Step 21: Map Your Advertising

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Digital advertising has changed the marketing game in recent years – allowing smaller brands, personalities and even politicians to make a play for share of voice.

The platforms you can advertise on are numerous – from Google, to Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and native publishing (sponsored posts).

For a brand looking to grow awareness, digital advertising is inevitable yet it’s a strong investment.

Why?

1. It’s Scalable

One of the trickiest challenges for any marketer is finding traffic and leads that are scalable – meaning, the amount of effort and budget getting those leads closely matches the results.

Digital advertising is highly scalable, which is why some businesses spend millions of dollars a year on Google and Facebook Ads advertising.

If you create a digital advertising campaign that is converting at a profitable rate, there is no reason to arbitrarily cap spend on that campaign.

You can increase your budget and your leads and profits will increase accordingly.

This makes digital advertising highly effective for businesses that need a lot of leads but are short on time and heads.

2. It’s Measurable

Compared to traditional marketing channels like TV or radio, digital advertising is highly measurable, providing a plethora of metrics that allow you to see at a detailed level what works and what doesn’t.

You can also run conversion tracking code (only for Google advertisers) to see exactly what actions your customers are taking on your site and then tweak your offering accordingly helping you quickly determine which of your campaigns are sucking or returning ROI.

3. It’s Flexible

You can customize your campaigns and ads to your particular needs, hyper-targeting the audiences you most want to reach.

For example, you can:

  • Specify keyword match types

  • Only display your ad to people who search for an exact keyword you specify.

  • Narrow your audience by location, time of day, language, browser or device type and more. A good portion of your SEO traffic may be worthless to you (for example, if you only need Australia-based leads, and half your web traffic comes from the Asia), but with digital advertising, you don’t have to display your ads around the world.

  • Access an enormous network of non-search users on properties like Gmail and YouTube and tons of partner sites.

  • Leverage display networks especially Google’s, which is great for building brand awareness and often converts at a lower cost than Google Search.

Ultimately, digital advertising is highly recommended in your marketing mix - complementary to your other marketing efforts, but it’s not a replacement.

Converting a lead into a sale is enhanced the all the work you’ve done on your branding, website design, social media proof, etc, all of which come together to form a picture in the mind of your audience and ad prospect, about who your brand is, which adds weight to their decision to BUY.

When starting out as a new or scaling brand in digital advertising its advised that you:

  • Begin with smaller budgets and well-defined targeting - based on your target audience personas. Start with a budget of $20-30 on either a boosted post or Google ad, then slowly increase budgets as you measure what’s working well for you and converting.

  • Prepare at least 2-3 different advertising messages - and test these separately to see which consumers respond to the most. Add budget to the ads that work for you and discard those that don’t.

  • Play with different headings, layouts and formats – from text to image only ads and videos. Again, optimise the ads that work the best for you as you begin to see results.

  • Alternatively, sign up with a professional digital advertising online agency. One of the best in the Google Adword and online advertising specialists is AdEspresso (packages start from $49 p/m). Using AdEsperesso is highly recommend as it reduces the time you could spend trying to figure out Google yourself, and gets you focused on other much needed aspects of the business.

 
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