How Expanding Your Advertising Mix Can Accelerate Business Growth

Many companies reach a point where they are no longer growing, not because their product declined in quality or their team lost motivation, but simply because their advertising no longer acquired new customers. They keep advertising to the same people on the same platforms with diminishing results and wonder why things aren’t improving.

The solution is not to throw more money into what’s not working. The solution is to look for new sources of attention beyond Google and Meta.

The diminishing returns problem is structural

Ad fatigue accumulates and gets worse gradually. It results from targeting the same customers with the same ads across channels. While optimization algorithms do their part to generate the best possible results, customers inevitably become less responsive to ads they’ve seen before.

As a business owner or advertiser, getting around campaign fatigue can be a tough job. You need to reduce your ad frequency to reach new potential clients you haven’t exhausted yet and to avoid targeting the same customers over and over again. But cutting out the best-performing platform or audience from your ad budget to give the others some fresh air might not sound like the best idea. You’ve invested time and money to get to those great results and walking away to try and prevent future campaign underperformance isn’t satisfying. Well, it doesn’t have to come to that if you take a step back and re-strategize. The key is to diversify your ad mix.

How push notifications fit into a broader mix

Push notifications reach people outside the feed entirely. A user doesn’t need to be scrolling through a social platform or running a search query. The message arrives directly on their device, which changes the dynamic completely.

For brands that want to reach potential customers during their daily routine rather than competing for attention inside a crowded auction, a push notifications ad network offers a different point of entry – one where the message isn’t fighting seven other ads for the same eyeball at the same moment. Delivery is immediate, which matters given that 71% of customers now expect companies to engage with them in real time. Push formats are built for exactly that.

CTRs on push formats also vary significantly from social and search benchmarks, which makes them useful for testing message variants. If a short, urgent headline drives better engagement in push, that’s signal worth carrying back into your Google responsive ads or Meta copy.

Finding underpriced attention

All advertising markets typically develop in a similar way. When a particular advertising format is new or not widely used yet, the advertising space costs are low, the level of competition is still pretty low, and your potential customers have not been reached frequently at all. The early adopters tend to achieve outstanding results because of all the given reasons. Eventually, as the format becomes more popular and therefore more widely used, the costs per click rise accordingly, and the effect of the advertisement also tends to get more standardized.

This is the current situation of many secondary advertising networks. Even though the user intent is often similar to high, or the same as on the primary network, the bidding competition is much less fierce than on the primary one. If you have already hit the maximum return on investment for your advertising on the primary network, the secondary network is the place where you can probably still increase it the most compared to the organic growth of customers. The fact is that your existing customers would eventually find you either way, with or without seeing an advertisement from you on their usual web-sites or when they are searching for a product like yours. This is why the so-called incremental growth is actually to be found the most on the secondary advertising networks if you are investing in advertising on the primary ones already.

To check whether this could be true in your case, you can simply try to keep the amount of money you spend on your advertising on the primary network the same, add some part of your budget to the desired secondary network and see the results. The total amount of sales should be higher than before. This is also why the so-called Media Mix modeling was invented. These involve taking a professional statistician and computer expert to analyze what part of sales can be directly linked to the advertisement. Often the results surprise most of their clients.

Building the multi-channel loop

The best advertising operations see all channels as not only revenue drivers but also sources of data. What you discover about messaging in one place should feed into every other place. When you’re running push alongside display, paid social, and search, you can start to understand which messages resonate at different intent levels of the buyer journey. Someone coming into your brand through a push notification is in a different mental state than someone who searched a specific term. Segmenting audiences by acquisition source, and mapping them against conversion rate, lets you know where your real buyers are coming from, not just where your impressions land. First-party data makes all of this stronger. Using what you know about your current customers – behavior patterns, timing of purchase, affinity by product – to influence how you target on newer channels, closes the loop between retention and acquisition.

Stop optimizing inside a single box

At a certain juncture, wringing additional efficiency out of a mature channel is no longer strategy. You’re just shifting spend within a pool that everyone else in your space is already paying for.

The companies that continue to scale aren’t always spending more; they’re spending where the return on attention hasn’t yet been arbitraged to zero. To do that, you have to test formats and content types that are new enough that not all tests can be winners, and view the losing tests as tuition rather than a sunk cost.

Your current channels will still be there. But, almost without exception, the scaling will come from the channel you haven’t fully bet on yet. Find it, test it seriously, and establish a feedback loop before your competition does.

Read More Find Magazine