When you’re planning a marketing campaign, it can be difficult to know how long it should run. But before you begin to think about length, it’s important to think about the goals for your paid internet advertising. What are you creating this digital marketing campaign to do? Some questions to help you decide are:
- Who do you want to reach? Knowing who your target audience is will help you create campaigns that speak to their specific needs.
- What are you promoting? Knowing why you want to reach your target audience is also key to a successful campaign.
- What is the call to action? Knowing what you want your audience to do when they see your ad is the final piece to figuring out your campaign goal.
You should be able to categorize your goals into short-term and long-term buckets, and this will impact the ideal length of your campaigns. For instance, you may run a single campaign for an extended period of time to support a long-term goal, while also running multiple, quick campaigns to support your short-term goals.
Budget is another major factor when considering the ideal length of your campaign — however, it isn’t the end all be all. Even if you don’t have extensive resources, you can still run successful short and long campaigns. All it takes is the right strategy.
Explore this blog post to dig into strategies and best practices that will help you create successful digital marketing campaigns that convert across internet advertising platforms.
Immediate-need campaigns vs. ongoing campaigns
We know that for different objectives, you’ll want to run different length campaigns. Immediate campaigns are best focused on short-term goals like specific, temporary promotions while ongoing campaigns — or evergreen campaigns — usually focus more on long-term goals like awareness.
Immediate campaigns
Are you promoting something with a clear start and end date? A one week to one month-long campaign is likely to be an effective timeline for supporting short-term goals with paid internet advertising. Examples of these promotions include:
- Flash sales: A straightforward strategy is to match the length of the campaign to the length of the sale.
- Seasonal/holiday offerings: If there’s something you only offer seasonally, or as holiday sales begin to ramp up, spend a few weeks letting people know what’s available.
- New product launch: Hype a new product or service with a quick campaign that begins before the launch and ends when it’s live.
- Event or conference: Build up excitement before a big event or conference by promoting it up to one month out, then spend a few extra days promoting insights from it.
In most cases, the sweet spot for immediate campaigns is one to two weeks.
Ongoing campaigns
If you have a goal that isn’t time bound and doesn’t have a defined beginning or end, you’ll want to look at an ongoing campaign. Ideally, you’ll dedicate multiple months to supporting long-term goals with content and messaging that is evergreen — something that’s relevant all year long. These goals could be:
- Driving brand awareness: Your target audience has specific pain points to deal with, and an ongoing campaign lets them know that you’re offering a solution whenever they’re ready to make a purchase.
- Boosting website traffic: This is a focus of many successful digital marketing campaigns and helps to convert customers — but it can take months to see results, hence an extended timeline.
- Customer or client testimonials: Campaigns that speak to the benefits your business provides are always relevant and, working in tandem with your other campaigns, can help drive conversions.
- Product showcases: Another form of paid internet advertising that is always powerful is showing off your product. If you’re an antiques shop it could be sharing new items in stock; if you provide pool cleaning services it could be before and after photos; if you are in real estate, you may want to share new listings as they come onto the market. For your target audience, seeing is believing.
For most ongoing marketing campaigns, three to six months is the amount of time you’ll need to meet your long-term objectives.
Budgeting
The budget you have to work with is an equally important factor that may determine how long you want to run a campaign. Different internet advertising platforms will have different options for customizing your ad spend, but for most, your budgeting strategy will stem from defining a total budget or a daily budget.
Working with the total budget (e.g., you have $300 total)
If you have a total budget to use for all of your paid internet advertising, immediate-need campaigns are often the best option. Say you have access to $300; while that may not be enough to sustain a campaign that runs for six months, concentrating budget behind specific objects will drive your ROI in the short term.
Depending on the platform, you may have to choose a daily budget. Work backwards from the total to determine a daily amount that will be most impactful — platforms like Nextdoor Ads Manager share estimated impressions as you customize your budget and campaign length. Then, run the ads for the number of days or weeks it takes to hit the total.
Working with a daily budget (e.g., you want to spend $20/day)
If you have more resources available, leveraging daily budgets over a longer period of time through an ongoing campaign is an effective strategy. Let’s say this time you want to spend twenty to thirty dollars a day — you can use those same analytics tools to determine the optimal daily budget to reach your target audience and the timeline it will take to do it.
This approach ensures an even spend of over the lifecycle of the campaign, which boosts your ROI and optimizes the sustainability of your ad. If you want to cap your total budget, simply project your daily budget forward until you hit a number you’re comfortable with. The projection will also highlight the longest your campaign can run.
Variations and testing to drive performance
The length of your campaign will also rely on its performance. If it’s not performing, you won’t want to keep running it, but if it’s performing well, you might want to extend it. The most successful digital marketing campaigns leverage both ad variations and A/B tests, no matter the campaign length.
Content variations
Begin every campaign ready with content variations you’ll use for the duration, whether it’s long or short. That way, you’ll be setting yourself to drive impact from the very beginning.
This is especially important for ongoing campaigns, as it’s easier to run into ad fatigue: when your ad is overexposed and becomes ineffective. You don’t want your audience to get tired of seeing the same content over and over. A good rule of thumb is to have one distinct image, ad copy, or both for each week you plan to run your paid internet advertising.
To prevent ad fatigue many ad platforms like Nextdoor Ads Manager offer frequency capping, which limits how many times neighbors are served ads from each ad group.
A/B testing
How do you know what’s performing well? In addition to weekly refreshed content for your campaign, test slight variations of images, headlines, and calls to action to see what gets more clicks. This gives you insights into how to move forward and drive conversions. Use this strategy to tweak an ongoing campaign or establish changes to keep in mind for your next immediate-need campaign.
Using Nextdoor Ads Manager
Nextdoor Ads Manager makes it easy to create campaigns of any length. Take advantage of easily adjustable parameters to extend or end a campaign right in the app. If you’re stuck, Nextdoor is by your side with how-to guides and a robust help center that make it easy to define your goals, audience, budget, and more. Built-in performance dashboards help you optimize successful digital marketing campaigns that convert.
