While we all understand the importance of the marketing “Rule of 7” we can’t expect consumers to respond to the same exact ad over and over again.

In fact, displaying the same ads on repeat will most likely frustrate or annoy potential customers and drive them further away from liking and trusting your brand. It also isn’t logical to spend months of your (or your employees’) time and energy creating multiple ad campaigns in an attempt to move consumers through the common “know-like-trust” journey.

KNOW – Get introduced to a company
LIKE – After looking through their digital platforms, consumers like what they’re about.
TRUST – After purchasing a product or service, a consumer likes that company enough to become a loyal customer and/or spread the word.

Modern consumers have grown accustomed to digesting data in short snippets before navigating away to new information. Being constantly bombarded by text, image and video ads, consumers loathe having their online time wasted by irrelevant and unhelpful ads. Your brand can steer away from creating consumer and employee fatigue by using ad sequencing.

Ad Sequencing Explained

Ad sequencing simply means that you create a predetermined ad flow to spark consumers’ interests. Instead of blasting one or two ads across platforms and having no control over how and when your audience views them, ad sequencing puts you, as the brand, in the driver’s seat and allows you to launch and control the flow of multiple ads.

Think of the process of moving consumers through a campaign funnel, but for advertising. Your ad sequence is a series of steps that your audience moves through based on their interactions with your previous ads.

Why Ad Sequence?

Creating this deliberate ad flow guarantees consumers view specific ads in a specific order, therefore deepening their curiosity and interest in your brand while avoiding consumer fatigue. Incorporating ad sequencing into your brand’s marketing toolbox empowers you to construct a brand narrative that can lift ad recall by more than 74%.

Amanda Bond, a HubSpot Academy instructor and Facebook Ads expert, points out that “serving lead generating ads to warm custom audiences is 50% to 100% cheaper than running lead generation ads to cold traffic.”

Plus, ad sequencing works within all the major marketing platforms, including Google Ads, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Brands can continue to apply their gathered campaign data and advertise on the platforms that the target audience use most regularly, just in a more consumer-friendly manner.

How Your Brand Can Ad Sequence

Your ad sequence can accomplish many goals, from brand awareness to conversions. And can be used in tandem with retargeting.

Yes, it will take extra time and energy to create and launch multiple, similar ads, but the ability to connect with your audience in a more sincere and focused way is well worth the effort. Try following these four steps to start creating your own ad sequence:

1. Choose Your Platform

This choice should be informed by previously collected campaign data. For example, if your target audience are Millennials, concentrate building ad sequences within their most-used platforms (e.g. social media.)

2. Choose Your Campaign Goal

Does your brand primarily need to build awareness? Or is it already firmly established and needs to focus on building trust, generating leads or retargeting lost consumers? Choosing the goal of the entire campaign will help determine structure.

3. Choose Your Sequence Type

In November 2018, Google tested five ad sequence types against traditional 30-second video ads to measure consumers’ brand awareness, ad recall and purchase intent. Which sequence best serves your campaign goal?

4. Test and Revise

Like any successful ad campaign, you must collect and analyze the campaign data in order to revise and maximize ROI. With our Insights + Analytics team, we do this in real-time so no marketing dollars are wasted on ineffective campaigns.

If you’re still wondering where or how to start building your ad sequence, some platforms like Google Ads provide ad sequencing templates.

And if you’d rather hand the reigns to a trusted ad amplification agency, keep in mind that LEAP Amp regularly creates ad sequences for clients to boost lead generation and build brand trust.