Advertising on search engines or social media can be challenging in the best of times. With so many advertisers clamoring for attention on these digital marketing platforms, how can you optimize your efforts and connect with your ideal customer?
Improving Your Advertising Strategy
Ask any digital advertising expert for their advice on how to best attract new customers, and they’ll have their own unique insights. Still, there are some general tips you can practice, no matter what channel you’re advertising on. Looking for specific tips for different ad platforms? We’ll cover those too.
Choose What You Measure
No matter what platform you’re advertising on or what types of ads you’re running, once you choose your campaign objective ( increase sales by 25%, sell $10,000 in new products, get 3,000 email signups), decide what metrics will help you measure those results.
If you’re investing in pay-per-click (PPC) ads, you might look at your click-through rates or cost per click (CPC) to see what each click is costing you. Then compare that against what percentage of those clicks actually converted to the goal you set.
Reach Your Target Audience in Innovative Ways
It’s great to target people who haven’t heard of your brand or purchased your products, but as the old adage goes: it costs five times more to get a new customer than to retain existing customers.
Today’s digital advertising offers plenty of opportunities to connect with people who have visited your website or bought from you in the past. Retargeting (also called remarketing) is a great example. By installing some tracking software on your website (for Facebook ad campaigns, it’s the Facebook Pixel), you can track who’s visited your site and then show relevant ads when they are on other sites.
Customize Your Ads for Different Ad Networks
The best way to stand out from the competition is to create unique ads across platforms. That means you have a different ad on Facebook than you do on Instagram. Give people something new to look at so they take note rather than ignore a duplicate ad.
And to figure out what ads hit home, invest in a/b testing. Tweak one thing, such as your call to action (CTA), and see which version of the ad gets better conversions.
Tips for Facebook Advertising
Now let’s discuss your Facebook ad strategy. The Facebook advertising platform offers a variety of ad formats, which is great for reaching your demographic in different ways.
Video ads can be engaging if you have live-action content. Carousel ads are ideal for displaying multiple products. Boosted posts show your content in the news feed of a larger Facebook audience.
Facebook also has cool features like lookalike audiences, which let you target the same demographic that follows a competitor’s Facebook page.
Tips for Google Ads
If you’re struggling to appear in search results naturally through SEO (that’s search engine optimization), Google ads may be a faster and more effective way to float to the top.
Google ads have come a long way since just offering search engine advertising. It now offers lead generation tools like video ads and has partnered with Dotdash and other advertising networks to get your ads in more places. It’s worth exploring Google Ads Manager to discover the opportunities available to you.
When creating ads, make sure you direct your ad to the most appropriate website. Customized landing pages with the offer you advertised are a great option, and you can easily track visits, knowing they all came directly from your ad.
Tips for Instagram Ads
If you want to leverage visual images in your advertising, Instagram’s the place. Instagram ads stress images over ad copy (though that’s important, too). Ecommerce companies especially do well on Instagram.
Check out Instagram’s lead ads, which allow you to collect a user’s details (name, email, birthday, phone number), which can help you better target your audience with future advertising. And try boosting a successful post to turn it into an ad. You can even set up an Instagram Shop to let followers buy your products directly from Instagram.
Tips for LinkedIn Ads
Let’s not overlook advertising on LinkedIn, especially for B2B companies. This social site is ideal for creating brand awareness, connecting with your audience through content or video, and generating leads.
You can boost content through its Sponsored Content option, and you can connect directly with individuals through Sponsored InMails. Try combining LinkedIn’s Sponsored Content and Sponsored InMails to get phenomenal results (like a 95% increase in clickthrough rate).
Let’s Not Forget Content Marketing!
Digital marketing is a wonderful way to connect with your audience, but if you combine it with content marketing, you’ll pack a more powerful punch. Content marketing covers everything from the (non-paid) content you’re posting on social media to your weekly blog posts and the emails you send your email list.
As you build your audience on social media, email, and your blog, you can discover which types of content resonate with your audience, and you can use that information to invest in the most effective ads.
Optimizing Your Ad Spend
No matter which ad networks you use to reach your audience, you need to make the most of your ad spend. A smart advertising and digital marketing strategy finds the balance between not spending enough to be seen by the right eyeballs and spending so much that it cuts into your profits.
Generally speaking, the more you spend, the better the results. But invest time in finding the right keywords, ad copy, images, and calls to action to ensure the best results for your money.
The Best Tool for Optimizing Your Advertising Strategy
Reaching potential customers requires money, and for most brands, that means using a credit card to cover advertising costs, which sometimes can reach tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each month.
Often, traditional credit card companies throw up a red flag when you spend that kind of cash so quickly, and you risk your card being frozen until you can contact them to confirm the purchases. In the meantime, your digital ads are on pause. That means you’re not making money.
A better solution is dash.fi. With limits that are 10-20x higher than traditional cards, you’ll never be stopped from purchasing the ads you need to grow.
Earn Cash Back on Ad Spend
In addition to being flexible with your spending limit, dash.fi also offers generous cash back to users. Every time you pay for online ads (or hire one of dash.fi’s partner ad agencies), you’ll get money back. Pretty cool, right?
Keep Ad Campaigns Running with Automatic Payments
With dash.fi, you can have unlimited virtual cards for any team member that runs advertising online. And you can use those cards to automatically pay your ad spend so your campaigns keep running without interruption.
High Credit Limit to Support Large Budgets
The biggest pain points retailers have about using traditional credit cards to pay for online ads and social media marketing is quickly butting up against that credit limit. They have to immediately pay down that balance to free up more credit, and let’s face it: that’s a headache.
Why tolerate using a card that doesn’t get what you’re trying to do for your business? dash.fi is designed for advertisers, and is here to help you reach more customers online.
