A good paid advertising strategy revolves around testing a targeted demographic, sending them to focused content and then capturing their emails. You should use an organic approach with these types of campaigns, and be ready to adjust depending on the results.
You could have great content on your site already, yet your visitors might never read it or even knows it exists (unlike your pre-existing audience). Paid ads work to draw traffic to your site when you face this scenario.
It is hard to carve out a niche when you have to compete with many similar tech service businesses in your area. When you incorporate paid ads into your sales strategy, you can target specific demographics with compelling content to draw them in. This outreach campaign focuses on a virtually unknown audience, with the goal of getting them to either purchase your product or to sign-up to learn more about your expertise and services.
Paid advertising provides an excellent way to test your market, message and audience. The best approach to getting the most out of this tactic is to continually adjust your advertising demographics and messaging to get the best results.
Why Paid Ads?
Paid advertising is a powerful tool to gain visibility into a highly specific audience. This technique helps you understand your niche because you target certain audiences and measure their engagement levels with your content. You see first-hand whether the audience is interested in your products and services, or if you are better off trying another demographic. Paid ads also help you hone in on your messaging and discover the best audience for your business.
A struggling content campaign, or one that is not starting at all, is a prime opportunity to bring in paid advertising support. This campaign could promote a new tech service you are offering, or it could help educate your audience on why they need your company’s assistance with their IT needs.
Content marketing is great at what it does, but it takes a long time to generate a decent audience. You may find your campaigns reaching a peak and becoming stagnant if you fail to catch the attention of a new audience. Paid advertising works for driving traffic to a new campaign or reaching a new audience for an old campaign.
Options for Paid Advertising
Social Media
1. Facebook and Instagram: You can target your audiences for a low price, and you can use the ad platform’s tools to become highly detailed in who you target. Due to the size of these social networks, you also have the largest potential audience.
2. Twitter: You get cheaper advertising than other pay-per-click (PPC) options on this social media site. However, you have an easier time getting in front of audiences organically on Twitter. You should weight whether Twitter ads are worth your time when you can simply follow a new audience and engage with them directly. Facebook does not give you this option, which often makes it the platform where paid ads make more sense.
3. LinkedIn: This social network is specifically for professionals, so it is focused on delivering business content for its network. LinkedIn is excellent for B2B advertising, with great targeting features, since it is based on the information people enter for their job and position. You have more accuracy when you select your audiences, but you will have more costs that with Facebook and Twitter.
Google
Google AdWords can get expensive, depending on the competition in your market segment. You can use the Keyword Planner tool to discover the average cost per click of your ads, the expected traffic and related terms. You will get a lot more bang for your buck by targeting a large number of lower-traffic terms than by targeting a small number of higher-traffic options. Look for keyword phrases that indicate purchasing intent, such as someone looking up estimated pricing for a particular service.
Affiliate Ads
Where do your ideal customers go on the Internet? Look for websites that cater to audiences that need your services. You can place ads on sites that key influencers in your industry run for improved outreach. The price per ad depends on how popular the affiliate is, the competitiveness of your market segment, the ad positioning and how long you run ads.
Paid Advertising Strategy
Set a budget before you get started. Think about how valuable one new customer is to you, and base your ad spending on this figure. You should allocate an ongoing percentage of your marketing budget to your paid ad campaigns.
Your next step is to create a landing page. These come in many forms, and they can be an article or content specific to that audience. Landing pages allow you to customize your message for incoming visitors. Ideally, you align the copy on the ad and the landing page to create a cohesive experience for visitors.
Custom landing pages allow you to push visitors toward specific actions, such as downloading a free ebook. You avoid displaying traditional navigation on this page, since you do not want distractions to decrease your chances of a prospect converting.
You have an easy time tracking click-throughs from your ads with landing pages, as well as the conversion rate. In some cases, you can use the same landing page for an entire ad campaign. For others, you may want multiple options customized for each keyword that you purchase.
The last step is to create a Call to Action. Once your visitor reaches the landing page, how do you plan on converting them into a lead or a customer? Every page you send them to should have a clear call to action. Powerful phrases that explain exactly what you want them to do work well, particularly if you add urgency into the mix. Take your time when determining the best CTA for your pages – it is the difference between a sale and wasted money.
Retargeting
When your targeted ad customer clicks through to your website, you can retarget them with other ads that point to informative landing pages. You build trust with your lead by presenting them with helpful resources, rather than attempting to close the sale as quickly as possible. Retargeting is excellent at converting window shoppers into buyers. You can capture this audience through high performing landing pages.
What Does an Effective Paid Advertising Campaign Look Like?
Highly effective paid ad campaigns contain concise messaging for a niche audience. Since you never try to appeal to everyone, your customized copy speaks to the exact needs of your ideal customers. The audience clicks through to a highly targeted, information landing page with a “hard sell” call-to-action to buy the product, and a “soft-sell” call to action to sign-up to learn more about what you have to offer.
The traffic going to your ad and page is tracked and monitored, so you have full visibility into campaign performance. This page gets at least a 3 percent conversion rate. A retargeting campaign uses other ads to deliver more information to the active audience.
Test, Measure and Adjust
Do small ad campaign runs across multiple platforms before you invest in large-scale advertising, and find the best platform and audience for your goals through testing. You save money in the long term and improve your ad campaign.
No matter what channels you choose, you need to research the competitive environment, optimize your copy to encourage user action, and put A/B testing in place to weed out ineffective strategies before they start to wear on your bottom line.
Avoid drastic changes to your ad and landing pages when you perform these tests. Instead, make one change at a time to measure results effectively. If you want to go in a different direction, create a separate ad with different landing pages to try two or three different options.
You are not an expert on what visitors want, your audience is. Check your own bias at the door for the best results. You may not agree with certain changes, but you will find that the data does not lie.
Consider the costs of testing and adjustment when you create the initial ad budget, and remember that you might not get results with your first campaign. Don’t quit, though. The majority of paid ad efforts are not effective in the beginning stages.
How Does This Help My Sales Process
Once you have set up paid advertising and targeted landing pages, your marketing works to bring in a larger audience at a faster pace than direct sales. You can test out audience demographics to find the ideal customer profile for your products and services. Filter out those who are interested and convert them to possible leads.
Once you capture interest among active users and build their trust in your company, reach out to them in a traditional sales fashion. You are no longer an unknown quantity. Between the paid ads, useful landing pages and retargeting, they know who you are and what you have to offer. Use a phone call or personal email to turn these warm leads into happy clients.
Sources:
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/beginners-guide-ab-testing-ppc/
https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/10/10/a-guide-to-testing-your-paid-social-ads-to-enhance-roi/
https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33319/10-examples-of-facebook-ads-that-actually-work-and-why.aspx
https://wpcurve.com/retargeting-guide/
