Why it's Important to Diversify Your Digital Ad Spend

The adage: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”, offers a lot of wisdom when applied to digital advertising. One of the main reasons for brands not hitting their desired levels of campaign performance comes down to the fact that they’ve limited their scope in terms of the platforms included within their marketing mix. 

The digital advertising landscape is vast and growing larger each year with new platforms and placements arriving on the scene. Narrowing your focus to just one—even two or three—platform(s) will mean that you’re missing out on a whole lot of performance potential and ROI. This is why, when it comes to digital ad spend, diversification is a must. 

This article highlights three reasons why you should diversify your brand’s digital ad spend: (1) connecting better with different audience demographics, (2) reinforcing ad messaging, and (3) mitigating risk. The article also discusses how diversifying ad spend also requires brands to produce diverse ad creative, with assets being optimized for each of the platforms in their mix.

Before diving in, there’s an important point that needs to be addressed: Diversifying your ad spend doesn’t mean distributing dollars evenly across multiple platforms. There will be certain platforms that are better suited to the makeup of your brand's target demographics and campaign objectives—these demand a greater share of the pie.

1. Connect better with different audience demographics

Back in the heyday of television, it was a lot easier for advertisers to pick where to put their advertising dollars as they could essentially reach all demographics through this single channel. In today’s digital environment, however, things are increasingly fractured, meaning that marketers need to take a more multi-faceted approach to reach the different sets of audiences that they’re looking to target. 

For example, let’s say that you’re a marketer for a coffee brand: you’re going to have a broad set of target demographics that you’d want to advertise to. To cover all bases, a single digital platform—or even a couple of platforms—isn’t going to cut it. This is because each platform, whether it’s Meta, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, or Snapchat, presents a different configuration when it comes to audience demographics; with different weightings based on age, gender, region, etc. To maximize your reach and strengthen engagement, you should draw on a mix of platforms, dividing your spending in a way that reflects your specific makeup of target demographics. 

The good thing about taking a cross-channel approach is that it gives you the opportunity, as a marketer, to serve ads that are more tailored to your different audience segments. This will help you achieve much deeper engagement when compared to ads that are trying to be universal in their messaging.  

2. Reinforce ad messaging

Yes, digital audiences are scattered, but this doesn’t mean that people exclusively spend their time in one place. Most online users divide their activity across a range of platforms, daily. 

When you diversify your ad spend and include multiple platforms within your campaign, it enables you to reach the same person in a number of different places during their time spent online. When done right and in an integrated manner, it creates a compounding effect for your campaign and will help you achieve both top-of-funnel brand awareness, and lower-funnel conversion outcomes. 

3. Mitigate risk

This isn’t the most exciting reason to diversify your ad spend, however, it’s important nonetheless. The digital advertising landscape is volatile; just because a platform is currently popular and performing well, doesn’t mean this will always be the case. 

New regulations, such as the current wave of privacy legislation, have a significant impact on ad performance. Or a new platform might arrive on the scene and experience a rapid rise in popularity, as was the case with TikTok. This can shake up the landscape in terms of where audiences are spending their time and which platforms are performing well from an advertising perspective. 

Diversifying your ad spend allows you to mitigate the risk caused by a volatile landscape. It means you aren’t too reliant on one platform and will enable you to adapt more quickly and easily when changes occur. 

Creative considerations when diversifying ad spend

Diversifying ad spend to encompass several different digital platforms means that you will be running cross-platform campaigns. To be effective in this strategy, you need to have the right ad creative. 

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to digital creative. Each platform and placement has its unique specifications and best practices. Maximizing performance requires you to build a variety of dedicated creative assets, with each optimized to its intended platform. 

This process of cross-platform creative optimization can be difficult and time-consuming. So, why not let Shuttlerock do the heavy lifting? At Shuttlerock we offer a cost-effective, easy solution for brands to produce impactful cross-platform video creative. As official creative partners with all leading digital platforms, you can rest assured that the assets you receive will give you the best chance of campaign success. 

If you would like to explore how Shuttlerock can help your brand, please feel free to book a demo, or get in touch with a team member in your region.