Advertising Basics – to Advertise or Not to Advertise, That is the Question…
We often get asked about advertising, not just whether we can organise some for our clients, but what we think about the various options available these days. It used to be a lot simpler: magazine or newspaper, maybe radio, posters, that was it. These days there’s Pay Per Click (PPC), Pay Per View (PPV), Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Banner, YouTube, Google AdWords…
It’s a bit of a minefield if you don’t know what you’re doing, and you could end up wasting a hell of a lot of money with no return on investment (ROI). There are risks involved with spending money on any advertising of course. Are people going to see the ad? Are the right people going to see it? Are they going to do anything about it once they’ve seen it? Targeting your marketing is essential, especially since we are all so bombarded with adverts these days. Reach the right people in the right place at the right time, and your advertising campaign could pay off spectacularly.
Facebook advertising used to be simple and generated great results. These days it has come under fire with accusations of false follows and fake clicks. One client had spent several hundred pounds on Facebook advertising, and had many thousands of followers (yay! you might say, how wonderful), but most of the time had little interaction, zero post likes, shares or comments. Then he had a look at his Insights, that oh so informative and useful tool which Facebook provides for page owners, and found out that most of his followers were from Asia! Mostly India and Pakistan, even though his company was in the UK and only served the UK market. It was at that point that he contacted us and asked for help, because his investment had left with him zero return and he didn’t know why or where to go from there.
A successful advertising campaign must have a target market. That should be your first consideration when you are thinking about spending money to get your business in front of people. There is no point advertising in the wrong place, and generally speaking advertising to the masses is a waste unless you have unlimited funds. Focus on your niche, get to know your current customers. If you understand your customers well then you will know where to advertise, but it’s surprising how little many businesses actually know. What do your customers read, where do they shop, where do they spend their time, what are their ages, gender etc. If you’re stumped, get to know your competitors. What are they doing which is making them so successful?
If you have a small budget, a great place to start is Google AdWords. Just take a look at these figures:
- 1.17 billion people use the Google search engine every month (source).
- There are over 100 billion searches carried out on Google every month (source).
- More than half of Google searches are now mobile (source).
- 65% of all online searches are on Google (source).
- 80% of search results now contain AdWords ad placements (source).
- Google is believed to have more than 4 million active advertisers (though they don’t openly discuss this figure).
In comparison:
- Facebook has 3 million active advertisers.
- Twitter has 130,000 active advertisers.
- Instagram recently announced they’ve hit 200,000 advertisers (owned by Facebook, it was only ever going to get bigger!) (source).
Google AdWords is simple to set up, can be tailored to your target market and you can easily manage your budget so that you don’t spend more than you want. So what are you waiting for? If you don’t know where to begin, drop us a message and we can set this up for you, manage your advertising campaign and give you comprehensive data which will better serve you in the future.