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 who 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 (websites visitors) is the easy piece of the puzzle, once you understand your customers and their buying cycle it gets a lot easier to figure out.
Before You Spend
I know you know by now, 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 amazing 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 so being successful:
- Test new ideas quickly, you will know after days not months if a campaign is going to be successful
- Easy to turn off ads that are not working and scale up those
- 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 just concentrate on conversions (the sale), not clicks, across all platforms that is ultimately the biggest metric to measure.
Your potential new customers, will normally 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 normally 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 big two biggest 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, 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 does have YouTube and with a great video, you can get social proof.
When to use
- When you have a great offer that people wouldn’t search for or be looking for
- You want to target interests and demographics, Facebook has way more data than Google
- People don’t really know you exist yet
- New products awareness
- Smaller budget, 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 top of the ad – Your hook, why should they be interested
- The headline at the bottom of the ad – 2nd hook
- The 3 lines before the see more- Your chance to get them to read your ad in full, make it interesting
- Social proof, likes, comments and shares – People read comments, if comments are nice, it will persuade people to buy
Search Google Ads
Keyword search intent, people already know their problem and is actively searching for a solution
It’s an auction process and you bid on the keywords put into Google search bar, and you really want to be in the top 3 spots.
The top spot will get more real estate and more 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 requires words only, no creatives to create
- Can be more expensive than Facebook for sales and leads
- Hard to run a sales or special offer as you would need to reply on search intent
- Google shopping is powerful 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 easily, that 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 days it isn’t likely that they will return to buy, this needs to be reflected in your re-targeting
Knowing your buying cycle, numbers and planning your customer’s journey has the power to 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 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 and sell you something, but only if you situation warrants it, promise!