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Are your ad campaigns suffering from less clicks? Having problems getting your leads up? Feeling unsatisfied by your recent lack of engagements? If so, then your digital marketing might be experiencing a case of ad fatigue.
What is Ad Fatigue?
Ad fatigue occurs when a person grows sick and tired of receiving the same ads over and over again. The monotony is a turn off; they become disinterested, distracted, or sometimes even annoyed. The end effect of having ad fatigue is that the person ultimately stops paying attention to your advertising.
And when that happens, you've basically lost a customer. Making matters worse, it can be difficult to get them back.
Symptoms of Ad Fatigue
Some tell-tale signs of ad fatigue include: declining click-through or listen-through-rates, less views, decreased impressions and lower overall engagements. All of which can be fatal to your ad spend, elevating your CPA and diminishing your ROI.
Internally, ad fatigue will bleed your budget. Outwardly, it'll bruise your brand reputation from ongoing neglect.
Screen Fatigue, Another Risk Factor
During the pandemic browsing shot up 70%, TV-streaming increased 63%, and social media consumption spiked 61%. Stuck at home for the better part of two years, Americans found themselves spending an unhealthy amount of time online. A trend that unfortunately continues to this day.
It's also not a coincidence that during this same time period another type of fatigue would start to see a ramp up in reported cases: screen fatigue.
Also known as digital fatigue, screen fatigue is a condition that afflicts 65% of the US population who experience a tiredness from excessive screen time. It's also an underlying, preexisting condition to a lot of today's ad fatigue too. Because if seeing just the one ad too many times doesn't wear on a person's attention span, then the other 10,000+ banner ads we get looped on a normal day most certainly will.
As you can imagine, all these ads and all this time online has been decidedly bad for your visual marketing. It's so bad that most internet users end up developing banner blindness. Late-stage ad fatigue in its most malignant form, a whopping 86% of people are said to suffer from a selective inability to focus or pay attention to digital display ads.
Treating Ad Fatigue, with Digital Audio
Luckily, ad fatigue is treatable and your business can easily recover. Just follow these prescribed steps and you should start to see your ad metrics improve quickly. Throw in some Digital Audio and they could even change significantly.
Vary your ads, switch things up. No one likes to see or hear the same thing on repeat. Familiarity breeds contempt. So, break up the tedium by rotating your ads. Create several versions of your ad and mix up their placement, that way users feel like they’re getting fresh messaging.
Go a step further by varying your platforms too. If you're accustomed to only running ads on Facebook, then you may want to layer in some Twitter ads as well. And if you're only doing search and social marketing anyways, then you should definitely have a streaming ad presence too.
Especially since digital audio ads are an effective salve for treating the banner blind and reaching the screen-fried. When asked in a survey during the pandemic, 20% of adults said they were listening to more podcasts, 45% reported increased usage of streaming music, and about one-third of respondents said Digital Audio offered them much needed relief from screens.
But if you do plan on adding more variety to your marketing mix, just know that this approach is only as good as your options are easy, effective, and affordable. So, let's also not forget that for only $10 our in-house, in-app creative studio could turnaround professional-grade audio ads in less than 24 hours. And from there it only takes 3 simple steps to start running that ad on the biggest music, radio, and podcast streaming apps.
Not to mention that for as little as $250, you can test and iterate all sorts of different messaging on AudioGO without having to break the bank.
Be relevant, get targeted. Unless you sell a product that is universal, like food, some of the worst ads you can possibly make are for general audiences. Again, it all depends on your business model, but the way to keep a person interested in your brand or business these days is to sell them exactly what they want to hear. They want messaging made specific for them. So, we strongly advise that you personalize your marketing for all of your various customers. That's one of the surest ways of getting a person's attention.
And whether those customers are homeowners, car buyers, local job seekers, college students, you name it - digital solutions, like AudioGO, offer a bunch of targeting options (ranging from your basic demographics to advanced-level choices like zipcodes, interests, and user profiles) to help segment and laser in on all of your different audiences.
Monitor analytics. Many marketers are guilty of a set-it-and-forget-it mentality. They (we) produce and launch a campaign and move on. Months later, they (we) want to know what went wrong. By then it's already too late.
Don’t wait. Trust us. Digital media dashboards give you access to real-time analytics. Use them. Check weekly and daily figures. Track their rate of change. If you don’t like the results you're seeing, you’ll know it’s time to try something else.
Launch a podcast ad campaign. Remember, the goal in curing ad fatigue is to get people reengaged again. We want them to notice us. And of all the media formats that's most likely to get you the awareness you need: it's podcasts by a long mile. Because what's special about podcasts is that not only are the listeners fully immersed in the content, but they're also paying attention to the ads that are streaming in between all of that content as well.
77% of podcast listeners pay attention to the advertising. 41% of listeners went so far as to say that they trust podcast ads more than any other ad type. While another 81% of listeners said they've taken action after being exposed to a podcast spot. Podcast ads are so hot right now that they even outrank social media, paid search and e-commerce ads as the most influential digital media format.
Getting through the Online Clutter
In the end, the real reason why your digital marketing is dealing with ad fatigue is because your messaging has gone stale. The law of diminishing returns is starting to take effect.
Our response to that is to switch things up. We address this attention-deficit by varying our ads and our ad platforms. We go multichannel. We get targeted. We hit our audiences from different angles to gain awareness, we give them multiple touchpoints to engage with our marketing. Diversification and personalization is key to extending the shelf life of our messages.
But there's so much clutter and garbage on the internet these days that you'll need an audio channel to make this strategy work, as people are increasingly becoming more disengaged online and turning to screen-less, audio formats as a refuge from all the noise.
And guess what? The ad dollars are already following. In a recent WSJ article, it was reported that "advertising on digital audio - podcasts and streamed music and radio - grew faster than any other category, up 58% (last year)." With the expectation that this year is only going to continue to grow even more.
So if you're trying to eliminate ad fatigue once and for all, we'll leave you with this as our final piece of advice: get started on a digital audio ad campaign today with AudioGO.
