Running Effective Advertisements for Your Small Business
Advertise what you know already works
To run an effective digital advertisement, you need to know that what you're advertising is something that already has brought interest, leads, or sales from your target market.
Most of the time people want to spend a lot on advertising when they're launching something brand new, untested, or unproven. This is a mistake, because you risk losing a lot of money on ads for something that people actually aren't that interested in.
“Advertising will allow your compelling message to be given a megaphone, it won’t make your message convert.”
When you know a product has already brought a lot of interest (increased traffic, comments, likes, conversions, leads, sales.), you know you're already telling the right message to the right people. Ads should simply expand that reach, and thus the amount of traffic, conversions, leads, etc.
Here's a story:
You want to start giving away a free "x" for an email address, or another purchase or whatever. Let's say that's the promotion, for example: "GET A FREE 'X' WHEN YOU PURCHASE 'Y' FROM US BY THE END OF THE MONTH"
Great. You've created a promotion you think people are going to like. You need to get the word out. You go to Facebook or Adwords, or Yelp, or LinkedIn, and all your social media profiles and boost the post. You spend $100/day to get the word out.
And the word has gotten out to thousands, as it should. You get a few leads and traffic, but not what you were expecting.
You shut it all down in discouragement.
This is the wrong way to do digital ads.
The right way is to take your promotion to your audience before paying to expand its reach. You'll know if it's a good promotion if you start getting more attention, traffic, and conversions than usual. It doesn't have to be a lot, just a noticeable bump.
That's when you know you can run ads to more of your same kind of audience and see your "more than usual" grow exponentially.
