If you want to attract more customers and prospects to your business, you’ve probably either tried or considered some form of digital advertising. While strategies such as content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) can help you get organic visitors, advertising is the fastest way to start getting targeted traffic to your website. There are quite a few choices for online advertising, though, for small businesses. It’s important to consider your alternatives and to identify the right strategy for your needs.
What Works and What Doesn’t
While digital advertising can be an effective way to promote your business, it can also be an expensive drain on your budget if you don’t do it right. Before we get into the specific platforms, here are some general guidelines on what to do and what to avoid.
Digital Advertising Best Practices
- Research your audience. Creating a buyer persona helps you know who your customers are.
- Advertise where your customers go. For example, if your buyers are young, you might focus on Instagram and Snapchat.
- Find keywords that your audience is searching for. Keywords are essential whether you’re advertising with Google, Amazon, Facebook, or anywhere else. Be sure to research long-tail keywords that are popular in your niche or industry.
- Test your campaigns so you can make changes as appropriate and scale up when you see good results.
Digital Advertising Mistakes
- Attempting to just wing it without a clear strategy. With each campaign, you have to know whether you’re trying to get opt-ins, sell products, or build visibility for your brand.
- Overpaying for very popular and broad keywords. For example, if you’re in a fitness-related business, it’s very expensive to bid on keywords such as “fitness” or “lose weight.” Identify more narrow and long-tail keywords that aren’t as costly and that attract a more targeted audience.
- Not testing the right metrics. If you don’t carefully test, you can end up sinking a great deal of money into losing campaigns.
The Many Types of Digital Advertising
You have a wide variety of options for online advertising. Let’s cover some of the more popular platforms.
Google AdWords is the oldest and still one of the largest digital advertising platforms. Advertising on the world’s largest search engine gives you access to millions of customers in every industry. Google also owns YouTube so you can also manage video ads from the Google advertising dashboard. While Google may be the largest platform, it’s also expensive, especially if you’re targeting popular niches.
Facebook and Instagram
Facebook, which also owns Instagram, is Google’s main competitor for online advertising. With over 1 billion active users, Facebook is the world’s largest social media platform. Instagram, which has around 100 million users per month, is also a top platform, with an average younger user base than Facebook. Both platforms offer highly targeted advertising options. One of the fastest-growing features of both Facebook and Instagram are Stories, content that’s only visible for 24 hours and that appear at the top of users’ pages. Sponsored Stories ads are just one option for Facebook advertising.
Twitter, while not as big as Facebook, occupies a unique space in the social media landscape. With its short-form content, it’s ideal for communicating concise messages within the 280 character limit (which was only 140 characters until 2017). On Twitter, you can invest in sponsored tweets that are targeted by interest or location. Twitter advertising is worth considering if you want to reach a broad audience. It works best if you’re already active on Twitter and want to give your tweets more exposure.
LinkedIn has the distinction of being the only major social media site designed specifically for businesses. Millions of users use this platform to find employers, employees, partners, investors, and clients. LinkedIn advertising options include sponsored posts, sponsored InMail (LinkedIn’s messaging system), and text ads. LinkedIn offers a well-educated, affluent, and professional audience.
Measuring ROI With Digital Advertising
When engaging in paid advertising, it’s essential to consistently track your results. Every advertising platform provides you with analytics. It’s up to you, however, to interpret the results. Some of the key metrics to watch include:
- Impressions -The number of times your ad appears in search results. This doesn’t indicate how many visitors saw or engaged with an ad, only the number of times it was displayed.
- Click-through Rate (CTR) – The percentage of people viewing your ad who actually click on it. Your CTR is important because it indicates how relevant and interesting your ad is to your audience. The average CTR on Google is around 2%.
- Cost-per-click (CPC) – How much you pay for every click. CPC varies greatly depending on the platform and how competitive the keywords are.
- Quality Score -Google calculates your quality score to determine how relevant your ads are. To improve your score, you need a landing page that’s a good match for your ads.
- Conversions – When someone takes action on your ad, it’s a conversion. This can be opting into your list, buying a product, booking an appointment, or any goal that you’ve set for the campaign. Conversion rates are another metric that varies widely but between 2% and 5% is fairly typical.
The Cost of Digital Advertising
Setting a budget is another crucial aspect of advertising. All of the major online advertising platforms give you plenty of leeways to set your budget. Google AdWords and Facebook, for example, let you set a budget as low as $1 per day. If your budget is too small, however, you’re unlikely to see meaningful results. Spending less than $10/day, it’s hard to even measure your results.
The average small business invests about 1% of its revenue into advertising. In many industries, however, the percentage is higher. Small Business Trends offers some guidelines as well as a list of what typical businesses in different industries spend. However, you have to decide what you can afford to allocate for advertising. It’s best to start small and scale up as you start to get a good return on your investment.
Let Professionals Handle Your Campaigns
Digital advertising isn’t for the fainthearted. You have to consider many areas such as targeting the right audience, finding the optimal keywords, choosing the right platforms, and setting the appropriate budget. Many businesses find that they’re just too busy to become experts at AdWords, Facebook ads, or other types of advertising. You can spend months and many thousands of dollars on ads as you get up to speed. A simpler option is to partner with an agency that can manage your ad campaigns.
If you run a small business, you already have plenty of tasks to keep you busy. Why not maximize your ROI by letting experts handle your advertising? If you’re ready to reap the advantages of digital advertising, Campfire Digital can help you find solutions tailored to your needs. To learn more about our services contact us. You can also schedule a free consultation.
