You’ve put in all the work to create great graphics, build a website, find the right hashtags, and target your ideal customers online. With eagerness, you upload your posts, write thoughtful captions and make sure all your links take your leads right where you want them. You get ready to launch your latest campaign, hit “publish” and wait with bated breath. When you wake up the next morning to check your stats, you’re expecting hundreds of clicks, but there’s nothing. Where Did You Go Wrong?
If you are a small business owner, then you know every dollar counts. That’s why taking the right steps to better manage your money and maximize the performance of your advertising is one of the best things you can do. Read on to discover strategies that can help improve the ROI of your marketing efforts on Google and social media.
Research Your Competitors’ Past Campaigns
How has your top competitor gotten people to interact with them in the past? Take a deep dive on their social media accounts to see what posts they’ve run during certain promotions. Visit their websites as well, and see if they turn up when you Google relevant keywords for your industry. If you’re finding them, so is your audience. Rather than focus solely on appearance, identify the pain points your competition focuses on among your shared target audience. Maybe their solutions are clearer, or their visuals elicit stronger emotions. Learn from their successes, then implement your knowledge into more specific campaigns.
Lower Your Monthly Costs
The greatest way for a small business to save money on advertising is to lower costs elsewhere. You may not be getting enough money back on your current marketing efforts to make up the price of paid advertising, and that’s okay. But you shouldn’t be paying for visibility at the expense of profit. Most founders bootstrap their business in some way, which means turning to your personal finances is a good place to start. Where could you minimize monthly bills and expenses? Things like refinancing your student loans can help you free up room in your budget, which makes paying for ads less painful. This guide covers everything you need to know about the student loan refinancing process.
Personalize Your Landing Pages
If your landing pages aren’t personal, your business won’t feel like it is either. People want to immediately connect with the information presented to them. This means the era of catchy but shallow sales pitches are over. Instead, keep it short and highly specific. Drive traffic for certain audience groups, called segments, to different landing pages for better results.
Hand Pick the Right Products
One mistake many small business owners make is advertising their company, not their products. Instead of pushing the right solutions to a specific segment of their audience, they just advertise their entire business and hope the right people will become customers. While building brand awareness is important, it shouldn’t be the core of your marketing campaigns. Advertising, especially in today’s overcrowded digital market, must be consumer-specific to deliver the best results.
Retarget Your Ads
Retargeting uses paid ads to reconnect with people who previously interacted with your ads or social media accounts. By investing your money into retargeting, you have a higher chance of conversions than if you only pay for impressions and extended reach. This can be a good solution for businesses that see ad performance in clickthrough’s but aren’t getting the level of conversions they’d like.