Digital ads are the quickest and cheapest route to a highly targeted market; you know you need to be running them, your competitors seem to be getting it right, but the fear of getting it wrong and wasting budget sits heavy on your shoulders.

So, what are the key elements businesses need to get to grips with in order to begin harnessing the power of digital advertising?

1. Understand your campaign objective - It’s simple, if your ultimate objective is to sell more of your product, you need to build a campaign with that objective. It’s not uncommon for new clients to tell us how much traffic their last campaign drove to their site, or what their cost per click was, but if that traffic, or those cheap clicks, aren’t converting into sales, they’re just ad spend you’re throwing in the fire. Identify your objective and build your funnel around it.

2. Budget effectively - Campaigns need fuel, and on the whole, the more you feed in the quicker you can go, but stop guessing and start calculating your budget based on your business metrics and the outcome you are aiming for. Too little budget and you’ll risk your ads not feeding out to the required audience in sufficient volume to get the conversions you need, too much budget and you’ll eat further into your marketing reserves than you need to.

Understanding a couple of the key metrics in your business will help you calculate the ball park your budget needs to be in to achieve your goal. You can download our free Nutshell Ad Spend calculator at the bottom of this article to crunch the numbers and get to grips with what you should be spending.

3. Understand your audience - However you set up your audiences (broad, tightly targeted, retarget) you need to be really clear who you are talking to, what their pain point may be, and how you can fix that. More on that here.

4. Understand the data in order to optimise - Know your metrics. Reading the results of all elements of a campaign allows you to pull the right levers to optimise its performance. Knowing where you’re losing your buyers in the journey helps you plug the gaps and knowing when an ad is getting fatigued or losing it’s resonance with your audience allows you to make the necessary edits to keep turning out the best results.

5. Test, don’t presume - You can only ever start a new campaign with what you think will work, but as soon as the data starts coming in you can make informed decisions on what copy, creative, offers, call to actions, headlines, audiences etc are working. As a campaign evolves this data is key to keep delivering your ads to the right people with the right message, so they take the right action. Staying on brand is clearly important, but try pushing yourself a little out of your comfort zone in terms of ad elements such as creative or headlines. We are so often surprised by what works, and forced to admit that what we would buy from isn’t what many others would. Be brave! Look out for trends in your own feed, see what jumps out at you, and ask yourself if that could work for your brand?

One last word of advice, if there was a point 6 it would be stop winging it - you could put my Mum in an F1 Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton in her Citroen, and he’d almost certainly get over the line first. If you don’t have the skills in your team to deliver ads you’re not going to get as many products through the checkout for your ad spend. It’s a false economy. We strongly recommend either investing in training or outsourcing if your in-house team don’t have proven experience on the platform you want to advertise on. ‘Giving it a go’ can turn into a really expensive headache and the conclusion that digital ads don’t work for you, when in fact they could be the most important tool in growing your business.