Every online platform has its own advertising tools, options and target audience. With the addition of new social platforms [going viral!] at every six months, we marketers are spoilt for choice. This article aims to simplify the process in five simple steps,
1.Understand the clients business model and target audience:
Unlike traditional media advertising, online advertising offers a variety of tools to target and track the advertising ROI. On a traditional set up, a typical advertiser would only need to discuss pricing and location of the ad being published whereas online marketing provides much more detailed targeting options Viz. age, gender, time, likes, interests, language etc. This puzzle can be better solved by actually spending time with the client and understanding their business goal.
2.Identify the platform:
Every online and social media platform has its own uniqueness in terms of potential target audience and the approach they employ to reach the target audience. Google uses search keyword match to target their potential audience whilst Facebook uses likes, interests and personal preferences to target. More on this topic here
3.Schedule and Advertise:
Once we are clear with the platform and its analytics tools, we can advertise by setting up a budget and schedule. Most social media platforms allow us to play around with targeting for different set of audiences and identify the best results as we progress. Google allows us to try with different keywords for example and Facebook lets us to target audiences with different “interest/likes” data. Its always better to try multiple platforms and understand what works better with help of analytics tools explained below
4.Analyse with different metrics:
Analytics is a very crucial differentiator if we are to compare online advertising with traditional advertising. Google analytics and Facebook insights do a very good job in identifying our advertising ROI. This information can guide us to make good business decisions too for example,
- If more clients “like/share” a particular product / service in our portfolio, we could increase our sales focus on those products/services
- If we get to know what keywords our visitors used in google search to find our website, we could rewrite our product description, sales pitch to attract other potential clients
Properly analysing advertisement ROI would definitely improve the business decision making process. There are other third party tools available to cross verify with the native analytics tools offered by the advertising platforms we use.
5.Finetune your results:
Most advertisers would be surprised to know that their target audiences are finding their products/services using unexpected keywords in google search results. The perception of the manufacturer Vs needs/wants of a potential buyer varies to a great extent. Keyword match is a trial and error game indeed. But it can lead to really wonderful business decisions if done properly. It is the same with Facebook too. We might advertise, in hope that a certain set of users with interest towards certain products / services might be interested in our products / services, but sometimes they never buy from us. It is always advisable to go slow, understand and tweak as we grow. Our big advantage here is we have the analytics data to help us do it better.
