If you’re starting a new business, or if you’ve never run ads before, you should know that adding paid media campaigns to your marketing efforts is a great way to get qualified traffic to your page, and thus help boost the performance of your other channels.

Platforms

Think about how your audience searches for your product; what are your customers’ pre-purchase touchpoints? How can you be part of the customer journey?

Depending on where your audience spends most of its time and on your budget, you should consider certain platforms over others. If you have limited resources, it may be best to start with just one.

Audience

“If you try to be everything to everyone, you’ll be nothing to anyone”. In other words, if you try to target everyone from 18 to 65+, regardless of gender, interests or location, your message won’t appeal to them enough to take action in today’s content-saturated world.

Even if you’re a brand that sells products for men and women of all ages, people’s motivation to buy your product or service may be different depending on their gender or a multitude of other factors. That’s why you need to segment your audience and send each one a different message.

Take the time to think about which of your audiences convert the most. You can go to Google Analytics to help you do this. Then think about what drives each of them to buy your brand.

Message

“People buy first by emotion and then by logic”. The mistake I see a lot of brands making is putting their product as the focal point of their ad. Yes, I can see that you sell product X, but I want to be convinced that your brand is the one I should buy. What makes you unique? Why did you go into business in the first place? What sets you apart from your competitors?

Budget

I know, budget probably should have been higher on my list, but I’m a marketer, not an accountant! Before you start advertising, it’s important to know how much you can spend and what return on investment you want to achieve. Also think about other important key performance indicators (better known as KPIs), such as cost per conversion and cost per click.

It’s important to be realistic about return on investment, as ads can take time to show good results. Your audience must first get to know and trust your brand, which may take a few months.

I’d say a monthly budget of $3,000 will be enough to give Google enough data points to serve your ads to more qualified people. For Facebook, when it’s no longer in learning mode and better understands your target audience, you should start seeing results.

Putting it all together

Relying solely on advertising is not a sustainable marketing strategy. This may have been the case a few years ago, when there was less competition on Facebook and Google, but it’s important to invest in other strategies such as:

• Organic social media marketing – Imagine: you click on a brand’s page after seeing their Instagram or Facebook ad and see little or no activity. It may seem suspicious. When a brand already has followers and good engagement on its posts, it will provide social proof to generate more sales. You can also test some posts organically first and then use your best performers as ads.
• Email marketing – It’s cheaper to build up an email marketing list to nurture people interested in your brand than to constantly rely on paid advertising to get your message across and attract new and loyal customers. A simple pop-up on your site with a call to action can do the trick. You can even use paid ads to expand your list with lead generation ads.
• Influencer marketing – You may not have the resources or know-how to produce the beautiful images/videos needed to run ads. Working with influencers can help you get those creatives and get your brand in front of their engaged followers.

If you need clarification on any of these points, I’ll be happy to answer your questions!