The world of marketing is constantly evolving. What worked for your business in the past may be applicable to our current situation. If you're not seeing the results that you wanted from your online advertising strategies, don't fret. You're not alone.
Right now, it's probably time to rethink your online advertising approach. While it's true that there's no one-size-fits-all marketing strategy that will work for your business, there are different online advertising tactics that you can implement. You can mix and match and see what works uniquely for your company. Of course, there are also a few all-inclusive tips that you should include in the mix for your next online advertising campaign.
Effective Advertising Strategies: How to Get Started
Before you start signing up for online advertising services, there are different steps that you need to take to guarantee success in online advertising.
1. Identify your goals and objectives.
Identifying a goal is always the first step in any process. When you outline your objectives, you can determine the specific steps that you need to take to achieve your goals.
Here are a few sample questions that you need to ask to start the first step towards building your online. advertising strategies:
- Do you want to grow your social media followers?
- Do you want to connect with a bigger audience?
- Do you want to promote your product or service?
- Do you want to increase brand awareness to non-customers?
Your goals don't have to be just one, but you need to choose an overarching goal that will define the direction of your other objectives.
2. Find your target audience.
Once you have a vision, find your stakeholders or people who you want to be involved in your game plan. The first thing that you need to do is to create an ideal customer profile.
For example, if you sell hairdressing items, it makes sense that your typical customer is one who owns a hairdressing salon or someone who likes to style their hair DIY style.
Once you have an ideal profile, go deeper and consider other attributes that your ideal customers have like age, gender, income, and location. This will give you a general idea of who you should be marketing to and help you identify effective advertising strategies and materials.
3. Understand how your brand is perceived.
Image is taken from a Strikingly User’s Website - Tablas Gourmet
The goal for this step is to establish your brand as an authority in your niche or industry. Note, however, that your perception should be unbiased.
There are several things that you need to consider before proceeding with online advertising like:
- Your logo
- Your corporate color
- Your brand tone
- Your social media content
- ...and more.
Creating a solid brand is a big brand or marketing, so you need to analyze your brand and, perhaps, overhaul your brand's image before delving into any advertising strategy. Regardless of the industry that you're in, high-quality and professional branding is a prerequisite before commencing any online advertising campaign.
Following the hairdressing example above, you probably want something modern and sleek which shows you only offer top-notch and cutting-edge hairdressing products. You can also put out content focusing on trending hair trends, health advice, and celebrity haircuts.
4. Test and Track your online ad campaigns.
Image taken from Strikingly
Before you launch and fully commit to online advertising, test it out and track its progress. You can, perhaps, start posting on social media and checking your analytics, and see how it performed.
If your ad does well, you can sit down and be comfortable including it in your advertising strategies. If your ads didn't do well, it's okay. You didn't spend that much anyway. You can totally scrap the idea and restart. You can also make minor adjustments and see if that pans out.
Each social media platform offers tools to help you track your conversions. Don't forget to take advantage of these tools.
5. Check out the right timing.
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Consider these facts from Wyzowl.com:
- We're living in a fast-moving world.
- Our attention span has shrunk from 12 seconds to 8.25 seconds. We have a shorter attention span than a goldfish.
- 25% of teens forget major details about their close friends and relatives.
- 7% of people forget their birthdays from time to time.
- An average office worker will check their email inbox 30 times every hour--we're so easily distracted.
What does this mean for your online advertising strategies? The answer is simple: you need the right timing.
Think of this analogy: If you own a restaurant, you will not advertise your breakfast menu at night, correct? The key here is to know when your target audience is more likely to see your ad and when they are more likely to respond.
Let's take another example: If you're selling office supplies, it doesn't make sense to advertise during weekends because the office managers aren't in the office, they're not working, and they're probably out with their families having a picnic.
When your ads are ready, you will be highly tempted to push them out as soon as you can but have patience. Know when to strike and when you do, strike really hard.
6. Know when you need help and find it.
If you own a small business or a startup, you are probably wearing several hats. Obviously, this doesn't mean that you should be performing marketing duties if you aren't inclined to do it.
If you can't produce marketing videos for your online advertising campaign, hire someone who can do it. If you can't edit images using Photoshop, outsource it. While it's cheaper to produce low-quality ads, it will cost your branding more. In online advertising strategies, quality trumps quantity at any time.
