Making the right decision to promote your business online can be difficult.
“I want to advertise online but I have no clue where to start”
“I don’t want to lose money in online advertisement”
“Online advertisement is expensive and does not give adequate return”
“I can’t find the right advertising agency for my company”
If any of these thoughts has ever crossed your mind, this blog is for you.
Even if you have never tried advertising online, I am sure you have seen an online ad and bought something because of it. This pandemic has taught everyone the importance of advertising online and what it can do for a company. Look at all online giants, isn’t it hard to believe that when the whole world was at a standstill, somehow companies like Amazon have made growth like never before. But we all know how that happened, I alone have ordered more from Amazon in the last 5 months than I have ordered in the last 3-4 years.
Online advertisement is crucial for the growth of a business now more than ever.
Making the right decision is already a tough one when you have no idea how the online world works, but it’s even tougher to make online advertising profitable and consistent.
Here are some important points that will help you make the right decisions when it comes to online advertising.
1. Knowing where to start
The first difficult choice is where to start. There are so many options there’s Search engine optimization, Email marketing, Pay per click, Google AdWords, Facebook Ads and the list goes on. Confused between all the options you think of reaching out to an agency, but that doesn’t always help because you can get different answers like some agencies suggest you need Facebook, another suggests you need a website and another suggest Email marketing to top it all some agency proposed you need all of them. That may not have solved the problem, but for sure it confused you further. ?
While it is always better to use all the marketing platforms available, I don’t suggest that in the beginning. I suggest starting small and starting with one strategy. Also, its better to take an expert’s opinions, which brings me to my next point.
2. Choosing the right marketing agency
Unless you are a marketing freak, it is wise to hire a marketing agency. And that’s what generally business owners decide to do, the only problem is selecting the right agency between all promising agencies. While the best agency is the one that can get you results, determining that is hard since many agencies promise to deliver results. Here are some points to consider that might help you make a better decision:
a. Choose an agency that knows about selling and not just the online technical stuff.
b. Choose an agency that understands you and your company.
c. Choose an agency that can simplify online advertisement so that a 5th grader can understand is, because that’s what marketing is all about.
d. Choose an agency that promises to generate revenue instead of promising to deliver growing online numbers.
e. Don’t forget to trust your gut.
3. Deciding the investment
As if the previous decisions weren’t enough, you now have to decide the amount of investment. This goes down in 2 ways, either your agency asks you for the budget and you are all blank or the agency sends you a long proposal filled with technical jargons and all you can focus on is the big number you have to spent monthly.
The way I and others (successful companies and great marketers) look at advertisement budget is: if spending every $1 earns you $3 and it is profitable for your company you will want to keep investing more money in the system, while constantly trying to bring the costs down. But for starters and you can do one of the following; Either trust your agency enough or start small, make sure it’s profitable and then invest more.
4. Reviewing the results
This is the trickiest part of all, you have been waiting for this day for weeks or months now. The results are finally here; they are either up to the expectations or you don’t understand what happened with your money. Let’s talk more about the later, since in most cases the numbers your agency shows you look very good as the graphs are green and people saw your ad but that does not mean that you got more customers. To determine whether or not your digital marketing efforts are in the right direction the most important factor to focus on is the Cost to acquire one new customer. Calculate it using this simple formula:
Cost per customer acquisition = Total marketing spent/ Total customers form marketing.
This number may not be satisfactory in the first month as sometimes at takes 2-3 months to optimize the campaign but if your costs of acquisition is going down and the number of customers is increasing you are headed in the right direction.
While the same platform, strategy or content does not work for every business, online advertising works for every business and there is no doubt about that. You just need to apply the right strategy, on the right platform and reach out to the right people. There is no one solutions that fits all, the sad part is that advertising agencies try to do that and thus have established a bad reputation for online advertising.
We at CYDIR provide a customized solution to every business depending on the business needs. We ensure our customers to keep trying until we have achieved the desired sales target.