Nowadays, we’re being constantly overwhelmed by commercials. An average American is exposed to 4,000 to 10,000 ads on a daily basis. It’s no wonder that the number of Americans using some sort of ad blocking software doubled in the last four years, reaching a 30 percent mark in 2018. People are getting absolutely overwhelmed by ads, and this is a phenomenon commonly known as ad fatigue.
Your marketing department might be a part of the problem, as users can suffer from brand fatigue as well. This simply means they’re getting tired of being flooded by promotional messages from particular brands. Of course, there will always be people who continue to be excited about your ads, but once this effect is easily measurable, one could say that brand fatigue is taking its toll. So how should you measure this effect, why does it happen and what can you do about it? Let’s look into these questions in more detail.
Keep an Eye on Analytics
The most certain sign of brand fatigue is a general decrease of engagement rates, which can mean different things for different marketing channels. Low engagement rates can also be a signal to some social networks and email providers to punish you by reducing your reach long-term or moving you to spam folders. This will throw you into a whirlpool of digital invisibility that’s very hard to escape.
A study by Adespresso proved a correlation between the number of times the same ad is displayed to users and a drop in CTR, as well as growth of CPC. You need to analyze these numbers constantly and try to track which type of content, language and overall promotional approach annoys audience the most and try to avoid it. These tend to vary for every brand and every marketing campaign. However, there are some general rules and guidelines that can be applied.
Reduce the Number of Messages
The first and most obvious strategy is to try to take it easy. If you see that your messages are irritating your audience, this doesn’t necessarily mean that something is wrong with your product or the creative aspect of your marketing. It might be that you’re just being too insistent. If this is the case, the solution is to simply send fewer emails or publish fewer posts.
In fact, when asked what made them unsubscribe from a brand’s mobile messaging, 57% of US users answered that they were simply bothered by too many messages and updates. Almost 60 percent of users find that two messages in a single day is too much, while 27 percent of them wouldn’t even put up with one message per day.
Therefore, don’t overwhelm your subscribers and customers, and make quality a priority over quantity. Many businesses are being unreasonable by thinking that a mere number of posts will make up for the lack of quality, but people at trustworthy digital marketing companies know that this is a huge fallacy that can seriously damage your online presence.
Authenticity
It’s one thing to stay up-to-date with trends and make sure not to miss out on anything that can be subtly and appropriately implemented in your marketing strategy in order to maintain the image of your brand. Jumping on a bandwagon, on the other hand, is something very different.
One of the easiest ways to fatigue your audience is to constantly take advantage of a current trend or popular cause in order to gain a few additional views or likes. Short-term results may even be decent, but in the long run this can have disastrous consequences for your brand’s image. Don’t use every opportunity to do things that everyone else does or to refer to topics everyone else talks about. Take the Ice Bucket Challenge, for instance. It started off as a fun way to support a noble cause but slowly turned into a farce.
People have learned to see through brand’s intentions and are starting to feel disgust with brands using this tactic. As much as 41 percent of consumers are aware of the fact that marketing is often just a spin. You need to be original, build your own style and stick to topics that your audience finds relevant, with an authentic and innovative approach. Even if you’re jumping on the train of hot topics, at least make sure to jump on the first wagon and add a twist or two that would make your way of dealing with them different from all the others.
Update Creative Content Regularly
You may think to yourself, “If I need to reduce the number of messages I send out to my audience, how do I remain visible?” One of the ways to do it is to constantly come up with fresh ads and new content that you intend to send out.
Facebook suggest that you should refresh creative content every week or two, but you may find this too expensive and time-consuming. In addition, this is usually not enough time to test the efficiency of your posts properly. As a study suggests, after 35 days, your CPC for a particular ad suffers a serious blow due to brand fatigue, so updating your creative every month or so might be the right thing to do.
Always Provide Value
Nevertheless, all this means nothing if the content that you’re serving to your audience is not relevant to them. A lot of brands annoy their audience by posting promotional content or content that is of absolutely no relevance to them. Most users don’t care one bit about posts where you brag about your company or try to make them read news about your product.
Only 20 percent or less of your content should be purely promotional, and the rest should provide value for the users. Offering relevant and knowledgeable insights and creating a highly personalized experience is the best promotion you can have.
Making a More Radical Move – Yes or No?
It may be that none of the above mentioned tactics will work, and you might be tempted to make radical moves, such as a complete rebrand or an outright change of your target audience. This is risky, costly and shouldn’t be done without a thorough market research and analysis that would show it could actually work. However, if you decide to go for this, have in mind that you’ll have to change your general approach, and stick to the mentioned pieces of advice anyway. Otherwise, you’ll fatigue your new audience and you’ll eventually have to go back to the drawing board once again.
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