7. Try low-cost or organic advertising options.
You don't need a massive budget to implement effective advertising strategies. There are free and cheap online advertising strategies that you can tap like the following:
- Hosting online events
- Posting on your social media channels
- Organic marketing
- Guest posts
- ...and more
The Importance of Online Advertising for Your Business
Effective advertising strategies are critical to achieving success for your online business. Online advertising is a developing medium. Both entrepreneurs and marketers are taking advantage of this new tactic to grow their customer base, generate leads for their business, expand their reach, and grow revenue.
1. Online advertising strategies can propel your business to reach a global audience.
If your online advertising strategies are effective, you can easily promote your eCommerce store to a global audience. The internet has allowed connectivity, allowing you to connect with your audience quickly without needing to travel.
Image is taken from a Strikingly User’s Website
An effective online advertising strategy can make your business visible to millions of potential clients. As your business grows, your net revenue grows with it.
2. Online advertising strategies are cost-efficient.
Compared to traditional advertising strategies, online advertising is way cheaper. You don't need to fly to target locations to set up shop, post banners or advertisements, or pay for air time. You can post videos, images, and text on your social media, which will not cost you anything.
3. Online advertising strategies can target your audience.
When you do television advertising, you're shooting your audience to random people who have their TV on at a specific timeframe. However, if you're using online advertising, you can target a specific segment of your audience based on certain attributes like age, gender, location, etc. All these data are easily accessible to you, and no traditional advertising techniques can match it.
Obviously, this can help you generate more leads for your business and significantly grow the profitability of your campaign.
4. Online advertising strategies can engage your customers.
The internet is a great platform to reach and engage your target audience. If you do enough customer research, you can re-target your campaign and determine which of your products or services are sought most by your audience. You can then plan your online advertising strategies accordingly.
Motivation Strategies: 10 Best Ways to Advertise Online
There are different ways to perform online advertising. However, you should always try to focus on triggering specific emotions that plot motivation from your consumers to perform a specific action.
1. Utility Strategy. This utilizes advertising as a service. In this type, online advertising adds value by helping people achieve their goals.
Tesco's Virtual Subway Store in South Korea ad is a great example of this strategy.
2. Modeling Strategy. This utilizes online advertising using high-profile personalities like celebrities and experts to inform and inspire desired behavior.
These are ads that are very popular. You'll see them in sports ads that feature Olympic athletes or Hollywood stars featured in coffee commercials.
3. Reframing Strategy. This utilizes ads to reframe or show a specific behavior as something positive by drawing on pre-existing assumptions and behavior.
One example of this online advertising strategies is Baby Carrots' ads which promote eating baby carrots like junk food.
4. Evocation Strategy. This type uses ads to evoke specific emotions from its target audience. This has recently become a trend and a lot of big companies are using it.
You've probably seen this on Coca-Cola ads, particularly during the holiday season.
5. Ownership Strategy. This particular type of online advertising invites its audience to be a part of the campaign through participation.
This is something that Coca-Cola also utilized in its Share a Coke campaign.
6. Collectivism Strategy. For this type of ad, social norms of appropriate and desirable behavior are reinforced or created.
Dove's Real Beauty Sketches ads are an example of this online advertising strategies.
7. Play Strategy. This strategy reinforces the desired behavior through gamification or structured play.
A good example of this online advertising strategy is the Speed Camera Lottery campaign.
8. Skill-up Strategy. These are ads that are like product how-tos because it shows the audience how to use a specific product or service to do a target behavior or how to do it easily.
Amazon's Super Bowl Commercial, Alexa Loses Her Voice, is a perfect example of this online advertising campaign.
9. Eliminate-Complexity Strategy. This is one type of online advertising strategies that aims to remove or reduce barriers to performing a specific task. The barriers can be real, imaginary, or anticipated.
One example of this ad is Westpac's Impulse Saver ad.
10. Commitment Strategy. This last type of online advertising invites its audience to perform a small initial action that is consistent with the targeted behavior.
A classic example of this strategy is TAC SpeedKills Case Study.
Obviously, you should never kick off any online advertising campaign without a website. If you don’t have one yet, sign up with us and go online in 20 minutes or less. A website should be the focal point of your campaign.
Strikingly sites are mobile optimized which makes them more desirable in search results. As well, all websites built on Strikingly automatically get SSL which also helps with your SEO and your online advertising campaign.
Image taken from Strikingly
if you are passionate about your brand, often, the best online advertising strategy is simply getting out there and spreading the word about your product. As we previously mentioned at the beginning of this article, mix and match your strategy.
It takes time to master online advertising, and it will require patience to find what works for your company. You can achieve your goal if you're putting your focus in the right places--your market, your target audience, your competition, and the changing trends both in online marketing and otherwise.
