Digital advertising revenue in the U.S. is projected to surpass 700 billion USD by 2025. It has become one of the most important forms of advertising and is critical to just about every business’s operations. If you want to keep up with competitors, then you need it too. Learn the basics here.
Digital Advertising Options
There are numerous channels and platforms with which to advertise your business online. Below are some of the most popular. Which one you should use would depend on your needs and goals.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
PPC platforms allow you to advertise your products and services through a website or search engine. With our PPC services in California, you’ll quickly generate leads and drive more revenue. You also only pay when someone clicks your ad, so it’s highly cost-effective.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO involves optimizing your website to increase your online presence and improve conversion rates. It takes time to see results, but it is one of the most effective long-term digital advertising strategies.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
There are several social media platforms you can use to market your business. An effective SMM plan will allow you to engage with your audience, attract consumers with promos, and build brand awareness and loyalty.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is simple yet versatile. You build up a subscriber list to send regular emails to. With this, you can advertise new products and services, conduct surveys, and attract new customers with personalized content.
ROI Indicators
One of the greatest advantages of digital marketing is that there are various tools that allow you to monitor your campaign’s performance. Some of the metrics you can track include:
- Impressions: the number of people who have seen your ad or web page in search results
- Clicks: the number of direct clicks to your ad or webpage
- Click-Through Rate: the percentage of people that click your ad or website
- Conversions: the number of people who take favorable actions, such as buying a product
- Keyword Ranking: your ranking on search engines for a specific keyword
The Best Places to Advertise
Through our team’s extensive work in the digital advertising space, we have come to the same conclusion as pretty much every digital advertising company. The best places to spend money on digital advertising are Google & Facebook.
With digital advertising, not only is a local business visible online, but they are visible to the right people online. Platforms like Facebook and Google allow for advanced targeting, which puts a local business in front of consumers who are more likely to convert into a sale.
Plus, Google and Facebook accounted for roughly 60 percent of ad spend in 2017!
Why advertise on Google?
Reach: Google is the largest search network in the world, and consumers are using Google every single day to search for local businesses. Utilizing Google’s massive network capabilities, digital advertisers are able to find ideal prospects and get in front of users looking for their products/services.
In the age of digital, people are not looking at TV commercials or listening to radio ads to find a local business, they are searching for a service and then locating your business online.
With 3.5 Billion Google searches conducted every single day, customers are looking for local businesses and businesses should want to be on Google.
Flexibility: Google allows the local advertiser to spend whatever they want, whenever they want. With flexible options for ad spend, advertisers are able to test what works and what doesn’t work for a business. Spend a bit, wait to see how the campaign performs, and then reinvest in larger budgets for greater prospect reach.
Why advertise on Facebook?
Massive Audience: The U.S. has at least 180.1 million active Facebook users, and this number keeps growing. As a business, you simply can’t ignore this. Marketing your business on Facebook, as well as on the other popular social media platforms, allows you to connect with a wider audience.
Engaging with customers on Facebook and starting meaningful conversations with them keeps your brand in their minds. It humanizes your business so that, to them, you’re not just another corporation out to make a sale. This creates more loyal customers.
You’ll need a well-thought-out content plan. Social media marketing requires you to be more engaging and entertaining compared to other methods. If you don’t have employees who are experienced with it, it would be best to hire someone who does. Alternatively, outsource your social media campaign.
Targeting: Facebook ads provide you with highly sophisticated targeting capabilities. You can target users by age, gender, location, interests, behaviors, and even job title.
This means your ads are more likely to reach those interested in what you have to offer. It’s also a pay-per-click service, so you only have to pay when people click on it. You’ll see significant increases in revenue for minimal investment.
Basic Online Advertising Tips
Research Your Audience
Your online advertising efforts will be in vain if you don’t know your audience. Perform research on their demographics, geolocations, interests, problems, what they search for online, and so on.
The more information you have, the better you can design your content and ads. For example, if you run an auto shop and know a significant portion of your audience is concerned about their brakes, you would know to create and improve pages related to brake repairs.
Focus on Just a Few Advertising Channels
There’s absolutely no need to use every advertising method or channel. Choose the ones that benefit your business the most. If that’s SEO and PPC, then focus on those. If you’re doing social media marketing, focus on just a few platforms. Just Facebook and Instagram would be enough.
If you spread your efforts too much, you likely won’t get any satisfactory results for your investment.
Always Track Metrics
Easily trackable metrics are online advertising’s most significant advantage over traditional advertising methods. Regularly reviewing your campaign’s performance and adjusting your strategy accordingly is key to getting the most out of your money. The data you gather will also help fuel your other marketing efforts in the future.
Conclusion
By leveraging these two platforms, every local business can easily take their advertising game to the next level, and begin to rake in new revenue—with the data to back their investment.