Why should you start paid online digital advertising? Well… To put things lightly, your company is basically lost in one gigantic Where’s Waldo puzzle. With billions upon billions of websites out there – it can be nearly impossible to get customers to notice yours. Here’s a few tips on how you can use paid advertising to generate brand awareness and grow your business.
1. Generating Awareness
To get your customers’ attention, you first need to make sure they are even aware your company exists. The major search engines like Google and Bing have the potential to put your website in front of millions of potential customers who would want to purchase your products or services. Search engines utilize complex algorithms that sort pages by ranking them on various factors from search terms, relevancy, usability, expertise of sources, and location. Ideally, your website will rank on the first page of relevant search results.
How do you make sure your website is optimized to rank high in search results? For starters, incorporate SEO, Google PPC, and Bing PPC into your strategy. Posting blogs on your website is one way you can improve your SEO. This is because each additional blog adds more content to your site, giving you more opportunities for search engines to show your company in the search results. Be sure to include keywords and phrases that you want to rank for in the search results. SEO can take time to see results, while you may see the effects of PPC quicker. Nevertheless, pairing an SEO strategy with search engine marketing is essential to build a foundation for many years of future success.
2. Targeted Advertising
Not only is generating awareness necessary, you must also ensure you’re getting in front of the right audience. It is vital you are advertising to customers with “high intent” for your products or services. Different social platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube offer different audience targeting options. You target those with specific interests, in a specific market, in a particular location, people of a certain age or education level, and more. With remarketing, a pay-per-click advertising technique, you can even target people that have previously visited your website, such as those who have viewed a specific product, but did not complete a purchase. Remarketing is often much less expensive (sometimes a tenth as much!) than other pay-per-click advertising strategies. Sound complicated? It can be. So engaging a professional paid advertising management agency to help identify the right mix of channels and ensure your targeting criteria is set up for success can maximize your return on ad spend…And make your life a whole lot easier.
3. Testing
A marketing pro can set your campaigns up and test different versions of an ad to identify what works best and what converts the most customers. In one famous example, Google tested some 42 shades of blue to find out which one was most effective. Now that might sound a bit ridiculous, but relevant feedback can improve anything. Every aspect of your ad campaign can be tracked and adjusted for maximum effectiveness. A/B testing and additional marketing analytics can isolate single variables, such as ad copy, landing pages, or ad imagery to determine if any particular change affects your marketing results, and let you know what campaigns perform best. This is another area where hiring a professional paid advertising agency really pays off – because paid media specialists are aware of the intricacies of digital advertising and know how and what to test that will optimize your campaigns.
4. Reach
There’s a reason that Google is the #1 search engine in the world. Larry Page, the founder, realized two important facts. Websites, like academic articles, generally tend to be more important and valuable the more external links they contained. That means more people are searching for and utilizing them. Also, the greater authority a web page is, the more its outgoing links are worth. When you use the Google, Bing, or social media to advertise, you gain more reach than a tower of hungry giraffes! (That’s right; a group of giraffes is called a tower.). To maximize your reach, incorporate a link building strategy that includes internal links (links on your site, to other pages on your site) and backlinks (links on external sites, to your website). Another way you can achieve optimal reach is by advertising on a variety of channels, not just one. The combination of paid advertising campaigns will optimize the performance of all of your campaigns and help you achieve your goals faster.
5. Variety
We’ve talked a lot about Google. Even though they’re the biggest fish in the sea, there are plenty of other advertising channels worth mentioning. Facebook, LinkedIn, Bing, and Instagram each reach millions, but they are often different demographic markets. A professional advertising agency can help find the optimal advertising mix ideal for your particular products or services. For example, maybe your mix include video ads. Video ads have become one of the most effective placement tools for advertising. Think about the last YouTube video you saw. Odds are it had ad placements.
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Like that popular local restaurant, where all of the patrons seem to know each other by first name, the web should be a place where everyone who’s a potential customer knows your company name and can easily find you. Get in touch with L7 Advertising today and we’ll help you launch a paid digital advertising strategy that can yield excellent ROIs and generate leads at high rates.