In today’s digital landscape where we as consumers are bombarded with ads, ad fatigue has emerged as a significant challenge that businesses and marketers need to be aware of. Ad fatigue happens when a viewer becomes desensitized to a certain advertisement, making it less effective over time. Essentially, viewers can become bored, making your ads easier to ignore and lowering the effectiveness of your messaging. This can be caused by overexposure to the same messaging, or by the ad being displayed too often. Keep in mind that this exhaustion is specific to your messaging, not your brand. While ad fatigue can cause a serious hit to your ROI, updating your ads and/or placements every so often is a fairly simple way to keep things fresh and engaging.
One way to avoid ad fatigue is to vary the type of media used to spread your message. Try utilizing different formats, like print, video, audio or interactive ads. Changing up the format in which you circulate your messaging will continue to capture your audience’s attention and prevent the effect of your ads being diminished because each format presents itself to the consumer in a different way. Audio ads cater to those who like background noise, video captures your attention through a visual change, when people read a print product, they expect ads and will often seek them out. You can ensure you’re employing the best formats for your business type by testing different versions of an ad. Over time, this will help to determine which placements are most effective for you.
A more complex option to avoiding ad fatigue would be to start using or update your targeting. If you’re selling a niche product but advertising it to a broad audience, you’re basically hitting a digital brick wall. Those wasted impressions/views are going to drive down your conversions. By targeting specific audiences, you’re more likely to hit your relevant audience, which in turn should have a positive impact on your engagement. Consider excluding past users or implementing frequency capping. If you’re running an email campaign, schedule a resend to users that opened the original blast. Keep in mind that your target audience can become desensitized, too, so it’s best to not rely on this tactic alone.
If you’re a small business, you don’t need to feel like any particular marketing plan will fail if you don’t have the ability to run multiple campaigns on an assortment of platforms. While running different placements certainly will help your business, there are much simpler ways to avoid viewers becoming bored. A favorite way to update your ads is by making small changes that have big visual impacts. For example, doing something as basic as changing the background images on a display campaign, or even adding slides to make a static ad into a gif, can have a huge impact. Simple updates like rewording the same information, changing the main colors used in an ad or changing the call to action verbiage can bring a new luster back to your campaign. Another option is to add dynamic messaging - every time a user refreshes, a slightly different version of the messaging will load in. If you can’t afford a team to build ad copy/creatives for you, utilize customer reviews and user generated content. A lot of this centers around your social media presence, and while it is time consuming, it’s also a free or low cost way to gather real experiences from people who genuinely use your product or service.
As far as when to change up your ad plan, don’t expect to make changes every week or even every month. I’d recommend waiting 6-8 weeks after implementing a new format to make any kind of change. In general, most campaigns start off with “under-performing” KPI’s, since the majority of consumers need some repetition to trigger interest in a product or service. If you don’t see any positive change in 4-6 weeks after launching an ad campaign, that’s when you should start taking a close look at your reporting to see where you’re losing interest.
While ad fatigue is a real issue for businesses big and small, there are quite a few ways to counteract the problem. Sometimes this is a trial and error process, so don’t make all the changes all at once. Try updating one or two things at a time, and make sure to monitor your campaigns regularly. Making small updates can keep things fresh for your audience, which can only improve the success of your business.