Word Of Mouth Just Isn’t Enough
These days, word of mouth just won’t cut it, and a great product or service alone will not ensure success. In order to grow your business, you need to spend some money on advertising, deciding on the best place to spend can be a tricky decision.
There is a lot of pressure to figure out how to get the best ROI (return on investment) on ads. No one wants to waste any money on ads that don’t work.
There are a lot of platforms that would like your advertising spend:
- Google Ads
- Facebook Ads
- YouTube
- Snapchat
I could go on for a while but the page could get very long and not that useful, let just say there are plenty of options.
We love ads here at WeByte HQ; buying traffic (website visitors) is the easy piece of the puzzle; once you understand your customers and their buying cycle, it gets much easier to figure out.
Before You Spend
I know you know by now that ads should be nearer the end of your work. Don’t even think about spending a penny on advertising until you have all these elements in place and a proper sales system:
- Customer Research
- Website Copy
- Reputation Management (Reviews)
- Landing pages
- Email sequence
- Traffic (ads)
- Retargeting ads
- Repeat – Testing and optimising
Digital Ads
I know you hear a lot of noise about digital ads. After 8 years of running ads, they have such fantastic power over older traditional types of advertising. The way you can track and optimise should give any TV or radio ad exec something to worry about
The biggest reasons for digital ads to being successful:
- Test new ideas quickly. You will know after days, not months if a campaign is going to be successful
- Turning off ads that are not working and scaling up the winners is easy.
- By tracking, you can see exactly what ads are making you money.
- Once you know what ads are working, you can make more of them.
- You can keep optimising and testing to keep costs down.
- Once you learn the cost of getting a new customer, it’s easy to work backwards and understand how much you need to spend.
Who’s Got Your Money?
The most important thing is to concentrate on conversions (the sale), not clicks, across all platforms, which is ultimately the most significant metric to measure.
Your potential new customers will generally turn into mini stalkers before they buy; they will be looking into your reviews, checking your Facebook and Instagram pages, trying to find out if you are trustworthy, make sure all of these are set up and easy to find.
You need to need to understand your customer’s journey and buying cycle:
- How long does it take for someone to decide to buy
- How many points of contact do people usually take before they buy
- Are people going to turn into stalkers on your company before purchase
- Emergency products and services are the fastest purchase
- Higher costs usually have longer buying cycles
We are going to concentrate on the two most significant different types of advertising:
Facebook & Instagram Ads
It’s no secret we love Facebook and Instagram ads here at WeByte HQ, mainly because this platform has unbelievable power and we can get huge results for clients but I have noticed, a lot of business just don’t understand the power.
Facebook ads are also an auction type, you are bidding to appear on your targeted customer news-feed, competition is rising all the time.
Social ads have more power than any other platform:
- Social proof ads will have likes & shares on the ad, and people can see friends who have liked the ad
- Tags: people can tag their friends, show them stuff they think they would like or share with
- Comments, people can ask you questions, say nice things about the product, of course, you will get trolls, but the trolls validate the good comments!
- People can save the ad to look at later when they have more time
- Tracking, you can see the exact ad that got the sale
- It’s quick: turn off ads that don’t work, scale ads that do work
Google can’t offer all of these, but it has YouTube, and you can get social proof with a great video.
When to use
- When you have a great offer that people wouldn’t search for or be looking for
- If you want to target interests and demographics, Facebook has way more data than Google.
- People don’t know you exist yet
- New products awareness
- With smaller budgets, they are typically cheaper than Google ads
The most important parts of a great Facebook & Instagram campaign
- Creative – picture – not stock! – Make someone stop scrolling
- The headline at the top of the ad – Your hook, why should they be interested
- The headline at the bottom of the ad – 2nd hook
- The three lines before the see more- Your chance to get them to read your ad in full, make it enjoyable.
- Social proof, likes, comments and shares – People read comments, if comments are lovely, it will persuade people to buy
Search Google Ads
Keyword search intent: people already know their problem and are actively searching for a solution
It’s an auction process, and you bid on the keywords put into the Google search bar and want to be in the top 3 spots.
The top spot will get more real estate and clicks, but remember, people are click-happy, and you pay for every click; you need to make sure your keyword is relevant and you are getting sales.
When To Use
If you have a product or service that people buy immediately in an emergency, ones that people don’t put too much thought into, this product is perfect for Google
Search Ads:
- Tracking in place via Google Analytics, you can see the exact ads making the sales
- Businesses find it easier as it requires words only, no creatives to create
- It can be more expensive than Facebook for sales and leads
- It is hard to run a sales or special offer as you would need to rely on search intent
- Google shopping is robust if you have e-com store
You need to make sure you are bidding on the most profitable keywords for your business, it can take up to 3 months to optimise an account, so make sure you are checking it regularly, otherwise, it can be a very easy way of losing money.
Re-Targeting
The best weapon is re-targeting; people are busy people and get distracted very quickly, which is why re-targeting has so much power.
If someone clicks on either your Facebook ad or Google ad, you need to be able to re-engage with and follow them around the internet.
Typically, once someone clicks on an ad, this would be the first step on the customer journey. You want to show them a different message or creative and control the journey.
If they click on an ad and land on your product page, you most likely know which product they are interested in; you can then retarget with that exact product or service; how cool is that?
It might be they are a hot lead for 3 days after, and after 30 day,s it isn’t likely that they will return to buy. This needs to be reflected in your re-targeting
Knowing your buying cycle and numbers and planning your customer’s journey can transform your business advertising.
All of these are parts of our Concord Sales System
Ad Audit
If you are running ads, we can offer you a free audit and make recommendations to improve your campaigns.
If not we can go over a strategy sure to work for your business, book a call below and lets get started..
P.S. I may try to sell you something, but only if your situation warrants it. I promise!