When the year gets busy, the day-to-day pulls us from meeting to meeting, and before long we're going through the motions without stopping to find time to be more curious, and ask better questions of the teams we work with. As you meet with teams this week, internally or externally, here are some questions you may not have asked in a while, designed to surface sharper insights and make sure your paid media spend is working as hard as it should be.
Consider this a starting point for richer conversations over the next month.
1. What have our paid media results taught us about our audience in the last 90 days that we didn't already know last year?
Every campaign generates data about who is responding, and where assumptions about your customers need updating. The most valuable insights are often the unexpected ones.
2. Does our top of funnel creative work hard to communicate what makes us different, beyond what we sell?
Top of funnel is where new audiences encounter your brand for the first time, and it deserves as much strategic attention as conversion creative. Strong creative decisions point back to brand positioning. If you swapped your logo for a competitor's and the ad feels like it could belong to either brand, your creative may need to work harder on what makes you distinct.
3. Beyond a welcome discount, what formats are we testing to grow our email database through paid?
Paid media builds owned audiences in more ways than transactions alone, but email capture, community growth and direct relationships don't always happen by default. Quiz-led activations and brand lead magnets are formats worth exploring to turn paid reach into something that compounds over time.
4. What would you do differently if you had 20% less budget next month?
This is one of the most useful strategic conversations you can have. A considered answer surfaces where the real confidence lies and where there might be room to sharpen the approach.
5. What are you seeing across other brands in our category that we should know about?
A paid media specialist working across multiple brands has pattern recognition most in-house teams don't have access to. They keep an eye on what's shifting in across your category. The best agency relationships turn your monthly review into a genuine market briefing.
These questions are just a starting point for the kind of conversations that can make paid media work harder. The best media specialist relationships go beyond reporting on what happened. Bringing sharper questions to the table is one of the simplest ways to get more from the partnership. When budgets are under pressure, the quality of thinking behind every dollar matters more than ever.
At Beautiful Sparks, we recently extended our services into Google Search, Meta and YouTube ads, rounding out our services across brand foundations, story and community, and now growth and commerce. We'll keep sharing perspectives from what we're seeing in this space. If you'd like to chat about the campaigns you’re currently running, we'd love to hear from you. Feel free to >>get in touch<<.
Author: Effie Asafu-Adjaye
Effie Asafu-Adjaye is the Founder of Beautiful Sparks. Beautiful Sparks helps beauty, fashion and lifestyle brands become known, loved and remembered through sharp positioning, strategic storytelling, and campaigns that connect with the right customers. Read more about Effie here. Linkedin.
