Advertising online, no matter your platform (Facebook, Google AdWords, etc) requires some skill, some patience, and a lot of planning. By keeping your eye on the prize , your mind on the customer and ensuring you have some key pieces in place, you will have a much easier time reaching your online advertising goals.
Below are five tips to keep in mind when building online advertising campaigns that will help you accomplish your advertising goals:
Define Clear Goals
Michael Ortner, CEO of Capterra said the most important part of any SEM (search engine marketing) campaign is to have a clear goal in mind. When forming your advertising campaigns, start the process by determining what your actual goals are. These goals will help govern all of the decisions you’ll make while developing and evaluating your ads, and give you the ability to determine success.
Keep Your Target Customer in Mind
Developing your ads with your target audience in mind makes it more likely that you’ll capture their attention (and their business). Alexa Talpau, director of Online Marketing at Webs9, has a great framework for this process called AIDAS” which breaks down into the following concepts:
Attract the Attention of your audience, raise customer Interest, convince customers that they Desire your product, lead customers towards taking Action (include a call-to-action) and [provide] Satisfaction if they end up choosing your website.
If your ads are built to capture the attention of your target audience, you’ll have a much easier time reaching your advertising goals and spend less time tweaking your ads.
Track Conversions
A conversion in advertising is when someone who has clicked your ad subsequently takes some sort of valuable action on your website. This conversion can take many different forms, from something as simple as a newsletter sign up to something measurable like a purchase in your online store. Tracking which ads are leading to real, valuable traffic allows you to replicate the success of those ads across your campaigns and drive a greater amount of more valuable traffic to your business.
Include Negative Keywords
Negative keywords on your ads help weed out that traffic by adding words that you do not want your ad to show up when used in search. For example, a fleet fueling company that specializes in services for multi-vehicle trucking companies would not want their ads to appear when people are searching for gas prices in their area. If they add negative keywords relating to gas prices, they can prevent their ads from showing unless the user is really looking for their products. This strategy can help save money from being used on useless traffic from users that aren’t really looking for your product or service.
Always Keep Testing!
Any online advertising campaign that stops testing new ideas is losing steam. By trying new ads, keywords, strategies, and content, your campaigns will constantly be developing into more and more well-targeted as well as having the chance to try to hit new audiences in new ways. Have fun with it! Try new things, and you are likely to have more success in the long run.
Need help with your online advertising? Let us know! We would love to help! We are specialists in social media advertising as well as certified Google Partners, and have the tools you need to drive success. Just drop us a line at tina@uptownstudios.net or give us a call at (916) 446-1082!
