Online advertising is an easy way for businesses, both small and large, to raise awareness of their brand and increase traffic to their website. Both social media and search engines have become platforms where you need to pay to play – organic content doesn’t have the same reach as it did before. Advertising may sound intimidating and expensive, but it doesn’t have to be! Here we walk through how to get your campaign started:
Identify the purpose of the campaign.
Start with the “who”. Most platforms allow for targeting of demographics, interests, locations, etc. – so take advantage of that.
Who are you targeting? A customer? A potential partner?
Is there a specific age range, location or interest you still need to identify?
The most important question to ask yourself when beginning a campaign has to do with results.
What is the goal of this campaign?
Do we want to capture customer information? Do we want to drive traffic to our website for the visitor to learn more?
Some campaigns may have multiple audiences or goals, and that’s OK! We see some of the best results from campaigns that have multiple audiences – the more testing you can do the better.
Choose your platform.
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or all of the above? While advertising across the board is ideal, the budget to put ad spend behind all platforms is not always available. Like most things in life, we like to recommend quality over quantity. Delivering one killer LinkedIn ad to your target audience with a hefty budget is going to be a lot more effective than sprinkling a small ad spend across all platforms. Here we share a bit more about each platform’s advertising offerings:
As a fast-paced and concise platform, you can easily connect with your audience through a quick sentence and eye-catching graphic on Twitter. With over 310 million registered users, Twitter can be very effective in reaching your target audience and makes it easy to choose your campaign goals.
Facebook was one of the first social media platforms to offer
LinkedIn is a unique social platform as it is designed specifically for businesses and professionals. Users go to LinkedIn to showcase their job experience and thought leadership, making it one of the more important platforms for those in B2B. We frequently use LinkedIn advertising to target individuals based on their job title or industry. While these targeting options are available on Facebook and Twitter, we have found these target audiences to be more effective on LinkedIn.
Create personalized ad content for your targets.
Most importantly, we want to create content that will be compelling and get users to act. Some platforms have content restrictions and guidelines when it comes to advertising. Beyond staying within those guidelines, most ads are completely customizable. Use creative copy, optimized graphics, and relevant calls to action to get the best results. It’s important to remember that not every single ad is going to perform how you expected. Try different graphics, different audiences, and switch up your copy every once in a while. You may surprise yourself.
Have a question or have another tip to share? We’d love to hear it in a comment below!