We all remember that 2020 was a ridiculous year. So many things have gone off track and I, for one, couldn’t be happier that this is coming to an end. With a new year, new opportunities and new potentials come, even if we can feel the effects of 2020 for a while.

When it reaches to online advertising, a new year is just a line in the sand. You have probably announced it during all these ups and downs and this unprecedented holiday season.

But that does not mean that 2021 does not allow a new mindset and a look at new strategies, or a return to those that have always worked best.

With that, I’m here to argue that 2021 should be the year that you focus on making your customers’ experiences with you as simple and enjoyable as possible. In this post, I’ll cover five ways to do this:

Customize ads by placement.

Meet mobile users.

Use your audience to personalize experiences.

Enjoy multiple platforms.

Give your customers the information they need.

As I said, we all had a rough year, so maybe paying for it with your online presence will make their lives easier – and yours. They will be more likely to make a purchase and later on, you will have a better chance of greater profits. In this post, I’ll cover five techniques to focus on your customers in 2021:

1. Customize ads by placement

Nobody wants to click on an ugly ad, let alone an ad that you can’t even read. By now, almost everyone is familiar with the Internet and an unprofessional looking ad is a red flag.

The biggest problem here is that almost all platforms have made it “easy” for you to show your ads anywhere, using just one ad unit.

While this makes the ad creation process easy, it opens up many potentially ugly results. Let’s take the devices as an example. Depending on the device you’re on, an image ad may appear too large or too small. This affects the type of image you should use for your ad.

But with the ease of creating ads, you probably selected an image and it was the one that looked best during the campaign creation process, not after looking at the views.

In addition, some channels allow a little text to be included in the image and others do not look that way.

Even with focal points. Sometimes, you can have a complex image if the ad is large, but you need to have a single focal point image for those that will appear smaller.

I wrote some detailed posts on this site about customizing your channel ads for Facebook and optimizing images for Responsive Image Ads on Google. Check them out for more details on how to make your ad creative as strong as possible, no matter where it appears.

2. Meet mobile users

As a marketer, you use your laptop/desktop for most of the day, but many people don’t. For some, the only connection to the web is via cell phone. See some of these statistics, for example:

These are some very powerful numbers to convince you that the cell phone is AT LEAST as important as the desktop, if not more. Additional channels, such as Snapchat and Instagram, rely solely on the mobile user experience. There is almost no desktop involvement.

As you’ve already agreed to start customizing your ads for channels/devices as I mentioned above, there are two areas of mobile optimization that I’d like you to step up to in 2021: experience and site speed.

Site experience

Like most other things, we usually find ourselves optimizing the user experience on our desktop site and neglecting mobile devices. If your site is responsive or has a personalized mobile experience, take the time to visit it (better yet, ask a trusted friend to do this and ask them to pass it on directly) and answer the following questions:

Is it easy to interact with your website?

Can you click on anything you want?

Is everything legible and well-spaced?

Is all the information you want available?

For all interactive parts of the site, do they work correctly?

Are there pop-ups or ads that are causing problems?

If you are failing in any of these areas, go back to the drawing board and correct it.

Page speed:

With mobile devices, users can be on Wi-Fi or their respective networks when they access your website. Almost without fail, one will be slower than the other, and if you are coming from a mobile device,

You are likely to be in a hurry more than on the desktop. This invariably leads to jumps before the page loads, which, for our PPC goals, means wasted money on advertising.

Also, keep in mind that updating the Google page experience is underway and page speed is involved in the basic web vitals of the update.

Check the speed of your page using Google’s Page Speed ​​Insights Tool and make some of the suggested changes to your mobile page to make it lighter and faster.

3. Use your audience to personalize experiences

Have you ever seen ads displayed that are not applicable because you have already made a purchase or are just not the right person for that company?

Everyone has. And you are probably doing the same thing with your target audience.

There are several ways to target audiences for better and more meaningful remarketing, either by creating a list of past buyers, excluding users who spend only 10 seconds or less on your page or customizing ad messages for someone who has added a product to the card but does not check out.

The amount of control we have over creating audiences is incredible, and it is incomprehensible that people don’t enjoy it better.

Here are some videos to guide you through the targeting options on some of the main PPC platforms and, hopefully, get your mind moving in creating audiences:

4. Enjoy multiple platforms

Nobody spends all the time in a network. (Okay, maybe older people are just on Facebook, but this is a small subset of people.) Finding your target audience is best done when they see you in many different environments.

First, you will have a better chance of reaching your entire customer base using more platforms. For example, an account I’m working on targets high school and college users for a PSA-type campaign.

We are targeting users on Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, but each platform is reaching a different subset of our user base:

YouTube is running ads for the older segment, 18 to 24 years old, and 60% male.

Facebook / Instagram are 60% female and are equally divided between 13-17 and 18-24.

Snapchat is reaching 99% of young people aged 13 to 17 and has a uniform division between men and women.

Each channel does its part to get our message across, but none of them are reaching 100% of our target audience. Without a multichannel strategy, you could easily lose a portion of your customer base.

Take advantage of additional channels to ensure you reach everyone and have more areas to test, optimize, and maximize.

5. Give your customers the information they need

The last point I’d like you to focus on in 2021 is a piece of common sense, but not nearly done well by most marketers:

Tell the customer what he wants to know.

Use your website to inform your clients what you do and why you’re the best at it. You don’t have to go into heavy technical jargon, but make it clear through effective marketing texts that you are the expert.

The feedback I ever hear from people is: “Well, I don’t require to post a lot on the site because we require them to talk over the phone”. As I listen to what you are saying, I point out this statistic shared by one of my friends:

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