When Knoetry is brought in to help a client scale marketing, we often see a few common performance marketing mistakes. These issues can arise from a number of reasons. Inexperienced marketing managers may be too eager to expand their efforts to the hottest new channel. More experienced marketers may be anchored to best practices that are out of date. Leadership may struggle to understand the cost-benefit ratio of some marketing efforts. Whatever the reason, these are the most common growth marketing problems we encounter. Do any of them look familiar to you?
Marketing in too many channels for your budget
There are a ton of great marketing channels out there. While the biggies like Google and Meta get the vast majority of performance marketing spend, there are so many other channels that can reach your target consumer and give you the opportunity to message your value proposition in a unique and valuable way. Why not use them all?
Over-diversifying your growth marketing spend prevents channels from reaching peak optimization, increases the management burden on the marketing team, and can obscure key insights or distract leadership from
Underinvesting in creative
By most estimates, the quality of your creative accounts for about half of marketing performance. Many brands are reluctant to invest in high quality creative because of the time and cost it takes to make something that truly stands out. They would prefer to spend the money on media, with the expectation that more impressions means more conversions. This view of creative costs as a loss center rather than a revenue generator results in ads that underperform and marketing campaigns that struggle to efficiently scale.
Fighting the algorithms
The larger ad platforms, especially Google and Meta (including Facebook and Instagram), have spent an enormous amount of money developing algorithms to improve ad efficiency because it generates more revenue for these platforms. These algorithms have improved significantly over the last few years and in most cases, outperform other bidding strategies. But there is a price. They require sufficient data to inform the optimization models.
How much data do the marketing algorithms need? Both Google and Meta require 50 conversions per ad set per week to reach peak optimization.
Meta Ads Account Structure
You may remember the days of having many ad sets with detailed audience profiles in Facebook based on expressed interests. That is no longer the recommended practice. In recent years, campaigns structures have been simplified to ensure the minimum weekly conversion targets are hit while the Meta algorithms determine which people should see your ads on Facebook and Instagram.
Modern account structures typically consist of Acquisition, Retargeting, and potentially creative test campaigns. The acquisition and test campaigns usually have a broad audience, while the retargeting audience contains prospects who have recently entered the conversion funnel or expressed interest in your ads.
Google Ads Account Structure
Similarly, Google Ads account structures have simplified. Brand campaigns are still separate, but gone are the days of separate ad groups or campaigns based on match type. These days, Google prefers broad matches and fewer ad groups, while relying on negative keyword lists and algorithmic understanding to determine which searches are most relevant.
Treating the mobile experience as a 2nd class citizen
For most B2C businesses, mobile traffic will make up the majority of your customer sessions. The latest stats show mobile traffic as being over 70% of all web traffic. And yet, we still see poor mobile experiences because design firms and the marketing teams working with them focus on the desktop web design first and treat mobile as an afterthought.
Which performance marketing mistakes are you making?
Is your organization guilty of any of the marketing mistakes listed above? If so, don’t feel bad. They are common mistakes and are sometimes the result of former best practices becoming less relevant as marketing platforms evolve. We hope this article has helped you identify ways you can optimize your growth marketing and increase ROI. If you need help finding scale with your marketing, reach out to us here.
