a brand isn’t in your industry or marketing to your exact consumer, doesn’t mean that they aren’t doing something that could be adapted for you.
When we’re looking for new ideas for our brands, we’ll look to either related brands or entirely different markets.
For example, we learn a lot about content marketing from b2b brands. Content marketing has been a staple for b2b brands and they’ve refined and optimized the strategy. All we have to do is figure out what aspects of content marketing will work for our e-commerce brands and how best to execute the strategy.
4: Create a structured experimentation plan.
When you’re looking for new ideas to improve your marketing, it’s easy to fall into the trap of just coming up with ideas and executing.
Instead, it’s important to be strategic in what you test and why. You want to make sure the tactics you’re implementing are impactful and meaningful for the business.
You also want to make sure that you’re not spending more time and resources testing things than the potential impact of the new idea.
We use an advertising learning agenda to plan & prioritize our ad experiments.
Our document outlines the experiments, the KPIs we’re hoping to improve, and the effort required to run the test. We can then prioritize the order of our tests to focus on the tests that would be most impactful for the brand.
Need inspiration for your own learning agenda document? You can download ours here.
5: Celebrate action, regardless of outcome.
The hardest part about continual innovation is not coming up with new ideas, but inspiring teams to be persistent when executing ideas.
People are afraid of being blamed if their ideas aren’t successful or don’t work. The reality of the situation is that many new ideas won’t work, but when the ones that are successful can be transformational for the business.
As a leader, it’s important to make sure your team feels safe when innovating. You want your team to be excited to share their ideas, good or bad, without fear of failure.
The best way to achieve this is through a team culture that celebrates innovation. Highlight team members that execute new ideas, whether they work or not.
You’ll only get real innovation, if you can inspire your team to want to keep trying new things, even if it doesn’t work.
What’s next?
Implementing new advertising strategies and tactics will help you scale your band and stay ahead of your competitors. Innovation is an integral part of running smart marketing campaigns.
Executing new ideas is not simple nor is it straightforward.
Create a culture of innovation and implement a strategic framework, to help inspire your team to continually think of new ways to improve your marketing.
Want to learn more about QRY? We're an advertising agency that helps e-commerce and DTC accelerate their growth. Learn more about our advertising approach and ad experimentation strategy here.
